Abstract
In the early 1990s, large Spanish cities be-

gan to apply the fi rst strategic plans to initiate
transformation processes in their physical spac-
es and productive sectors. The second gener-
ation strategic plans launched in the following
decade includeed more immaterial objectives
associated with improving citizens’ quality of life
and involved key social actors from the city in
their design and implementation.

The case of Móstoles, located in the metro-
politan area of Madrid, is an example of a city
that undertook a process of strategic planning,
based on the active participation of its citizens,
to develop the city in the long term. This plan-
ning process has become a tool for transforming
the administrative culture of the City Hall and for
government accountability to citizens regarding
the degree to which the objectives of the plan are
fulfi lled and its political performance.

Keywords: strategic planning, citizen par-
ticipation, local government, accountability, local
governance, urban policies.

LOCAL STRATEGIC PLANNING
IN SPAIN. A CASE STUDY

José Manuel RUANO

José Manuel RUANO
Professor, Department of Political and Administrative Sciences,
Faculty of Political Sciences and Sociology, Complutense
University of Madrid, Madrid, Spain
Tel.: 0034-91-394.2634
E-mail: jmruano@cps.ucm.es

Transylvanian Review
of Administrative Sciences,

Special Issue 2015, pp. 71-85

1. Introduction

Strategic planning is understood here as an instrument for intervention in a
city territory, based on citizen participation and the public-private pact that makes
it possible to formulate shared visions of the future and to design the necessary
actions and projects required to achieve the anticipated objectives. Thus, it involves a
considered and consensual response of the main actors of the city to the main urban
challenges.

While it is true that strategic planning is an instrument that has traditionally been
used by private enterprises, its application to the public sphere in Spain has been
delayed, perhaps due to a great extent to the greater weightiness of administrative
procedures and to the observance of strict normative legality, which made it
diffi cult to apply forms of direction that involved actors, external to the bureaucratic
organization, in decision-making about its future.

The fact is that strategic planning tries to integrate the interests and needs of the
main actors in the city, and it tries to establish, in a single instrument, the objectives
and actions that should be initiated to achieve a harmonic development of the city in
the long term. To this end, it is essential to identify the main urban actors, to design
and apply a methodology that makes consensual decision-making possible, and to
involve local actors throughout the process (Fernández, 2006).

Based on this defi nition, this article analyzes the experiences of strategic planning
in Spanish cities, and then goes on to present in greater detail the case of the city of
Móstoles, the second most populated city in the Madrid region, with over 200,000
inhabitants, where strategic planning is being used as an instrument to design the
city’s future. The methodology used is the study of the academic bibliography on
this subject and the analysis of strategic planning documents in the main Spanish
cities and, specifi cally, in the city of Móstoles. In this last case, the document analysis
(Ayuntamiento de Móstoles, 2011) has been completed with in-depth interviews with
the people responsible for designing and implementing the strategic plan1.

2. Experiences of local strategic planning in Spain

While the fi rst strategic urban plans began to be applied in North American cities
in the 1980s, as a way to deal with the eff ects of the economic crises of the 1970s and
1980s on these cities, the fi rst strategic plans for cities in Spain were designed and
applied in the 1990s, mainly as tools for physical regeneration. This is partly due to
the fact that the more traditional kind of planning for cities is urbanistic planning,
linked to the approval of ‘urban plans’. At any rate, the main objective of the
municipal governments was to capture economic resources from the private sector

1 I would particularly like to thank Manuel Arenilla Sáez (Director of the team from the Universi-
dad Rey Juan Carlos in charge of the methodological design of the plan) and José Enrique Díez
(from the General Directorate of Modernization and Quality of Móstoles City Hall).

to construct new infrastructures in order to stimulate economic development and to
provide the cities with the equipment they lacked. However, the second generation of
strategic plans launched from 2000 onward includes other strategic objectives related
to citizens’ quality of life and adopts a broader perspective of territory. This broader
perspective is no longer restricted to the administrative limits of the city, but takes
into account the cities’ interactions with their environment. That is, it goes from a
vision based on a main objective to a vision that contains multiple objectives, and
from a strictly urban perspective to a focus on the city’s territory as a metropolitan
region, insofar as the solutions to the city’s problems can be found in its relations
with the metropolitan environment.

