Provided by Research Papers in Economics
Local Strategic Planning
as a Factor of Regional Development
In the Republic of Serbia
Zoran Njegovan, Ph.D.
Economics Institute, Belgrade
Introduction
From the point of view of economy, regional development policy could be seen as a tool
for the efficient administration and utilization of comparative and competitive
advantages in space and time. In the last few decades, the experiences in the Republic
of Serbia in this field are not of major importance. They have evidenced that the
application of a centralised administrative model in the management of social and
economic trends is not able to deal efficiently with the cumulated contradictions neither
at the national nor at the regional / local level to the least. It is necessary to deal with
these contradictions as soon as possible by changing the model of social and economic
development, since the negative effects of wrongly applied strategies and development
policies so far have reached unanticipated boundaries. Such an approach is also
required for the fact that Serbia has opted for joining the European Union, which means
complying with their standards and models of regional/rural/local development.
Development must be based upon the so-called “good administration” which, in its
essence, presupposes local strategic action planning as a basis for regional
development and a factor of competitiveness (“bottom-up” approach). What have to be
focused here are all formal and informal agents as well as formal and informal
structures so as to be able to make the proposed decisions in an acceptable way and
then implement them efficiently.
"Good and Bad Governance" - the element of a Sustainable
Strategic Planning
Recently the words governance and good governance have been increasingly used in
the literature connected with a local sustainable development. For this reason, big donor
communities and international financial institutions are binding its policy of financial