Government strategic planning: an integrative review of academic production

Strategic planning is a deliberative, disciplined approach to producing fundamental decisions and actions that shape and guide what an organization is, what it does, and why it does it. Although strategic planning comes first from the private sector, it can, in fact, lead to successful strategy implementation in the public sector. Public institutions need to implement a performance management system in order to provide better public service to citizens, to promote sustainable public policies, to ensure a transparent decision making process, to spend the public money in an efficient and accountable way, and to achieve measurable results in implementing strategies, programs and projects. The objective of this study is to verify what is being studied in the field of government strategic planning in the past five years, considering articles indexed in the Web of Science database. The study shows that the main topics of concern are related to urban and metropolitan planning, reform and budget cuts, and studies verifying the effectiveness of strategic planning in the public sector. O planeamento estratégico é uma abordagem deliberativa e disciplinada para produzir decisões e acções fundamentais que moldam e guiam o que uma organização é, o que faz, e porque o faz. Embora o planeamento estratégico venha primeiro do sector privado, pode, de facto, conduzir a uma implementação bem sucedida da estratégia no sector público. As instituições públicas precisam de implementar um sistema de gestão de desempenho a fim de prestar um melhor serviço público aos cidadãos, promover políticas públicas sustentáveis, assegurar um processo transparente de tomada de decisões, gastar o dinheiro público de forma eficiente e responsável, e alcançar resultados mensuráveis na implementação de estratégias, programas e projectos. O objectivo deste estudo é verificar o que está a ser estudado no campo do planeamento estratégico governamental nos últimos cinco anos, considerando artigos indexados na base de dados da Web of Science. O estudo mostra que os principais temas de preocupação estão relacionados com o planeamento urbano e metropolitano, reformas e cortes orçamentais, e estudos que verificam a eficácia do planeamento estratégico no sector público.

The Fight for a Public University in Boston: Making a Public-Private Educational System

This article explores the conflict between US public and private higher educational institutions by tracing the long struggle for a public university in Boston between 1890 and 1980. This history reveals how the competitive relationship between public and private institutions was central to the formation of each sector, while also complicating a clear dichotomy between the two. Educational innovations such as state scholarships, teacher-training initiatives, university extension courses, and junior colleges are also recast in this story as strategies to limit, rather than expand, the public sector. Finally, this history should prompt a reinterpretation of the current neoliberal moment. Rather than view contemporary budget cuts and public-private partnerships as novel historical departures of the late twentieth century, they appear in this Massachusetts story as a return to a political landscape long hostile to public higher education.

Output Effects of Fiscal Consolidations: Does Spending Composition Matter?

This paper studies whether changes in the composition of public spending affect the macroeconomic consequences of fiscal consolidations. Based on a sample of 44 developing countries and 26 advanced economies during 1980-2019, results show that while fiscal consolidations tend to be on average, contractionary, the size of the output fall depends on the behavior of public investment vis-a-vis public consumption during the fiscal adjustment, with heterogeneous responses growing over time. When public investment is penalized relative to public consumption and thus, its share in public expenditures decreases, a 1 percent of GDP consolidation reduces output by 0.7 percent within three years of the fiscal shock. In contrast, safeguarding public investment from budget cuts vis-a-vis public consumption can neutralize the contractionary effects of fiscal adjustments on impact, and can even spur output growth over the medium term. The component of GDP that mostly drives the heterogeneity between both types of adjustments is private investment. The results hold up to a number of robust-ness tests, including alternative identification strategies of fiscal shocks. The findings have policy implications for the design of fiscal adjustment strategies to protect economic growth as countries recover from the coronavirus pandemic.consolidation reduces output by 0.7 percent within three years of the fiscal shock. In contrast, safeguarding public investment from budget cuts vis-a-vis public consumption can neutralize the contractionary effects of fiscal adjustments on impact, and can even spur output growth over the medium term. The component of GDP that mostly drives the heterogeneity between both types of adjustments is private investment. The results hold up to a number of robustness tests, including alternative identification strategies of fiscal shocks. The findings have policy implications for the design of fiscal adjustment strategies to protect economic growth as countries recover from the coronavirus pandemic.

