A future-proof and distinctive Economic Perspective

The municipality of Zwolle is part of the Zwolle Region: a partnership of 22 municipalities across four provinces. The city is growing and the region's economic development is robust: the Zwolle Region has the objective of becoming the fourth economic region of the Netherlands. The city has always championed successful regional collaboration and aligned itself with the region's economic agenda, but has developed little of its own policy and profile in doing so. With the development of an Environmental Vision, the question increasingly arose of how the municipality of Zwolle wants to deploy itself within the region. Choices also needed to be made about how to allocate capacity and resources. Does the municipality go for a large number of themes and/or sectors where it can offer limited effort per theme? Or does the municipality focus on a smaller number of themes where it can make a bigger difference with stakeholders? An Economic Perspective had to be developed for this.

A clear Economic Perspective calls for policy choices and lines of action that connect both to the external environment (where is the world heading?) and to the unique DNA of city and region (what fits us?). To get a view of trends and uncertainties in the external environment, a group of employees from the municipality of Zwolle worked with Jester Strategy last year on developing future scenarios. The municipality had also drawn up three concept lines of action that served as inspiration and basis for the Economic Perspective to be developed. The scenarios developed were then used to test and enrich the lines of action. This produced a picture of which lines of action are robust and future-proof.

We also looked at a strategic focus: which scenarios seem most likely and challenging, and which lines of action best address those scenarios? On the basis of this picture, a preferred line of action was selected and sharpened, which served as the first draft for the Economic Perspective.

After consultation with various parties from the region (businesses, the Economic Board Zwolle Region, other municipalities and so on), the Economic Perspective was adopted unanimously by Zwolle city council in July 2021.