Thus, the fi rst plans implemented in Spanish cities, such as in the cases of Bilbao
and Barcelona, tried to transform old, declining industrial cities and alleviate the
insuffi ciencies of basic infrastructures as a way to stimulate their productive sectors
and promote their economic recovery, while at the same time regenerating the city
physically. The main objective was to go from cities that were dependent on traditional
industries on the decline (shipyards, the textile sector, heavy industry, the iron and
steel industry) to cities based on more diversifi ed productive sectors, with the service
sector as a clear leader. However, the fi rst plans of the 1990s were not clearly defi ned,
nor were they based on any consensus, and they gave too much weight to individual
physical transformation projects compared to other more immaterial objectives. As it
can be seen in the following table, the fi rst strategic urban plans applied in Spain in
the 1990s focused mostly on investment in new infrastructures as a basis for economic
development, while the second generation plans, applied from 2000 onward, give
greater importance to social cohesion, sports, culture, research and development,
education and to the quality of life in cities; as such, they try to make economic
development compatible with integration and social cohesion.

Besides, from the point of view of the methodology used, the new plans are based
on more fl exible methodologies to achieve their goals and include more actors and
interests to increase the coherence of the diff erent strategic axes of intervention. Thus,
while leadership and implementation fell almost exclusively on the city government
in the 1990s, the role of urban actors, particularly business organizations and unions,
gains importance in the second generation plans, as well as, on a second level,
universities, neighborhood associations, fi nancial entities, NGOs, and consumer
associations. In the end, these plans’ greater internal complexity refl ects the very
social complexity of the city, which is seen as a dense network of relations and
interests with multiple actors who intervene simultaneously in a cooperative way
(Ruano, 2010a).

We must keep in mind that, in the Spanish case, urban areas experienced one of
the highest population growth rates in Europe, from the mid-1990s to the middle of
the fi rst decade of the 21st century, with yearly growth rates of over 2%. It is, then,
in this context of rapid population increase, the result of economic growth and the
arrival of immigrant population, when local governments begin to lead their cities’

transformation processes using second generation strategic plans that try to organize
the provision of public goods and services, facilitating decision-making regarding
the future by means of participatory processes that involve diverse social sectors,
in order to anticipate the changes and demands of the environment. This policy-
making exercise is based on the acknowledgement that all cities have physical and
economic resources and possibilities for development, and that the interactions
among the diff erent actors who make up the city are a key element for carrying
out the planning. Thus, from the 1990s onward, 60.85% of the Spanish cities with
over 50,000 inhabitants (that is, 166 cities) have carried out some kind of exercise of
strategic planning, although with diff erent approaches and results (Prado and García
Sánchez, 2006, p. 661).

Table 1: Main areas of interest of local strategic plans in Spain

Strategic Plans

In
fra

st
ru

ct
ur

En
vi

ro
nm

en
t

Ec
on

om
ic

De
ve

lo
pm

en
t

Q
ua

lit
y

of
L

ife

Sp
or

ts
a

nd
C

ul
tu

R
&

So
ci

al
C

oh
es

io
n

Ed
uc

at
io

Bilbao I

Bilbao II

Saragossa I

Saragossa II

San Sebastian I

San Sebastian II

Malaga I

Malaga II

Seville I

Seville II

Valencia

Barcelona I

Barcelona II

Source: Prepared by the author based on the information found in the strategic plans.

Therefore, the strategic plans implemented from 2000 moved on from the
development of urban infrastructures to immaterial objectives meant to guarantee the
competitiveness and future of the cities. As mentioned earlier, this was the case for
Bilbao and Barcelona, and for the rest of the large cities: Zaragoza committ ed itself to
linking territory, activities, and people in order to achieve a technological city, taking
advantage of the momentum of the 2008 International Exposition. The fi rst plan in

San Sebastian (2003) was developed along the axes of science and innovation, people
and information society, as well as fomenting numerous social, cultural, and sports
infrastructures. Malaga (2006) focused its second strategic plan on objectives related
to social, economic, and environmental sustainability and on citizen participation. The
2010 Seville plan tried to defi ne the city of the future from an urbanistic, cultural, and
productive perspective, but it was also concerned about favoring the participation of
citizens and of economic and social agents. With its 2007 plan, Valencia tried to create
a network for managing knowledge in technological sectors, giving the university
and its research centers a revitalizing role in the creation of a progressive city in the
areas of information society and knowledge.

