1 PREPARATION OF STRATEGIC DEVELOPMENT PROGRAMMES: IS PARTICIPATION THE RIGHT WAY? Paper prepared for the 44 th Congress of the European Regional Science Association, Porto, Portugal 25 – 29 th August, 2004 Irena Đokić Jelena Šišinački Institute of Economics, Zagreb Kennedy Sq. 7, HR-10000 Zagreb, Croatia E-mail addresses: idokic@eizg.hr jsisinacki@eizg.hr Abstract If you want to run a successful regional policy you need to behave similar to the company manager: you need to have vision, mission, strategy and action plans. In Croatia, during the past 13 years, more than 100 official national and regional documents called "strategies", "programmes" or "plans" have been produced. Therefore, it would be reasonable to assume that Croatia has an extensive experience in the production of such documents. Nevertheless, in the last couple of years Croatia has and is still receiving international and financial assistance for the production of development projects. Why? Although many, too many strategic documents were produced, once when the supervisory body adopts such documents, they usually end up in somebody's draw and without any repercussion stay there. Through the international assistance a new, participative methodology in regional development planning was applied with three regional programmes as results. The first brought to you by CORE View metadata, citation and similar papers at core.ac.uk provided by Research Papers in Economics