Developing strategic planning system at the national level : opportunities and obstacles in the context of Croatia

The systematic strategic planning on the national level aims to ensure the quality and uniformity of the strategic planning documents and to guide the participants of the strategic planning process to focus on development priorities and results at the national level. At the same time, it establishes the accountability to citizens for how public resources are used, what results are achieved, and how effective these results are in bringing progress and development of a country. Strategic planning as a tool is seeking to enhance the capacities of ministries and other first level budget users to improve planning, monitoring and evaluation processes and to establish clear links between past, present and future initiatives and development results. Without effective planning, monitoring and evaluation, it would be impossible to judge if goals are achieved, whether progress and success can be claimed, and how future efforts might be improved. Strategic development planning at the national level is a process that leads the decisions on how to reallocate limited state resources in order to achieve the most important development goals. The purpose of this paper is to analyze actual situation on the strategic planning system in Croatia and to give insights about opportunities and obstacles in the introduction of the functional system for strategic planning on the national level in the context of Croatia.