3. The case of the Móstoles Strategic Plan

3.1. The economic and social context

Móstoles is the city with the second largest population in the Madrid Autonomous
Community, aft er the capital. It is located 17 kilometers outside of Madrid and
is, therefore, part of the Madrid metropolitan area. It went from having 196,173
inhabitants in 1996 to 206,478 inhabitants when it began to prepare its strategic plan in
2009. The economic crisis that began in 2008 caused a slight reduction in its population,
to 205,712 inhabitants in 2014 (INE, 2015). The city had undergone strong economic
growth in the decade of 2000, until 2008 when the property bubble burst in Spain.
In this year, the city government became aware that it was necessary to undertake a
process of collective refl ection regarding the model of the city in the next decades. The
challenge was to defi ne a model of the city that would contribute to the population’s
wellbeing by establishing the bases of a comprehensive development plan built upon
a planning process that would include the citizens, individually and collectively.

The economic and population growth of the city was a challenge for the muni-
cipality’s environmental sustainability and aff ected land use, water management, air
quality, waste management, and energy effi ciency. On the other hand, the previous
economic growth turned the city into a magnet for foreign population, which went
from 5.32% of the population in 2002 (10,586 people) to 13.99% in 2009 (28,889 people),
that is, a positive variation rate of 162.96%. The integration of the foreign population
was, thus, an important challenge for local government.

Its proximity to Spain’s capital was seen as an opportunity to take advantage of
investment fl ows and the concentration of resources in the city of Madrid. However,
these opportunities also presented challenges to Móstoles’ public transportation and
infrastructures.

Finally, local government’s capacity to lead this process of change, whether it
would be capable of reinforcing its power to drive collective action, was unknown.
To achieve this, Móstoles had an important network of associations: 286 associations
registered in the municipal registry, 1.39 for every 1,000 inhabitants, which was
higher than the average of nearby cities, including Madrid (with 0.44 associations per
1,000 inhabitants). Out of this total number of associations, the most important ones

were the parents’ associations (19.6%), sports associations (19.3%), and neighborhood
associations (13.6%). Less numerous were the political associations (0.4%), youth
associations (0.7%), immigrant associations (0.7%), and associations against drug
addiction (0.7%).

3.2. The Plan’s organizational structure

In order to launch the strategic plan, an organizational structure that would
guarantee the success of the planning process, which intended to involve public and
private actors in the city, was necessary. To this eff ect, the fi rst intangible resource
was the political will of the mayor as a key factor for involving key actors. The second
step was to decide which part of the organization would be in charge of directing
the process, that is, the issue of defi ning the management structure upon which the
plan would rest. This decision was important because, in order to gain the support
and participation of all of the political groups represented on the municipal council
and the support of social agents, it was essential to integrate them into the decision
structure of the plan, meaning that the characteristics of the organism responsible for
directing the plan could encourage or discourage their participation. The possibility
of assigning the process to one of the City Hall’s already-existing general directorates
could be perceived as just another policy of the city government, with the risk of
distancing citizens and political and social actors. This risk explains the creation of
a specifi c entity to manage the planning process, providing it with the human and
fi nancial resources to function properly.

As a result, the Directive Committ ee of the Strategic Plan (‘Comité de Dirección
del Plan Estratégico’ in Spanish) was created as an organism of coordination and
deliberation, presided over by the mayor and made up of the political groups with
representation on the municipal council, neighborhood associations, business
associations, unions, and the university. In addition to this political organism, a
Coordination Committ ee was created as a technical support agency responsible for
carrying out operational tasks. In short, the creation of an ad hoc organism made it
possible to avoid the symbolic risk of the plan being associated with a monopolizing
policy of the municipal government.

3.3. Methodology

The methodology was based on the fi ve classic planning steps, as it can be seen in
the Figure 1.

For the organization and presentation step, six work groups (one for each of the
following dimensions: economic, social, transport and mobility, urbanism and town
and country planning, culture and sports, and environmental sustainability) were
created in the Coordination Committ ee and put in charge of preparing studies on
the characteristics of the municipality and its national and international context,
according to the dimensions chosen. In addition, the committ ee tried to articulate
the available technical information with citizens’ ideas and proposals, by means of

participatory mechanisms. In this information-gathering phase, the City Hall areas of
government played an important role for obtaining and exchanging information with
the actors involved.

