SWOT-analysis as a basis for regional strategies - EUROlocal

employers of the region in question. The public actors may also include, for instance,
regional or district units of railway or other infrastructure administration with their
own national structures, which may be partly parallel, partly overlapping with those of
the regional development administration.
Owing to their economic importance, such organisations should be co-opted, at least
on the fringes of the RSGs. They may not find a clear role in the programming stage,
and their own operations may be so gigantic that the programme’s entire
implementation scheme would stand for a mere fraction of them. Yet this does not
mean that these organisations would not be interested in the information produced in
the programming phase. While their perspectives are inevitably different, particularly
for the “non-RSGs” the SWOT may constitute a window for looking at the way the
strategy makers – actors that they may well meet as stakeholders on fora dealing with
other issues than those explicitly labelled regional development processes – analyse
the terms of the region’s development, both its constraints and particular assets.
This knowledge can actually be very highly valued by actors such as the region’s key
employers and value-adding enterprises. However, in order to receive such an
acclaim, the programming document must provide its readers with a skilfully
processed and analytical review of the leading trends in the social development of the
enterprises’ immediate environment. This may also be something the enterprises
might well find worth taking part in as a part of their own intermediate/long-range
manpower and investment scenarios. This adds a new customer- or stakeholdercentred
perspective to the elements of a programme. In order to have such an external
relevance its analytical parts must be precise enough so that the entire programme
document actually is given a possibility to encompass the most elementary and even
foreseeable but emergent trends it professes to. Moreover, they have to be logical
enough to form a clear continuum – moving from the description of a region in
question, its past developments and socio-economic structure to its organisational and
institutional capacities - and facilitate the explication of the vision and a strategy with
due goals and measures that need to be taken. It could thus be maintained that the
SWOT analysis is a culmination point in the logical, or even narrative, structure of
the programming document.
This being said, it is possible to define a set of particular “domains” a programming
document may be supposed to consist of. They have particular temporal reference
points with regard to the programming process and follow each other chronologically.
The first stage refers to past development and is the descriptive assessment of the
region’s trends. The present stage of the document and the entire programming
process can best be read from the analysis, which should also link historically
accumulated strengths and weaknesses to opportunities and threats concerning future
developments. Finally, the visions and strategies as well as the goals and measures
portrayed in the document must be clearly based on the future. From the viewpoint of
the SWOT as the core of the analytical text, the descriptive part represents a backward
linkage, whereas the visions, strategies, goals and measures represent a forward
linkage. As this terminology indicates, the logical structure of the programming
document is treated here as a vertical dimension of which the analysis is a part.
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