Regional Strategic Planning

The purpose of this research was to identify the most suitable planning techniques or methods to help ‘find the way forward' for a region. This was undertaken by reviewing international literature on Strategic Planning techniques and holding structured interviews with nine planners of six regional strategic plans undertaken by territorial local authorities and central government departments in the Otago province of New Zealand. This was done in order to learn from applied experience of successes and constraints. The field results highlighted the informants' concerns with various problems experienced in regional Strategic Planning. Firstly, some plans focused on the first stage of identifying the broad needs/objectives and not the second stage of identifying the specific projects to achieve these objectives. Alternatively the projects were in other management plans and not clearly connected to the objectives. Sometime the objectives were really a few highly desired projects and the identification of the core needs were missing.