In addition, key actors were identifi ed and they participated actively in the
formulation of the plan, contributing with ideas and relevant information on the
city’s problems. The actors were identifi ed based on the work dimensions selected
and their capacity for action. To present the plan, a communication strategy that had
been specially designed to promote the strategic plan among the inhabitants of the
municipality was launched. Media coverage was employed, informative materials
were produced, citizens and key actors in the city were summoned, and alliances were
created with some of the local institutions (merchants’ associations, neighborhood
associations, youth associations, etc.).

The second step consisted of an intense exercise of refl ection regarding the data
obtained in the internal and external analyses. The purpose was to defi ne a series
of scenarios regarding the present situation and the future situation of the city, to
analyze the viability of the proposals, and to construct a general framework for action
on specifi c issues (Francés, 2001, p. 57). It is important to indicate that, in this second
step, it was necessary to consider the existence of strategic resources (the use of new
technologies, communication strategies, citizen participation, and alliances among
actors) to ensure the fi nal objectives. That is, it was a matt er of ensuring the elements
necessary to make the experience successful, elements such as institutional capability,
indispensable for guaranteeing any initiative by any government (Van den Meer,
Braun and Van den Berg, 1999).

Organization and presentation
September 2009-January 2010

Definition of the strategic framework
December 2009-May 2010

Plan design
May-November 2010

Approval and dissemination
December 2010-January 2011

Monitoring and assessment
rom 2012 onwards

Figure 1: Steps of the plan

Source: Arenilla Sáez, 2012, pp. 71-101

In this step, the external factors aff ecting the city and its internal characteristics
(economic, social, environmental, institutional, etc.) were identifi ed in order to design
scenarios and strategies. The point was to identify Móstoles’ diff erential features
compared to other commuter towns and the ‘vision’ of the municipality was created,
as a portrait of the desired future to be achieved.

Aft erwards, initiatives (norms, policies, and plans) undertaken by other adminis-
trations which had had an eff ect on the city were identifi ed. Finally, the external
analysis also included global and national (demographic, economic, social, and
ecological) tendencies that had an impact on the environment and the internal
functioning of the municipality.

In the internal analysis, reference was made to the characteristics of the locality
and to citizens’ main problems, in order to determine the strengths of the city and
the threats to it, using a SWOT analysis. Citizen participation, the participation of
neighborhood associations, and that of other actors who shape the city were decisive
in this analysis, and were carried out through the habitual organisms of participation
and thematic forums. The information provided by the SWOT matrix served to fi x the
strategic lines that guided the plan’s design and which, in turn, marked the trajectory
of the actions needed to guide the achievement of the plan’s objectives.

The third stage consisted of defi ning objectives, describing concrete actions to
achieve them, and designing a set of indicators that would be needed in the assessment
phase. Specifi cally, and fi rst of all, objectives derived from the strategies that the
government hoped to reach over the duration of the plan were set, linking indicators
for assessing them. Actions were derived from this set of objectives and translated into
specifi c projects assigned their corresponding resources (see Figure 2). In the end, the
plan included 27 strategic lines, 75 objectives, and 223 indicators.

Strategic lines

Aims

Projects

Indicators

Resources

Figure 2: Relations between Strategic Lines, Aims and Projects

The approval and diff usion of the plan underwent an important debate within
the Municipal Council, and activities to disseminate its contents throughout the city
were approved. However, we must remember that the incorporation of city actors
throughout the process continued during the dissemination step of the plan, too.

The participatory methodology was decisive, allowing all the social actors to give
their opinions on the contents and to contribute to improve the plan in the discussion
forums created especially for the plan and through the citizen participation structures
that already existed in the city. Naturally, the opinions received were analyzed by the
members of the working groups, following criteria of power, technical, and fi nancial
feasibility, which conditioned, in the end, their inclusion in or exclusion from the
plan.

Finally, the strategic plan was understood as a continuous process of refl ection
which did not end once the fi nal document was approved; it was considered
necessary to establish activities that would make it possible to update it by including
relevant information, produced aft er the document was fi nished, that was important
for making decisions and assigning resources according to the needs of the strategic
lines (Bonnefoy and Armĳ o, 2005, p. 66).

