Strategic Planning for Economic Development Under Pressures: Insights From French “Intercommunalities”

ABSTRACT

Strategic planning in public organizations has been extensively studied, yet research remains theoretically fragmented regarding how strategic planning processes vary across institutional contexts and how they connect to accountability mechanisms. This gap is particularly acute in regulated systems, that is, France, where strategic planning operates under a dynamic institutional context that differs markedly from the Anglo‐Saxon or Scandinavian contexts dominating the literature. This study examines how French intercommunalities formulate economic development strategies under institutional pressures and how strategic planning is articulated with accountability. Drawing on institutional theory as an analytical lens, we conducted a qualitative multiple case study of four French intercommunalities through 21 semi‐structured interviews and documentary analysis. Our findings point to three main insights. First, we identify hybrid strategic planning configurations that combine rational and collaborative approaches, revealing that hybridity is not uniform but varies along a continuum from formalized to participatory configurations. Second, our findings indicate that strategic planning functions as a dual accountability architecture combining two forms, namely, external public accountability and intraorganizational accountability. Third, the study demonstrates that institutional pressures, that is, coercive, normative, and mimetic, produce uniform effects on the structure of accountability architecture but differentiated effects on strategic planning configurations. We offer an integrative framework and respond to calls for examining strategic planning beyond dominant Anglo‐Saxon paradigms.