Association for Public Policy Analysis & Management

Particularly since the National Performance Review and the Government Performance Results Act of 1993, strategic planning has steadily attained a presence near ubiquity within most types of organizations in the public and nonprofit sectors and at all levels of government. Given the prevalence and implicit importance of strategic planning in scholarship and practice, however, there remains an incommensurate deficit in the theoretical and practical perspicuity with respect to the effects of various practices of strategic planning and their role in advancing the attainment of desired public outcomes.

Drawing on sociological theories focused on communities of participation (Feldman and Khademian, 2007) and organizational sensemaking (Weick, 1995), this research study explores the extent to which strengthening communities of participation in strategic planning practices affect how well government can adapt to crises and how accurately managers assess adaptive capacity. Because strengthening communities of participation involves ensuring the participatory inclusion of political, technical, and local/experiential perspectives in planning (Feldman and Khademian, 2007), the primary research question is as follows: To what extent does participatory inclusion in strategic planning practices affect how well cities adapt to a fiscal crisis and how well managerial perceptions accurately reflect an understanding of actual adaptive capacity? This question is addressed primarily by an econometric analysis of respondent data from managers in 2,214 city-like and county governments who participated in a 2009 survey with questions about strategic planning practices, along with municipal budgetary shortfall data found in Comprehensive Annual Financial Reports (2009, 2010). By connecting theory to strategic planning practice, this research contributes toward enriching our understanding of how to better develop strategic planning in order to enhance governmental adaptive capacity and to increase the fidelity of managerial assessment.