A scenario approach to implement strategic priorities of municipalities’ development

Priorities for the development of municipalities within the framework of the existing legislation should be established in the process of a strategy development and should determine the importance of individual projects and programs of the strategic plan for the development of municipalities. The plan of measures to implement the strategy in accordance with the legislation is an independent document of strategic planning and is formed after the development of the strategy. However, with regard to the procedures for moving from strategic priorities to a strategy implementation plan, discussions in the scientific literature remain. The researches focus on the formation of scenarios for the implementation of strategic perspectives from the position of a systematic approach based on strategic goals and results of a strategic analysis. Priorities for the development of municipalities are established on the basis of a combination of a system of goals, which include long-term goals (oriented to the Vision), the main objectives (oriented to the implementation of the Mission) and strategically significant objectives oriented to the current situation (built on the results of SWOT analysis). An algorithm that has been developed for constructing a scenario to implement strategic priorities for the development of municipalities considers different approaches to the formation of various options of the strategy implementation. It has been made on the basis of different descriptive languages suggested by the authors to describe possible scenarios (scenario configurators). The approach developed by the authors for constructing a scenario configurator is characterized by the necessity to develop three scenario development tools. These tools are based on a combination of the priority areas of municipalities’ development with strategic objectives, expected results of the strategy implementation and the analysis results of the factors of external and internal environment. Morphological matrices, which reflect the main content of these priority areas of development of municipalities, are the key instruments of the present study. The scenarios constructed within the framework of this approach allow obtain a comprehensive description of possible results when achieving strategic priorities for the development of municipalities. It ensures the consistency of projects and programs, as well as the activities of the strategy implementation plan. In addition, the research allows systematically systematize these projects and programs, which increases the effectiveness of the strategy implementation based on the ranking of the interrelated elements of the strategic plan. Further studies will concern the development of a procedure for the strategy implementation plan and the creation of a tool system that will provide the transition from the strategy of a municipality development to the measures of the strategy implementation.