Assessing the Impact of Community Centre’s on Roma Integration: A Study of Eastwood

During the last 10 years, Roma have become the second largest and the most deprived ethnic minority in Rotherham and thus, the local authority has put Roma integration as a priority in terms of community planning and development. Due to the complexities around Roma integration and the government budget cuts to public spending, the local authorities rely on community centres to fill gaps in improving the Roma integration and their quality of life in the UK. This article aims to assess the impact of a community centre on Roma integration, specifically, focusing on the Eastwood area of Rotherham. The research methods included semi-structured interviews of professionals that regularly engage with Roma community and the Roma residents of Eastwood. The case study findings show that the Eastwood community centre plays a vital role in the Roma integration. Some of the main contributing factors include their expertise and the ability to effectively engage with the Roma community. However, this paper only touches upon the issue of Roma integration in the UK, which means that more comprehensive and a larger scale of research is needed to improve the processes of Roma integration and the integration of other communities in similar settings

International organizations' responses to member state contestation: from inertia to resilience

International organizations (IOs) play a key role in promoting multilateral cooperation on critical transnational issues. Yet, their authority has increasingly been contested by member states that cut financial contributions or even withdraw their membership. How do IOs respond to such contestation? While the existing literature has mostly focused on reactions by other member states, I argue in this article that our understanding of IOs' responses to contestation remains incomplete without an analysis of IO bureaucracies. I propose a conceptual framework to analyse three types of bureaucratic responses: inertia, i.e. no immediate response; adaptation, i.e. institutional changes to maintain the support of the challenging member state(s); and resilience-building, i.e. developing organizational capacities to limit contestation. I argue that each of these responses is shaped by specific bureaucratic mechanisms, namely hunkering, negotiation, framing, coalition-building, shaming and professionalization. Based on a comparative within-case study analysing the reactions of the United Nations Population Fund (UNFPA) to budget cuts by the Reagan, Bush and Trump administrations, I further theorize that the organization's threat perception, the position of other member states and bureaucratic leadership are relevant factors that need to be considered to explain the variation in IO responses to contestation.

The Attack on Higher Education

American higher education is under attack today as never before. A growing right-wing narrative portrays academia as corrupt, irrelevant, costly, and dangerous to both students and the nation. Budget cuts, attacks on liberal arts and humanities disciplines, faculty layoffs and retrenchments, technology displacements, corporatization, and campus closings have accelerated over the past decade. In this timely volume, Ronald Musto draws on historical precedent - Henry VIII's dissolution of British monasteries in the 1530s - for his study of the current threats to American higher education. He shows how a triad of forces - authority, separateness, and innovation - enabled monasteries to succeed, and then suddenly and unexpectedly to fail. Musto applies this analogy to contemporary academia. Despite higher education's vital centrality to American culture and economy, a powerful, anti-liberal narrative is severely damaging its reputation among parents, voters, and politicians. Musto offers a comprehensive account of this narrative from the mid-twentieth century to the present, as well as a new set of arguments to counter criticisms and rebuild the image of higher education.

Adjusting to precarity: how and why the Roslin Institute forged a leading role for itself in international networks of pig genomics research

From the 1980s onwards, the Roslin Institute and its predecessor organizations faced budget cuts, organizational upheaval and considerable insecurity. Over the next few decades, it was transformed by the introduction of molecular biology and transgenic research, but remained a hub of animal geneticists conducting research aimed at the livestock-breeding industry. This paper explores how these animal geneticists embraced genomics in response to the many-faceted precarity that the Roslin Institute faced, establishing it as a global centre for pig genomics research through forging and leading the Pig Gene Mapping Project (PiGMaP); developing and hosting resources, such as a database for genetic linkage data; and producing associated statistical and software tools to analyse the data. The Roslin Institute leveraged these resources to play a key role in further international collaborations as a hedge against precarity. This adoption of genomics was strategically useful, as it took advantage of policy shifts at the national and European levels towards funding research with biotechnological potential. As genomics constitutes a set of infrastructures and resources with manifold uses, the development of capabilities in this domain also helped Roslin to diversify as a response to precarity.