What Are the Best Options for Strategic Planning?
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Centre for Policy Studies Praxis, Chairman of the Management Board
In Estonia, nearly fifty documents direct policy shaping and strategic development at the government level in more than 17 fields.
The offshoot of this profusion of development plans and strategy documents is the sectoral fragmentation of the whole process, lack of coordination and evidence base, inconsistency of management systems, and inadequate cooperation between fields. The government has clearly intended to reduce the number of development plans and strategy documents in its planning process. To achieve this, the future emphasis will be on horizontal development strategies that integrate several policy fields. At the end of the current planning cycle, the 27 government level strategy documents of today will fall to 16–17 development plans on policy shaping. This is, to all intents and purposes, an opportunity to significantly refresh the entire national policy shaping strategic planning framework at once. This article draws on the current experiences to highlight certain opportunities that are worth keeping in mind.