Strategy in governance: communities and their futures reimagined and reconstructed

We fully develop our strategy concept, highlighting its double nature, as narrative and institution, capable of coordinating other institutions. We resort to semiotic theory to understand how strategy can help to create its own support over time, and we analyse this further in terms of reality effects (in the community) and goal dependencies (in governance). Even when considering strategy for a collective as a collective effort, we point at the importance of leadership for path creation and for overcoming path dependencies and other dependencies, when these set the community on an unsustainable path. We discuss the process of visioning in a community as a step towards strategy, beyond the deliberation and integration of several future narratives in governance, but acknowledge that strategy can create instability, even when it is designed to address instability. Furthermore, we argue that the balancing of short- and long-term perspectives in and through strategy, the balancing of tactics and strategy, can never be perfect, and requires a careful cultivation of reflexivity, learning and adaptation in governance.