Evaluating the quality of municipal strategic plans

Local governments increasingly use strategic planning as a tool to anticipate and address the complex challenges they face. Strategic planning is the process of setting long-term goals, prioritizing actions to achieve the goals, and mobilizing human and financial resources to execute the actions. Although there has been considerable debate about the appropriate scope, content, and procedures for strategic planning in local government, less attention has been paid to the quality of municipal strategic plans, meaning the presence or absence of key characteristics that analysts typically associate with good plans. This article explores the content and quality of municipal strategic plans in Canada. It presents results of a comparative plan quality evaluation, which assessed the official strategic plans of the 66 most populous Canadian municipalities using a comprehensive set of criteria derived from existing scholarship on plan quality and strategic planning. The findings indicate that there is considerable room to improve municipal strategic plans, which lack many of the features commonly associated with good quality plans. Municipal strategic plans should contain a comprehensive fact base to prioritize and rationalize the goals within the plan, and there should be appropriate provisions for implementing, monitoring, and evaluating plan progress and outcomes.