Security and Goal Setting in the Strategic Planning System

Abstract

The adoption in 2014 of the Federal law No. 172 “On strategic planning…” not only fully returned the concept of “planning” to the legal and institutional “field” of the system of state and municipal administration, but also outlined the need to establish long-term priorities and goals for such planning. It is also important that the law directly linked the goal setting of socio-economic strategy-making with ensuring the requirements of national and economic security of the country. Strategies and other security documents were developed before the adoption of Federal law No. 172. But only this legislative act has established security strategies as an integral element of strategic planning practices and confirmed their role as one of the key sources of goal setting for strategic planning documents. However, it appeared not possible to implement such setting in real management practice in complete and consistent way. Although formally Federal law No. 172 is saturated with a variety of references to security requirements, in reality it’s almost impossible to determine what national and economic security requirements are meant in each particular case and to what extent they are practically implemented in a particular strategic planning document. There is a situation, in which references to national security requirements have become an excessive and even burdensome attribute of strategic planning practice. The reasons for such a situation, however, cannot be attributed only to the miscalculations of Federal law No. 172 and current law enforcement practice. Rather we should talk about the obsolescence of Federal law No. 390 “On security” and, of course, the problematic content of the two current federal documents on security. These documents, although they are known as “strategies”, can hardly be considered as such type documents and even more, they can hardly be actually accepted as a source of goal setting for other strategic planning documents. Meanwhile, security components are not an encumbrance and not an alternative to the main documents of strategic planning. The article proves that it’s important to define more concrete security components and the mechanisms of their realization in such a way so that their role should be not less and not more than it’s really necessary for systematic goal setting in the framework of strategic planning. The purpose of this article is to identify the conditions under which security strategies would overcome their current formal status and could be actively integrated into the practice of strategic planning as one of the main sources of goal setting.