Determinants of poor implementation of strategic planning in the public sector in Tanzania: The case of DAWASA and Ubungo Municipality

Abstract

Strategic planning has become an important management tool for public organizations in most countries including Tanzania. It is however, noted in the current public sector literature that this management tool has been poorly implemented in many developing countries. For instance, since the 1990s public organizations in Tanzania are required to implement strategic planning and by now the assumption is that most public organizations should have developed sufficient experience to effectively implement strategic planning. However, studies have demonstrated that most public organizations in Tanzania have poorly implemented strategic planning as their management tools. This study examines factors affecting the effective implementation of strategic planning in two selected public organizations in Tanzania, namely DAWASA and Ubungo municipality. This study is informed by institutional theory and by design it is a case study.  The study used both primary and secondary data to achieve its noble mission. The target population of the study comprised 414 employees from both DAWASA and Ubungo Municipality In addition; two sampling techniques were employed; purposive and simple sampling techniques to obtain a sample of 165 respondents. Quantitative data from questionnaires were analyzed using descriptive statistics with SPSS version 26, while qualitative data were analyzed through content analysis to identify pattern of issues that are of interest in relation to our research objective. Our findings noted that both DAWASA and Ubungo Municipality have been implementing strategic planning as part of their service delivery tool. It is further noted that, although these two public organizations claim that strategic planning plays a critical role in enhancing their organizational performance, but strategic planning is poorly implemented in these two public organizations. Our study has further noted that factors such as resource constraints, poor alignment of resources with planned activities, resistance to change and bureaucratic procedures have significantly affected the effective implementation of strategic planning at the two public organizations studied. The study concludes that strategic planning has been poorly implemented due to factors identified. The study recommends that public organization to address factors that hinders effective implementation of this reform aspect so as to improve public service delivery. In addition, future research should be expanded to include more public organizations across regions for comparative analysis so as to broaden our insights into sector-specific challenges and best practices in implementing strategic planning in public organizations.