3.4. The Plan’s contents and its internal coherence

As mentioned earlier, the strategic plan set the foundations for city development
by defi ning a set of collective objectives that were to guide the actions of the
public and private actors who make up the city. To this end, six work groups were
created, organized along six dimensions (economic, social, transport and mobility,
urbanism and town and country planning, culture and sports, and environmental
sustainability). This procedure was very useful for gathering information and
distributing tasks, but during the planning process they turned into closed boxes
that made it hard to integrate the contents of the plan. This made it necessary for the
director of the technical team to undertake the integration of the contributions of each
dimension and give them coherence. In eff ect, one of the risks of strategic planning
in cities which should be avoided is incoherence among the objectives, actions, and
expected results due to this lack of articulation of their contents. In order to avoid this,
the strategic lines must be articulated and made coherent with the diff erent objectives
defi ned within the work groups. These strategic lines were: to turn Móstoles into
a prosperous city, oriented toward the population’s wellbeing, socially cohesive,
connected, so that infrastructures and transport would favor development and
reduce the diff erences among neighborhoods, with talent, where culture and sports
would contribute to the population’s wellbeing and foment its quality of life, and
green, where economic development would not be incompatible with the best use of
environmental resources.

However, as the planning process continued, the technical team realized that one of
the central aspects for a city’s progress that is not taken into account in other strategic
plans is the political and institutional aspect. In fact, political-institutional factors
had, in the past, a limited infl uence when it came to launching local development
policies, but today these institutions are key actors for energizing their territories
through cooperation with other public and private actors by means of interactions
and relations that can be summarized in the concept of governance (Ruano, 2010a).

As a result of this refl ection, the technical team decided to include the dimension
of governance in order to strengthen the relations of public and private actors in
the territory, orienting their particular interests to the achievement of the common
interest. In order to defi ne this dimension, the concepts of leadership, legitimacy,
citizen participation, and institutional capacity were used. In eff ect, it was no use
having a set of strategic lines for developing the city if the City Hall did not have
suffi cient institutional capacity to implement the actions and achieve the objectives set
forth. At this time, the importance of having skills and resources to establish alliances
with other actors, of the characteristics of the administrative structure, and of the
competence of the City Hall staff , were acknowledged. Thus, the plan incorporated
institutional strengthening as a strategic line to guarantee a proper implementation.
This institutional strengthening included objectives such as reorganizing the
administrative structure in order to make it more effi cient, promoting the use of
and fomenting IT, improving the quality of public services and the training and
professional development of public employees. In addition, it was concluded that
citizen participation was a valuable instrument to strengthen democracy in the
municipality, but that it was necessary to manage the risk of citizens’ expectations
not corresponding to the objective results, which could seriously damage trust in the
City Hall.

4. Citizens’ central role

Once the advantages and risks of citizen participation in the planning process
were acknowledged, the fi rst option that the Offi ce of Coordination of the Plan
considered was to base the model of participation on the city’s already-existing
institutional resources, that is, on the traditional system of participation. Up to
this time, the participatory model of Móstoles was based on the activities that the
districts carried out as territorial subdivisions of the city (territorial participation)
and on the contributions of the municipal associations and organizations in diff erent
deliberative spaces according to their specifi c interests (sectorial participation). In
addition, a City Council Seat of Citizen Participation existed in the organic structure
of the City Hall, which was responsible for implementing the initiatives of the local
government resulting from the relations with civil society in the territorial and
sectorial deliberative spaces.

However, the city government felt that it was necessary to diff erentiate the
municipality’s habitual participatory activities from the other participatory activities
that the process of the strategic plan needed, while taking advantage of the structure
of the City Council Seat of Citizen Participation and its members’ experience. Thus,
one of the fi rst aspects taken into account was the reduction of costs of participation,
in terms of time and individual eff ort. The city government felt it was important to
reduce the barriers that tend to prevent some social segments from participating in
decision-making. Thus, the model of participation adopted combined individual
participation and the participation of associations. Similarly, it combined in-person

participation with electronic participation and, in order to involve the greatest
number of citizens, fl exible schedules were adopted for calling meetings and in-
person activities with short schedules, using facilities that the inhabitants could
access easily.

