Strategy and strategic decision‐making in the smaller local authority

This paper is based on interviews with four chief executives of district/borough authorities in a two‐tier local government area. The interviews constitute a snapshot of opinion from a group of people ideally placed to relate to the issue under discussion, namely the importance of strategy and strategic partnering for smaller local authorities. The paper considers the extent to which the views of this group develop or interlink with the thinking around strategy, in the literature on strategy in the private sector, and with views of public sector strategic management, particularly in the work and in the critique of the operation of the modernising agenda in the NHS. It concludes that, far from strategy being an irrelevancy to small authorities, it may be that they are ideally placed to provide insights into some of the tensions evident in the strategy debate at all levels.