SWOT-analysis as a basis for regional strategies - EUROlocal

above have been tackled at least to the extent that a programming document has been
written, equipped with a strategic analysis leading to the major developmental
guidelines for a definite period of time. But the key question remains: who is to act
according to these guidelines?
3.2 Confidence-building in an ostensibly utilitarian setting
Clearly, although the strategy - and the analysis as its integral part - is meant to be
everyone’s (i.e. the regional community’s) shared strategy, it hardly has the potential
to become anyone’s (i.e. the individual RAAs’ or RSG-members’) individual strategy,
due to the sheer lack of financial resources. The best that can be reached in the
divided responsibility setting is that the region’s strategy will provide the necessary
tools for the RAAs and the RSG-members to design their own strategies as regional
developers 1 accommodating both their own and their shared visions as set forth in the
programme. This function of the programming document can be called confidence
creation or confidence building.
Theoretically the major function of confidence building is to turn a non-co-operative
decision-making setting to a pro-co-operative one. The methodological individualism
underlying neo-classical economic thinking is generally in favour of non-co-operative
solutions, whereby it is assumed that each actor aims at maximising his or her own
utility. Any co-operation which does take place is seen to emerge as a “higher order of
individual utility maximisation”, which also explains the existence of organisations as
bundles of diverse interests. Actor networks, in turn, become created, as the actors
seek to widen the sphere of single decision-making system without increasing its
internal complexity through widening the own organisational structure. Even the
networks as expressions of one shared mission can thus be given an individualistic
interpretation.
Due to the prescriptions of methodological individualism, co-operation among
parallel actors, organisations or networks can easily be discarded as an exception
rather than a rule of human interaction. Refraining from co-operation emerges as the
prevailing model if an actor assesses that this line of action either maximises his or
her own utility or at least minimises the losses he or she otherwise would have to
suffer. At least this is how the utilitarian “each man for himself” teaching goes,
providing the individualist ideology with its necessary philosophical grounds. Its
weaknesses – given the fact that systems of co-operation can be found on every
imaginable scale of living organisms, and that they have already been transferred to
man-made systems such as community robots – are elegantly portrayed in game
theoretical forms in further elaboration of the famous prisoner’s dilemma model (cf.
e.g. Axelrod 1984; McKenna 1986).
3.3 From individualist utilitarianism towards more co-operative strategies
The individualistic explanation may be valid in situations in which actors meet with
each other sporadically, do not know each other, and have to make their decisions on
1 It is to be noted here that an organisation may have multiple roles, and that even though an enterprise must
concentrate on its core competencies and make the bulk of strategic decisions based on this fact, it also may be
highly profitable for it to engage in activities that affect the development of its immediate operation environment
and thus aim at (pro-)active stakeholdership in issues related to development of its surrounding region.
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