In September 1959, Lebanese president, Fuad Shehab, signed an agreement with Louis-Joseph Lebret. Lebret was the founder of the Institut international de recherche et de formation en vue du développement harmonisé (IRFED), a Paris-based institution set up to provide technical expertise to developing nations. During its Lebanese mission, IRFED conducted a series of studies that formed the basis for a set of comprehensive development projects in Lebanon. These beginnings became a critical turning point in Francophone development politics as Lebanese experiences came to shape how experts and politicians viewed regional versus urban development. Put simply, this was the critical moment fueling the turn to regional planning. I investigate French and Lebanese collaboration on state development and social welfare projects in rural Lebanon from 1958 to 1970. During his presidency, aided by French experts, Shehab sought to implement infrastructure and welfare projects to bridge socioeconomic disparities between the developed urban coast and the poorer rural interior. Shehab believed that economic inequality and lack of state outreach inflamed sectarian and class tensions between citizens, leading to the Civil War of 1958. I look at how the state designed and implemented projects; how communities at the site of development perceived them; and how these plans and the reactions they engendered influenced global discourses of development and planning. My work contributes to two key research lines. The first is in Lebanese historical accounts of postcolonial Lebanon.The current historiography of Lebanon focuses on its pre-nation state Ottoman roots, or its period of French colonial rule (1920-1943). Rarely do historians investigate Lebanese social and economic structures in the post-independence era and rely even less on Lebanese state records, while the scholarship remains Beirut-centric. By using recently uncovered Lebanese documents from agencies like the ministries of General Planning, Industry, and Agriculture, my research looks at Lebanon after its independence, during the years of heightened nation building, while focusing on planning at Lebanon's peripheries. The second, is in larger development histories. By highlighting the role of on-the-ground politics and the actions of state and non-state actors in Lebanon, I show that development is made, not by experts sitting in tall buildings of international organizations, but in the specifics of every city, region, and country. I also emphasize the importance of debates in Francophone development work given the focus on Anglophone development in the literature.