To Use or Not to Use Strategic Planning: Factors City Leaders Consider to Make This Choice

Abstract

Over the past 30 years, local governments in the US have used a variety of administrative reforms to help clarify goals and improve performance to adjust to changing political and social environments, and demands for new services. Osborne and Gaebler’s (1993) Reinventing Government and the National Performance Review work argued that government should be run in a more strategic manner, be more attuned to customer needs, less bureaucratic, and more innovative. As a result, since the early 1990s, strategic planning and new public management (NPM) approaches, such as performance management and contracting out, have been widely used in local governments. City administrators were early users of strategic management processes such as strategic planning and performance management approaches (Vinzant and Vinzant, 1996). Strategic planning is still popularly used in local governments because it helps them respond to external forces that use their services and impact their agencies, and to reorganize their internal capacity in order to provide better public services to stakeholders.