New development: Implementing and evaluating government strategic plans—the Europe 2020 Strategy

ABSTRACT

This article examines the implementation of the Europe 2020 Strategy. The authors analysed the strategic and management plans of the European Commission’s directorates-general (DGs) to identify the main and dominant discourses in the documents. The supplementing or supplanting of the simple strategy framework of the early years by a political framework after 2014 can be seen as caused by an interaction between rational management evaluation on one hand and political values and will on the other.

IMPACT

This article is intended to be directly useful to government policy makers in relation to the evaluation of inclusive economic growth strategies. It demonstrates, in a European context, the way in which strategic management can contribute to effective government and public governance and how this interacts with political leadership.

KEYWORDS:

• Europe 2020 Strategy
• political will
• strategic management
• textometric analysis

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author(s).