| dc.description.abstract | The topic of this study is strategic planning and management in the municipal sector, specifically, the extent to which local government has adopted strategic planning and management, which planning and management elements that are used, and what is the nature of municipal strategy. We also examined whether the size of the municipality, economic freedom and the strategic positions – prospector, defender and reactor – are affecting the municipality's strategic management. In recent years there has been carried out many international studies on the use of strategic management in the public sector. We wanted to assess how the situation is in Norwegian municipalities, and based our examination on a survey conducted by Poister and Streib in 2005. They pointed out that strategic planning has been used in the public sector for over 20 years, and their results suggest that there is increasing use of complex links between multiple management processes in strategic work. We adjusted this study to fit Norwegian conditions and added questions about strategic content from a study by Andrews, Boyne and Walker (2006). The data was collected via a questionnaire sent to all municipalities. There are responses from a total of 176 municipalities, which yielded a response rate of 41%. We also collected secondary data from Statistics Norway (SSB). The results from our survey show that local authorities make extensive use of strategic planning and management processes and, in general, experience the effects of strategic planning as positive. We found that municipalities connect several strategic management processes of planning in a complex way, though to varying degrees. It was also an objective of this study to gain more knowledge about what is the content of municipal strategy. The data suggest that municipalities are not passively controlled by the expectations and orders from external stakeholders, but act proactively within the room to maneuver that exists to create public value. A regression analysis showed that the factors of municipality size, economic freedom and the strategic positions advocate, defender and reactive, explains 33 percent of the variation in the strategic management of municipal councils. The analysis also showed that the strategic position prospector is more correlated to the variation in strategic management than the size of the municipality and economic freedom. The size of the municipality and the strategic position defender is more influential to variation in strategic management than economic freedom. | en_US |
