Strategic Planning in Intergovernmental Organisations

Intergovernmental organizations (IGOs) are actors in the international arena, with the ability to instigate actions for transnational issues that otherwise can only be addressed through mutual cooperation among states. Some of these IGOs have developed strategic plans that tackle the varying needs of their stakeholders to preserve legitimacy and to continue receiving support. In the literature, strategy has been found to be associated with higher performance. Similarly, strategic planning in IGOs is not a new concept in practice, as observed from a number of IGOs that publish their strategic plans; however, strategic planning remains to be sparsely adopted today despite of its benefits. In this paper we seek to understand how strategic planning occurs in IGOs. Traditional management research on strategic planning has focused prevalently on for-profit organizations and, more recently, also on public organizations. However, this review finds that the international relations and strategic management literatures are silent on strategic planning in IGOs. While similar to public organizations in many respects, IGOs diverge from other organizations in four aspects: purpose, organizational characteristics, resources, and environment. Based on these specificities, we argue that some strategic planning approaches popular among businesses are applicable to IGOs while others cannot be transposed directly that can explain why some IGOs adopt strategic planning and yet some do not. Our contributions in this paper are three-fold. First, we extend the concept of strategic planning to IGOs that we have found to be over-looked in the literature. Second, we identify the elements of strategic planning process and for-profit strategic planning approaches that affect their direct application to IGOs. Third, we update the strategic planning models reviewed by Bryson and Roering (1987). This study can show how IGOs, as actors, improve their performance by providing IGO strategists frameworks to consider in developing better strategic plans.