Agency for Strategic Planning, merged into a ministry in 2002
Kazakhstan's President created an Agency for Strategic Planning directly subordinate to him by Decree No. 3377 of 4 March 1997; parliament appropriated KZT 29,040 thousand to it for 2002, including a programme to monitor geopolitical and geo-economic processes and assess their effect on the country's development prospects, and Decree No. 931 of 28 August 2002 then merged the agency into the Ministry of Economy and Budget Planning.
29,040 thousand tenge, republican budget appropriation to administrator 604, agency for strategic planning of the republic of kazakhstan, 2002 (budget law). Parliament of the Republic of Kazakhstan, Law No. 273-II of 15 December 2001 on the republican budget for 2002, annex on expenditure by administrator and programme, via the zakon.uchet.kz legal database, retrieved 2026-10-17.
The move, and what it needed
The President set up a strategic planning agency reporting to him and outside the cabinet, then a later administrative reform folded it into a merged economy and budget ministry, which put long-range planning under the body that writes the annual budget.
Preconditions
- A presidential system in which agencies are created and merged by decree, with no statute to repeal
- A government reform programme that counted separate agencies as overhead and merged them into larger ministries
- A receiving ministry able to absorb planning tasks, so the closure left no visible gap in the budget law
Where else it has been used: Poland's strategic studies centre (pol-rcss) was folded into the Chancellery and a line ministry in 2006 on the same consolidation logic; Kazakhstan, unlike Poland, recreated a presidential planning agency in 2020.
Limits: The figure is an appropriation in the budget law, not an outturn, and the agency was merged before the year ended, so it did not spend the full year as a separate body. The text was read on zakon.uchet.kz, a private mirror of the official adilet.zan.kz database, because adilet renders acts only with JavaScript; the mirror shows the law's current edition, which may carry amendments made during 2002. Of the KZT 29,040 thousand, 22,940 thousand was administrative cost, and only 1,200 thousand went to the programme on world geopolitical and geo-economic processes, the line closest to foresight; the rest funded energy-sector planning, public administration recommendations and a demographic information system. The agency was a planning body, closer to development planning than to scenario-based foresight. Its name and form changed between 1997 and 2002: a 1998 decree (No. 3958) reorganised the then Agency for Strategic Planning and Reforms by dividing it, and describes it as a central executive body outside the government, so the 2002 body was smaller than the 1997 one, and this record does not measure by how much. Decree No. 931 merged the agency rather than abolishing its tasks, so planning work moved to a line ministry, and in 2020 the President created a new Agency for Strategic Planning and Reforms whose regulations list strategic forecasting (zakon.uchet.kz, Decree No. 427 of 5 October 2020, https://zakon.uchet.kz/rus/docs/U2000000427). What ended in 2002 is a dedicated agency with its own budget administrator code, not the planning function, and the function returned 18 years later.