The COVID-19 pandemic was one of the greatest crisis faced by humanity. It had a significant negative impact that affected public health, the society, the economy, and the performance of public administration. Although national administrative system's response to COVID-19 pandemic was set up, the performance and the resilience of strategic management patterns at national and local level was also initiated. This paper focuses on identifying and evaluating the strategies and models adopted by Greek local government to build resilience during the COVID-19 crisis. The results of the research are based on an empirical survey conducted in 27 municipal authorities in Greece, which showed that despite the various government policy initiatives and funding provided during the last decade and the formal introduction of crisis management and resilience focused planning models, urban resilience is downgrading due to the continuation of important implementation and compliance gaps in strategic planning and performance measurement adoption from the municipal authorities and the lack of an effective model of multi-level coordination among policy’s stakeholders.
This paper evaluates the impact of strategic planning on the performance of municipal services in Greece in lieu of the recent policy reforms. Improvement in public performance management has been the core tenet in the Greek Local Government Reform, now spanning over two decades. The recent "Kallikratis'' reform program triggered significant structural reorganization across local government organizations in an attempt to address and resolve centralization and democratic deficit problems, but its impact on municipal services performance remained particularly limited Evidence confirmed marginal improvements in services efficiency and quality, but not substantial enough to inspire municipalities' economic sustainability and citizens' level of trust and satisfaction. Performance and governance deficits in municipal services provision, arising from the inherent restrictions of social capital in Greece, characterized by low rates of trust and collaboration, the Weberian characteristics of the hierarchal and centralized decision making in local government, the existence of multiple and overlapping levels and categories of audits and the failure to integrate innovative policy tools for better design and delivery of municipal services). These deficits reflected a lack of an effective national policy for the promotion of strategic management and performance measurement and the limited compliance of local government authorities with their tools and management models. Based on the combination qualitative and quantitative empirical data, this research thus, evaluates and analyzes the existence, perception, and impact of strategic management tools on municipal services performance, by focusing on 39 municipal authorities and 8 service sectors.
<p>The evaluation of the participation of private sector in Greek local government comprises a rather complex task, as it is directly linked to the special configuration parameters of the national model of local governance. Although such model of local governance has gone through significant reforms over the last 20 years, mainly in the promotion of democratization, decentralization of responsibilities and municipalities uniting, however, it remains largely monopolistic and distinctive for its limited efficiency. The monopolistic provision of municipal services still features in the Greek local government, despite its distinctive significant efficiency issues, and also the vast number of regulatory initiatives for the promotion of the alternative provision that have been introduced. Such promotion initiatives of the alternative provision of municipal services have already been promoted since the mid-80s, through actions such as scheduled contracts, inter-municipal co-operation, concessions and PPPs<a title="" href="file:///C:/Users/Mohamad%20Mostafa/Desktop/Knowledge%20E/In%20Press%20Conferences/EBEEC-2016/Source%20files/Source%20files/KNOWLEDGE%20E_1/EBEEC_2016_paper_95.doc#_ftn1">[1]</a>. However, these have eventually produced limited results, due to the regulatory complexity that characterized their operation, increased bureaucracy in respect of their supervision, limited administrative capacity of local partners and the inability of their integration to the wider development planning of local government.</p>
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