As the last pages are being proofed, the last diagrams formatted, and every pre-press detail is accounted for, we sit down to perform our final journal task: writing the introduction. In 1 973, Aaron Wildavsky argued that planning includes too much, asserting that ''If planning is everything, maybe it's nothing.''' To the proponents of Wildavsky's argument, we seek to demonstrate with this volume that planning may in fact be everything; but it certainly is not nothing.