Content of Municipal Strategy Papers: Comparison of Five Finnish and Five Canadian Municipalities' Strategies

Abstract

Municipalities are facing nowadays several new challenges which they have to be able to settle. In addition to managing the legal tasks they should also be tempting and credible in the eyes of inhabitants and enterprises. Municipalities have traditionally made their budgets carefully and the budget has been handled and argued extensively. Nowadays following year’s budget does not seem to be enough but municipalities have also started to create strategies in order to outline the future.

The aim of this study is to research what the municipalities’ strategies contain. The research problems are: Do municipalities’ strategies fulfill the criteria of a strategy? Are municipalities’ strategies different from each other and are they taking the municipalities’ special features into consideration? Have the strategies been created in order to direct the operations or in order to market the municipality?

Public sector’s strategy has to be handled separately from private sector’s strategies. Elected representatives, legal tasks, vague targets, external oversight, politics and several other public sector’s features cause that strategies and strategy processes can and should not be similar to those in private sector. Mintzberg’s definitions of different kind of strategies; intended, deliberate, realized, unrealized, and emergent can be applied also to the public sector. Also it can be thought whether the strategies in the public sector and especially in municipalities are based on some of Whittington’s approaches; on Classical, Evolutionary, Processual or Systemic approach.

The method of this research is a textual analysis. Before the analysis can be made there has to be some criteria with which the texts will be analyzed. This criterion is developed through strategy literature and especially on findings about special features of municipalities’ strategies and definitions of what the public sector’s strategies should and should not contain. On the basis of these theories, ten questions will be formed and through these questions five Finnish and five Canadian municipalities’ strategies will be ex-amined in order to find out what kind of strategies municipalities have and to compare if the strategies differ depending on country or municipality’s size and special features.

Canadian and Finnish municipalities’ strategies seem to be very similar. Both countries’ strategies handle basic services and legal tasks very much and it seems that these tasks are so challenging that any extra targets or remarkable changes have not been set. The most notable differences between the strategies of these countries’ municipalities are in styles of visions and roles of citizen. Canadian municipalities’ visions seem to be longer and more descriptive. Citizens’ and other stakeholders’ opinions have been taken into consideration much more in the creation of Canadian strategies. The strategies are mainly created in order to direct the municipalities’ action not to market the municipality. Though the bigger the municipality the more there can be found some features of using the strategy also as a PR tool. All analyzed strategies fulfilled at least at some level the criteria set to the strategy but the quality of the strategies varied a lot.