Аuthors:

Oleg S. Sukharev, Dr. Sc. (Econ.), Professor, Chief Researcher. Institute of Economics of the Russian Academy of Sciences

Abstract:

Incremental approach in strategic management and planning is a gradual, step-by-step process of continuous improvement of the existing mechanisms as well as their revision for making necessary strategic manoeuvres that implies the involvement of different groups of stakeholders. Ensuring balanced socioeconomic development of a country, its regions and municipalities through strategic planning has become increasingly difficult in conditions of the unfolding crisis of the social forecasting. For rural municipalities this is an even more challenging task because their financial, time and information resources are rather limited. The research aims to assess the prospects of applying the incremental approach in strategic planning of socioeconomic development of rural municipalities considering the case of municipal districts of the Russian Federation. Methodologically, the study relies on regional and rural economics and adopts the incremental approach. The methods include systematisation, induction, deduction, comparative and content analysis. The review of the literature allowed concluding that rural municipalities can benefit from pursuing the incremental approach in their strategic planning in a number of instances. First, the approach holds considerable potential for consolidating and coordinating the efforts of various groups of stakeholders. Second, it stimulates building a system of checks and balances in strategic decision-making. Third, the approach decreases costs due to addressing socioeconomic issues step-wise, and finally, favours flexible and non-trivial solutions required by unique local situations. For our examination, we selected the strategies of nine municipal districts of the Ural Federal District (Russia) based on the criteria of population density and share of rural populations. The analysis revealed that the mission statement of the municipal districts reflects the transformation of the role of rural areas in the post-industrial society, and the strategies provide for risks typical of municipal districts as rural municipalities (demographic shrinkage, environmental risks, transport accessibility, lock-ins to resource dependency). The research demonstrated that in the strategic planning of socioeconomic development of municipal districts the potential of the incremental approach is exploited insufficiently, while the application of its principles could have made the process more effective.

Keywords:

strategic planning; incremental approach; municipality; municipal district; rural areas; socioeconomic development; rural shrinkage.

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