Municipal governments come and go. What happens to all those plans, programs, strategies, etc. elaborated by predecessors? Are they also gone with the wind of elections? In Ukraine, that used to be the case. A new mayor would bring a new team, and would immediately reinvent the wheel. The elaboration of plans, programs, strategies, etc. would begin from the ground up, as if there had been nothing done before, and the mantra would be “if not invented here, then we don’t pursue it.”
That was easy to do because it was once true that city administrators wrote plans and strategies in the still of their offices, without input from the people for whom they were written, and with little connection to the actual situation they intended to improve. “Ownership” of the plans indeed belonged only to the inner members of the former city administrations.
But now, after the recent elections, a completely different story emerges.
Helping cities to prepare their Economic Development Strategic Plans, the USAID LED (local economic development) Project applied an approach called community-based strategic planning in the sixteen cities with which they worked prior to the elections. That means that these cities’ community leaders, including business representatives, organized themselves with the city administration as a public/private Strategic Planning Committee (SPC), and together spent hundreds of hours crafting a transparent economic strategy and a detailed work plan for its implementation. Noteworthy is that a private business person chaired the SPC in every city. And in the end, the SPC’s and city administrations took the plans to public hearing before introducing them to City Radas for approval as law. The result? Ownership of the economic development strategy belonged to the community as a whole.
This spring’s electoral wind, or rather storm, brought new mayors to more than half of the cities that had developed their Strategic Plans with assistance from the LED project. Has it also swept away the plans? Not this time. The plans remain effective, although there may be some adjustments. But, after all, no one has ever said that a community’s economic strategy as captured in a Strategic Plan is anything but a living document.
|
|
Pryluky Deputy Mayor Nadia Yeremenko says the new Mayor, Yuriy Berkut, supports the goals of the plan in his city. “Maybe, the new City Rada will update the Strategic Plan by setting several new objectives. But the goals will remain the same. I think the Rada will consider Strategic Plan issues at its next session,” she relates. She also states that if a community is going to develop, it must have a strategy, which “allows us to see what we have to attain, and how.”
Important to this view was the fact that the economic strategies were not composed of mere dreams or good intentions of wistful community members. To ensure that the strategies would be relevant, feasible and acceptable to successive generations of leaders and community members, they were based on careful analysis of objective data, in order to neutralize potential concerns that politics were at play in formation of the economic development priorities. One group of data was statistics aggregated in a Community Profile: tables and charts on the economic, demographic, social, and other aspects of the situation in the city. Another group of data was generated through a Business Attitude Survey, where the SPC members interviewed their fellow businessmen about future plans for investment, perceived strengths and weaknesses of the city’s economic environment and production factors, and general business outlook regarding competitiveness in the market.
At the final SPC meetings in different cities many committee members confessed that what they had started rather reluctantly had captivated them with time. “We learned to hear and better understand each other. Now we know that we can change a lot in our city,” they said.
Zinaida Fedoruk, Deputy Mayor of Ivano-Frankivsk, where the administration has changed, echoes the views held in Pryluky: “As a matter of fact, no city can develop successfully without a development strategy. And it is very good that Ivano-Frankivsk already has the Economic Development Strategic Plan. Sure, there are no limits to perfection, and some amendments may be made in the plan. But it’s not an impelling need right now. We are interested in collaboration with the [LED] Project in implementing the Strategic Plan and attracting investments to the city.”
Perhaps the most dramatic display of strategic consistency exists in the northwestern city of Kovel, where Serhiy Kosharuk, who served on the Strategic Planning Committee as its chairman, is the newly-elected Mayor. Mr. Kosharuk readily broadcasts that he founded his electoral program on the Kovel Economic Development Strategic Plan. “Now I have pleasure in recalling that the Electors’ Committee, which monitored programs of mayoral candidates in Kovel, recognized my program as the most adequate,” says Mr. Kosharuk. Speaking about his pro bono committee chairman work, Kosharuk states, “Probably, I would have never ventured to contend for the mayor’s office had I not presided at the committee meetings before. I had become better aware of problems in the city and how to solve them. I had learned about problems in other cities. I had seen what was done wrong, and what I’d like to change.”
Technical assistance projects come and go, and the challenge is always to test what USAID calls “sustainability”. If you ask the question: What remains in local economic development after municipal elections have changed municipal leaders? The answer is: strategies remain and consistency thrives because the entire community has created and owns its LED vision.
The story as .pdf file