Thus, in order to involve citizens in the step of diagnosing the city, a telephone
survey was carried out to fi nd out inhabitants’ needs, gather their suggestions for
approaching the city’s main problems, and assess the functioning of public services.
A total of 810 people were interviewed over two months, a digital version of the
survey was included in the City Hall webpage, and an ‘idea bank’ was created so
that citizens could participate electronically, including proposals gathered by these
means in the set of proposals analyzed during the preparation of the plan. The results
of the telephone survey and the idea bank were used to prepare a report that the City
Hall published and that was presented to the mass media and civil organizations of
the city.

The information obtained by these means was complemented with a citizen
consultation, with participation points installed in diff erent parts of the city where
citizens could pick up and fi ll out the questionnaires that had been prepared
to identify the main problems of the city and possible solutions. Even though the
City Hall carried out a strong promotion campaign in the media and mailed the
questionnaire to all the homes in the municipality, only 506 complete questionnaires
were collected.

The incorporation of the city’s social organizations was achieved by creating
thematic forums on each of the plan’s dimensions. The Offi ce of Coordination of the
Plan felt that it was essential to promote the participation of the city’s organizations,
as they had been convoked to work on a strategic plan at the beginning of the decade
of 2000, but had never received information on the implementation and results
of this strategic plan due to the change in city government. Because of this, it was
understood that this negative precedent could discourage social organizations from
participating. In addition, the 2011 local elections were coming up on this occasion,
and the hope was to prevent the strategic plan from being perceived as an electoral
initiative of the city government. As Manuel Arenilla Sáez, director of the technical
team, commented:

‘It was necessary to strengthen the associative network’s trust in the local
government and consolidate the idea that participation was the only possible
way to promote a true transformation of the municipality. Trust was fundamental
to advance in the construction of collaborative models that would favor the
exchange of strategic resources among the actors involved in the planning
process and manage to extend them to other initiatives of the local government.
The leadership exercised by the mayor of the city was a key element. He made
the commitment to include the viable proposals of the civil organizations into the
Strategic Plan and to extend citizen participation to all the steps of the planning
process, including the monitoring and assessment phases.’

For each forum, two rounds of deliberation were carried out, with the intervention
of the university team. In the fi rst round (the diagnosis), the participants presented and
debated the problems of the municipality and their possible solutions. Thus, documents
were created in a consensual way, summarizing the proposals made and agreed upon
by the participants. The second round coincided with the step of preparing the plan
and made it possible to present a draft of the objectives and strategies containing the
model of the city to the representatives of the civil organizations. In the end, 93 city
groups participated in the forum.

The challenge of the participatory process consisted of taking advantage of
the endogenous potentials of the city using strategies that made it possible to
coordinate the key actors of the municipality (Arenilla Sáez and Llorente, 2012, p. 47).
Nevertheless, there are many risks that can result in participatory processes aff ecting
the legitimacy of the plan as a whole (Ruano, 2010b). One of these is if individual
citizens and civil organizations do not have the same chance to participate. Another is
if the most powerful or infl uential organizations monopolize the participatory process
in the name of the entire community. Yet another one refers to the lack of implication
of a suffi cient number of people in the participatory initiatives, reproducing the
elitism of traditional politics. It is a fact that citizens generally do not participate very
much in decision-making regarding public policy and that, when they do, it is in the
implementation phase, respecting the hierarchy of organizations in the territorial and
sectorial forums. Thus the importance given to transparency in all the steps of the
process, as the city government was aware that any failure in the development of the
plan or any participatory bias would have a high political and social cost.

The objective, therefore, was to include all the relevant economic and social
agents of the city in the process, seeking maximum plurality, as the defi nition of a
project for the future is only eff ective if all the public, private, and social actors are
mobilized (Borja, 1997, p. 18). Because of this, the participatory model adopted in
Móstoles included new initiatives such as consulting citizens and thematic forums,
but it also favored deliberation by means of stable organisms of participation that
already existed in the city. In addition, individual and association participation were
combined, as well as territorial and sectorial logics (García Vegas, 2012, p. 95).

5. The monitoring and assessment of the plan

Once the formulation of the plan was completed and aft er it had been approved
by the Municipal Council in January 2011, the next step was to stimulate its
implementation. Following the planned methodology, each area of government had
to take on, according to its powers, the corresponding strategic objectives, and to
develop a short-, middle-, and long-term program of actions. However, the citizens
expected something more than a plan on paper: in order for the strategic plan to be
a true tool for transforming the city, a monitoring and an assessment plan had to be
designed properly, with the participation of civil organizations and citizens.

