Strategic planning and performance management in government agencies in Norway
This paper explores the use of strategic management and performance management in central government agencies in Norway. While there are many empirical studies of strategic planning and management in local government there are relatively few extensive (large-N) studies of strategy in central government. Moreover, many of the conceptual as well as empirical papers are from the Anglo-American context. This paper contributes to the literature on strategy in the public sector by conducting a population study of how strategic planning in central government organizations in a Nordic country is influenced by the ordinary governmental planning system and how the agencies adapt to their environment by strategic planning and positioning by strategic types. We used the strategic management framework by Poister et al. (2010) as an integrative perspective and interpreted the relationship between agency and parent ministry as defining important contextual determinants described by Ferlie and Ongaro (2015). Key questions are how performance management interacts with strategic management in governmental agencies, how the ministries’ various use of performance management affect whether the agencies develop strategies or how they design their strategies, and whether the (long term) strategies are ‘sleeping documents’ or actively used as steering instruments in the agencies alongside (short term) performance management. The paper examines the whole population of 62 central administrative agencies in Norway (in 2017) including directorates, inspectorates and oversight bodies. These agencies are organizationally autonomous units, separated from their parent ministry, and are therefore able to ‘strategize’ but they are also exposed to politically based ministerial governance, including performance budgeting and performance management. We conducted quantitative content analysis of three main document sources: the agencies’ strategy documents, the parent ministries use of performance management through annual letters of allocation and the agencies annual reports. In the letters of allocation, we measured various steering instruments. The agency strategic plans were analysed and categorised by strategic stance (Boyne and Walker 2004), institutional values and vision (Hood 1991; Bozeman 2007), whether they employed any analysis of external environment and total steering load counting the parent ministries’ use of strategic aims. The multivariate analysis was conducted by partial least square structural equation modelling (PLS-SEM). The key finding was that the agencies seem to be a low-NPM affected tier of government. 41 out of the 62 agencies had agency wide strategies spanning on average 5.2 years and the dominant strategic type was defender. Depending on variables like size, organisation structure, policy area and ministry-affiliation, however, the interaction between performance management and strategic management showed a lot of non-linear variation suggesting that the strategic plans function as separate, but interconnected steering-instruments in government agencies in Norway.
Publisert i European Group for Public Administration (EGPA) Annual Conference, 2019
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