strategy

The journal Futures has published a special issue on Long-term perspectives and strategy. This special issue analyses and reflects on relations between long term perspectives and strategies in governance. While dismissing high modernist planning and acknowledging constraints to long-term policies, the different contributions in this volume, each in their own way, contend that strategy is necessary to face the challenges of our times. The fifteen articles highlight different aspects of the possibilities of and limits to strategy in governance, to turn long-term perspectives into strategy and strategy into reality. They all examine how long- term perspectives and issues are constituted by different governance practices and emerge in rather different policy contexts, which points to the need to better understand the diverse interplay between strategy, long-term perspectives and patterns of policy integration. Furthermore, the contributions emphasize how long-range governance requires careful attention to issues of temporality, the management of uncertainty and the interplay between the short term and the long term.

Strategy for collectives and common goods: Coordinating strategy, long-term perspectives and policy domains in governance

Kristof Van Assche, Gert Verschraegen, Monica Gruezmacher

Strategic openings: On the productivity of blended long-term perspectives in spatial strategy. A Dutch case study

Ferry van de Mosselaer, Martijn Duineveld

Strategy’s futures

Liliana Doganova, Martin Kornberger

There is no such thing as a short-term issue

Michael K. MacKenzie

Assessing the options for combatting democratic myopia and safeguarding long-term interests

Jonathan Boston

Breaking through the epistemic impasse: Ending homelessness with the invention of ‘functional zero’ in the Anglo-American world

Joshua Evans, Tom Baker

What makes long-term perspectives endure? Lessons from Dutch nature conservation

Raoul Beunen, Iulian Barba Lata

Governing through strategies: How does Finland sustain a future-oriented environmental policy for the long term?

Vesa Koskimaa, Lauri Rapeli, Juha Hiedanpää

Anticipating and planning for mine closure in South Africa

Lochner Marais, Anri de Lange

Shaping future perspectives in policy advice under deep, long-term uncertainty. The case of the Dutch Delta Committee

S.A. Van ‘t Klooster, S.A. Veenman

Prospects of a transition to the knowledge economy in Saudi Arabia and Qatar: A critical reflection through the lens of spatial embeddedness and evolutionary governance theory

Abbas Ziafati Bafarasat, Eduardo Oliveira

Governing technological zones, making national renewable energy futures

Shana Lee Hirsch

‘Solving for X?’ Towards a problem-finding framework to ground long-term governance strategies for artificial intelligence

Hin-Yan Liu, Matthijs M. Maas

Reinvention paths and reinvention paradox: Strategic change in Western Newfoundland communities

Kristof Van Assche, Monica Gruezmacher, Kelly Vodden, Ryan Gibson, Leith Deacon

Strategic spatial planning through pragmatic blueprints: Forms and levels of adaptivity in modernist planning of the Dutch IJsselmeerpolders

Terry van Dijk

Strategy for the long term

This special issue analyses and reflects on relations between long term perspectives and strategies in governance. While dismissing high modernist planning and acknowledging constraints to long-term policies, the different contributions in this volume, each in their own way, contend that strategy is necessary to face the challenges of our times. The fifteen articles highlight different aspects of the possibilities of and limits to strategy in governance, to turn long-term perspectives into strategy and strategy into reality. They all examine how long- term perspectives and issues are constituted by different governance practices and emerge in rather different policy contexts, which points to the need to better understand the diverse interplay between strategy, long-term perspectives and patterns of policy integration. Furthermore, the contributions emphasize how long-range governance requires careful attention to issues of temporality, the management of uncertainty and the interplay between the short term and the long term.

Van Assche, K., Verschraegen, G., & Gruezmacher, M. (2021). Strategy for the long term: pressures, counter-pressures and mechanisms in governance. Futures.

05/20/2021 0

Rethinking strategy

This paper presents a novel framework for analyzing the formation and effects of strategies in environmental governance. It combines elements of management studies, strategy as practice thinking, social systems theory and evolutionary governance theory. It starts from the notion that governance and its constitutive elements are constantly evolving and that the formation of strategies and the effect strategies produce should be understood as elements of these ongoing dynamics. Strategy is analyzed in its institutional and narrative dimensions. The concept of reality effects is introduced to grasp the various ways in which discursive and material changes can be linked to strategy and to show that the identification of strategies can result from prior intention as well as a posteriori ascription. The observation of reality effects can enhance reality effects, and so does the observation of strategy. Different modes and levels of observation bring in different strategic potentialities: observation of self, of the governance context, and of the external environment. The paper synthesizes these ideas into a framework that conceptualizes strategies as productive fictions that require constant adaptation. They never entirely work out as expected or hoped for, yet these productive fictions are necessary and effective parts of planning and steering efforts.

Van Assche, K., Beunen, R., Gruezmacher, M., & Duineveld, M. (2020). Rethinking strategy in environmental governance. Journal of Environmental Policy & Planning, 1-14.

06/16/2020 0

Mapping institutional work

This paper investigates the potential of mapping institutional work in communities as a method for both analyzing and formulating local development strategy. Twelve Canadian case communities experiencing dramatic ups and downs (‘boom and bust towns’) serve as the empirical base. Analytically, it finds that institutional work for strategy takes on very diverse forms, some of them not described in the literature, and further identify a special class of institutional work associated with leadership. Normatively, it demonstrates that mapping institutional work can be a structured process of self-reflection underpinning strategy. For the Canadian case study, it finds that lack of local autonomy is often a stumbling block for strategy. More broadly, the paper conclude that mapping institutional work for strategy works best when governance evolutions are grasped as context, and when strategy itself is understood in its complex, multifaceted nature: a narrative, a way of linking institutions, and an institution in itself.

Van Assche, K., Gruezmacher, M., & Deacon, L. (2018). Mapping institutional work as a method for local strategy; learning from boom/bust dynamics in the Canadian west. Journal of Environmental Planning and Management, 1-21.

The paper is part of a special issue that explores the concept of institutional work in the context of environmental governance. It aims to develop a better insights in the actions that underly plannend and unplanned changes in evolving governance contexts.

04/11/2018 0

International Institute for Innovation in Governance

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Long-term perspectives & strategy