The mayor had made a commitment to the urban actors to extend the participatory
process beyond the creation of the city model contained in the strategic plan. The

social agents themselves expected transparency and accountability to guide the
results of public action. Because of this, the assessment was understood to be an
exercise in political responsibility that intended to account for the achievement of
local government’s commitments to the citizens and social organizations. As such,
it was necessary to develop tools for carrying out the monitoring and assessment.
There were two alternatives: to create a specifi c system for the plan that included the
indicators of each of the objectives, or to create a comprehensive system for measuring
all municipal public action, including the strategic plan as well as the commitments
included in the government plan. The option chosen was this last one.

The system for monitoring and assessment needed to allow the continuous
supervision of the projects planned, the implementation of any adjustments necessary
(if deviations from the plans occurred), and the incorporation of new objectives and
actions. These measures were important for designing the measurement system
because, on one hand, when the strategic plan was fi nished, the economic crisis was
becoming acute in Spain and future scenarios were not optimistic. As Manuel Arenilla
Sáez, director of the technical team, acknowledged: ‘The will to promote a model of
city like the one presented in the Strategic Plan clashed in an untimely fashion with
the reality of a hostile economic environment where the government’s capacity to
maneuver was limited.’

On the other hand, for the local government, the implantation of the system of
monitoring and assessment was a tool that would allow them to continuously review
the strategic plan, as well as adapt its objectives and strategies to changes in the
environment, especially any changes that might aff ect the stability of the budget. But
this meant a new challenge. The implementation of tools for assessment in public
administration requires a transformation of the bureaucratic-technical culture.
Thus, José Enrique Díez, technician of the General Directorate of Modernization
and Quality, explains the following: ‘One of the main challenges was to involve the
entire municipal organization in the tool for strategic planning, for all the parts of
the organization to make it their own, understand it, and participate.’ Measuring the
results of public action in terms of effi cacy, effi ciency, and, mainly, eff ectiveness and
impact would become a central element in the decision processes and meant a change
in administrative culture.

The assessment system has a framework in which clear criteria are established,
criteria which make it possible to interpret reality and the changes observed aft er a
public intervention. This is the reason why the monitoring and assessment system
was created following the same logic that had been used to systematize the strategic
plan: it was constructed based on the dimensions selected in the work methodology,
so that each strategic line contained a series of strategic objectives upon which
concrete actions and intervention projects depended. Finally, indicators that made it
possible to measure the degree of change operated upon reality were assigned to each
of these projects. So the importance of a proper selection of indicators and of persons
responsible for carrying them out can be understood: a good list of indicators can

register the true extent of public action and foment the decision-making process, while
a bad selection of indicators can distort the knowledge of social reality and fail to
provide relevant information to public managers. In this regard, indicators of effi cacy
and effi ciency, economic indicators, indicators of time and quality, and, mainly,
indicators of impact that made it possible to assess the degree of transformation of
social reality were incorporated.

It is evident that the implementation phase of the plan as initially designed is
highly important because the means necessary to achieve the strategic objectives
must be specifi ed, despite the fact that, as José Enrique Díez says: ‘Determining the
fi nancial and human resources necessary in the implementation phase of the plan is
diffi cult because, in addition to the need to coordinate diff erent areas of government,
it is hard to quantify ahead of time the means necessary to achieve the objectives.’

The mayor of Móstoles himself insisted that part of these indicators of the
assessment system be obtained from citizen surveys. The objective was for the
inhabitants themselves to be able to assess the rendering of municipal public
services and express their degree of satisfaction with government action. In short,
the assessment system was conceived as a tool for accountability. So much so that
two assessment reports are prepared each year, with information on the degree to
which the plan and the government’s political commitments are fulfi lled, and they
are published on the City Hall webpage and sent to the civil associations. In addition,
citizen forums are organized at the end of the legislature, in which the political
offi cers of the diff erent areas of government present their achievements and failures,
as well as the indicators and the degree to which they have been fulfi lled. Individual
citizens, unions, business associations, NGOs, neighborhood associations, etc.
participate in these forums and they can propose changes and improvements. This
procedure refl ects the fact that the strategic plan is not only a technical instrument for
improving internal management, but has become an enormously valuable document
for assessing the political performance of government action.

