Strategic planning in the municipalities of northern Russia

The article examines the experience of strategic management and planning of socio - economic development of the municipalities of the Russian North and the Arctic region for the period 2000-2012 years. 108 municipalities with a population of 20 to 100 thousand people, situated in the territories belonging to the Far North and equivalent areas has been studied. It has been found that for the period of 2000-2012 a strategic approach to the management of socio - economic development was applied in 44 northern municipalities, local authorities adopted strategic documents, and they were posted on the official Internet- sites of local governments, which allowed to group them by the date of their adoption. The first and second group was composed of the documents adopted in the early and mid 2000s, so in addition to the degree of completeness of strategic documents (the presence of the mission, goals, objectives, scenarios, etc.) we reviewed the benchmarks strategies. The third group includes strategic documents adopted recently, so we carried out only assessment of the completeness of the strategic documents, marked features of the strategies for the development of some municipalities. The analysis of all the three groups showed that in developing strategic documents, local authorities face problems and the solution of the majority of them hardly depending entirely on the local governments: lack of legal, information and personnel security, lack of a universal method for strategic planning of urban development, lack of revenue sources of local budgets. In terms of the contents of the strategy documents there is also a number of problems: a poor quality of the designed strategies, their optimistic and/or non-public nature, etc. The results can be used by regional and municipal authorities, both in the evaluation of the designed strategies, and in the formation and improvement of the development strategies that are being designed.