Defining strategic planning in the public organizations: emergent or deliberate strategy?

This paper aims at analyzing the gap (and the “hierarchical” relation) between deliberate and emergent strategy in the public sector in Italy, focusing on municipal institutional setting. In the literature, the investigations on the strategic planning have focused on some sectors and policies but haven’t approached the broader topic of the territorial management and haven’t assessed the efficacy of the strategies and their implementation. Most of the studies have focused on the contents or on the steps of the planning process. This paper takes into account the planning instruments of Italian Municipalities using the case study method. This work is part of a broader research aiming at understanding if a hierarchy among strategic planning documents exists and what are the behaviors of the public decision makers toward their formulation. The preliminary results of this research reveal that the public actors safeguard a degree of “opacity” on the decisional processes, in order not to formalize the strategic goals as a consequence of political pressures or of the need to adapt to the “turbulent” environment in which the public organizations operate