6. Conclusions

The strategic plan of the city of Móstoles was imagined and implemented as a
valuable instrument for social change based on the active participation of the city’s
key actors, in order to respond to citizens’ demands and to the challenges of the next
decades. The strategic plan has made it possible to orient the eff ort of all the public,
private, and social agents of the city toward achieving collective objectives, thanks to
its inclusion of individual perspectives and interests in the agenda of public action.
The plan has been imagined as a learn-by-doing tool for organizing the City Hall
insofar as all the areas of government have internalized the plan’s philosophy and
have learned to work using a long-term road map for achieving strategic objectives.

In addition, the strategic plan has been a tool of government accountability,
as it includes the commitment to periodically present the results of the plan’s
implementation and the degree of fulfi lment of the indicators associated with the

objectives to the citizens and to key municipal actors. Accordingly, one of the original
aspects of the plan is the inclusion of a political-institutional dimension that includes
factors of governability of the city and the government’s institutional capacity to
carry out the planned tasks.

This accountability process is only possible due to the political commitment to a
transparent, participatory process in which citizens have access to all the information
generated at every step of the process, from formulation to assessment. The use of the
new technologies, the creation of strategic alliances with key actors in the city, and
the design of a proper internal and external communication strategy were essential
in this eff ort.

References:

1. Arenilla Sáez, M. (ed.), Ciudad, gobernanza y planifi cación estratégica, Madrid: Dykinson,
2012.

2. Arenilla Sáez, M. and Llorente, J., ‘Las ciudades de hoy y la planifi cación estratégica’, in
Arenilla Sáez, M. (ed.), Ciudad, gobernanza y planifi cación estratégica, Madrid: Dykinson,
2012.

3. Ayuntamiento de Móstoles, Plan estratégico de Móstoles. La ciudad que queremos,
Móstoles: Ayuntamiento de Móstoles, 2011.

4. Bonnefoy, J.C. and Armĳ o, M., ‘Indicadores de desempeño en el sector público’, 2005,
Serie Manuales de la CEPAL, no. 45, [Online] available at htt p://repositorio.cepal.org/
bitstream/handle/11362/5611/S05900_es.pdf; jsessionid=5B8FA2CFE94BC129BBE7323
38AA22D05?sequence=1, accessed on November 17, 2015.

5. Borja, J., ‘Las ciudades como actores políticos’, 1997, América Latina Hoy, vol. 15, pp.
15-19.

6. Fernández, J.M.G., Planifi cación estratégica de ciudades: nuevos instrumentos y procesos,
Barcelona: Editorial Reverté, 2006.

7. Francés, A., Estrategia para la empresa en América Latina, Caracas: Ediciones IESA, 2001.
8. García Vegas, R., ‘El proceso de planifi cación en las ciudades medianas’, in Arenilla

Sáez, M. (ed.), Ciudad, gobernanza y planifi cación estratégica, Madrid: Dykinson, 2012.
9. Instituto Nacional de Estadística (INE), Censos de población, 2015.
10. Prado, J.M.L. and García Sánchez, I.M., ‘La utilización de la planifi cación estratégica y

de los indicadores de gestión en el ámbito municipal: análisis empírico de los factores
que afectan a su implantación’, 2006, Revista Española de Financiación y Contabilidad, vol.
45, no. 130, pp. 645-672.

11. Ruano, J.M., ‘Acción pública y gobernanza: desafíos gerenciales y consecuencias
políticas de la coproducción de servicios públicos’, in Arenilla Sáez, M. (ed.), La
Administración pública entre dos siglos, Madrid: Instituto Nacional de Administración
Pública, 2010a, pp. 301-322.

12. Ruano, J.M., ‘Contra la participación: discurso y realidad de las experiencias de
participación ciudadana,’ 2010b, Política y Sociedad, vol. 47, no. 3, pp. 93-108.

13. Van den Meer, J., Braun, E. and Van den Berg, L., ‘Competitividad y cohesión
metropolitanas. La exigencia de capacidad de organización y redes estratégicas’, 1999,
Papeles de Economía Española, no. 80, pp. 248-265.