Strategic management, policy analysis, and budgeting

Preoccupation with fiscal problems and the failures of such reforms as PPBS and ZBB has caused microbudgeting and policy analysis to be neglected. Strategic management offers alternatives for the framing of policy analysis that are quite different from reforms that are predicated upon exhaustive calculations of marginal rates of return. Rejecting a purely positivist approach, the prescriptive implications of strategic management closely resemble those of some of the foremost proponents of politically rational approaches to policy analysis. Strategic management’s emphasis on adaptation, rather than optimization, leads to a reframing of V.O. Key’s famous question, and its emphasis on advocacy oriented leadership offers opportunities for agency based analysis to assume a more important role in theory and practice.