Past attempts to manage drought and its impacts through a reactive, crisis management approach have been ineffective, poorly coordinated, and untimely.  Because of the ineffectiveness of this approach, greater interest has evolved in recent years in the adoption of a more proactive risk-based management approach in some countries.

The 10-step drought planning process developed by Wilhite (1991) was based largely on interactions with many states in the United States, incorporating their experiences and lessons learned. This planning process has gone through several iterations in recent years in order to tailor it to specific countries or subsets of countries (Wilhite et al., 2000).  With the increased interest in drought mitigation planning in recent years, this planning process has evolved to incorporate more emphasis on risk assessment and mitigation tools.

Online version of guide
http://drought.unl.edu/portals/0/docs/10StepProcess.pdf