Strategic Planning and Public management Reform: The Case of Romania

Abstract

Strategic planning is an excellent tool that local governments can (and should) use in order to deal effi ciently with change, which means that planning is an important aspect of public sector reform, arguably one of the defi ning elements of the public policy landscape for the past three decades (Pollitt and Bouckaert, 2011). Our main objective with this research is twofold: to analyze why and how local public administration uses strategic planning as a managerial tool for managing change (reform), and to identify whether the planning efforts display a specifi c reform pattern. We employed a quantitative methodology – online survey – to collect data on the strategic planning process at the local level in Romania, with a specifi c framework for the strategic profi le (Hinţea, 2015) and another three dimension model – NPM, NWS, NPG1 – for the reform component (Pollitt and Bouckaert, 2011). Our analysis indicates that over 70% of strategic planning efforts are done because it is a mandatory condition for accessing EU funds. Major issues concern implementation, monitoring and evaluation with only around a third of organizations having a formal body responsible for this. Although the process has mixed characteristics, NWS type elements are more common/preferred, while NPM seem least common/preferred by local authorities.