Civil oversight institutions are among the most prominent tools for enhancing transparency and accountability in contemporary societies, especially in environments facing complex political and economic challenges (Transparency International, 2023; UNDP, 2015). In the Palestinian context, the AMAN institution has emerged as one of the leading civil initiatives that seeks to establish concepts of integrity and combat corruption through independent oversight tools (AMAN Coalition, 2000).

This study addresses the experience of the AMAN institution as a civil oversight model in Palestinian society, aiming to analyze its strategic roles and its ability to influence public policies and enhance the culture of community accountability (ESCWA, 2021; World Bank, 2015).

The importance of this study stems from the need to understand the dynamics of oversight work in an environment characterized by institutional complexity, political pressures, and developmental challenges, where its results and recommendations can contribute to highlighting the importance of strategic alignment between the published strategic orientations and the actual activities, thus enhancing the principle of transparency and the seriousness of the published strategic discourse.

Through the review of the theoretical framework of the study, the researcher aims to deepen the theoretical concepts of the study variables and their dimensions by conducting a thorough review of previous studies and deriving the necessary cognitive implications to build a wide cognitive momentum to establish a solid ground for building analytical models and reaching scientific conclusions that help answer the study’s questions and achieve its objectives.

The researcher defined the dimensions by building a matrix showing the presence of strategic dimensions in previous studies. For this purpose, the appearance of each dimension was traced within the eight adopted studies, in order to extract the most frequently recurring dimensions and justify their employment in analyzing the published activities of the AMAN Coalition.

The AMAN Coalition was established in 2000 and is considered one of the leading Palestinian institutions specialized in combating corruption and promoting integrity in the management of public funds. In 2006, it joined Transparency International as an accredited branch, which enhanced its oversight position at both local and international levels. The institution has faced several challenges, including a lack of political will, stalled legislation, and ongoing occupation obstacles, yet it has demonstrated an active presence in Palestinian oversight performance.

The institution operates from a vision that believes in a corruption-free society, and its mission seeks to mobilize community efforts in favor of transparency and accountability, based on values such as justice, independence, and integrity. Its strategic objectives include establishing public oversight, holding officials accountable, building national partnerships, and developing reform tools. Among its achievements are the launch of the local integrity index, organizing a national accountability day, establishing an integrity school, granting oversight awards, and issuing critical reports on public budgets.

Given AMAN’s position and its vital role in protecting public funds and activating community oversight, studying it is an ethical response to addressing one of the most serious structural challenges facing the Palestinian people in their struggle for justice and institutional dignity.

From the above, we conclude that the AMAN Coalition represents a structural pillar in shaping Palestinian oversight awareness, embodying a vibrant community model that enhances the role of citizens in holding the executive authority accountable and establishes a culture of transparency and accountability as functional and societal values. In light of the complexities of the Palestinian environment and the reduction of official oversight paths, the existence of AMAN reflects a vital need to create a civil structure that monitors public funds and defends the right to knowledge and accountability.

Strategic orientation is defined as “the identification of the general direction in which the organization is moving, which expresses its future vision and guides its decisions towards achieving its long-term objectives by interacting with the external environment and efficiently employing internal resources” (Bani Hamad, 2022).

As Al-Ifad (2022) pointed out, strategic orientation is implicitly understood as a vital process through which the organization seeks to achieve its long-term goals by analyzing its internal and external environment, identifying strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and challenges, and then formulating and implementing appropriate strategies that enhance its ability to adapt and make effective decisions in a dynamic competitive environment. Stacpoole-Kenny (2021) confirmed that strategic orientation as a process defines the long-term direction of the institution and seeks to align resources with changing environments and stakeholder expectations, thereby enhancing its ability to achieve long-term goals in a context of multiple dynamic variables.

Thus, strategic orientation is closely linked to institutional alignment, as it enhances the organization’s ability to align its resources and vision with environmental requirements, reflecting on the quality of achievements. Among the most prominent of these benefits are listed in Table 2.

The researcher relied on the literature review to select four dimensions that recurred in most studies and were implicitly embodied in the activities of the AMAN Coalition, namely:

The researcher defines strategic orientation operationally as: the applied patterns and intellectual visions embodied by the Palestinian AMAN Coalition through its published activities, which reflect levels of leadership, innovation, environmental responsiveness, and beneficiary focus. The content of these activities is analyzed according to qualitative content methodology, as they represent the components of the independent variable in this study.

The literature on strategic management has witnessed a clear evolution in analyzing institutional orientations and their impact on operational performance. Analytical models in this field varied between quantitative studies that examine causal relationships and descriptive studies that aim to extrapolate institutional patterns within different organizational environments.

Through reviewing relevant previous studies, their contributions can be classified into four main axes: formulation of concepts, supporting the research problem, selecting the analytical model, and developing the applied index.

Al-Dala’in (2017) highlighted a positive relationship between the dimensions of strategic orientation and improved performance in the environment of airline companies, supporting the legitimacy of using orientations as a measurable functional structure. Both Al-Jarjari and Al-Abidi (2021) linked strategic orientation with the re-engineering of internal processes at Mosul University, providing practical evidence of the importance of orientation in developing operational systems.

The study by Badawi (2021) distinguished itself as it addressed the AMAN institution as a model, revealing a gap between strategic discourse and actual practice, which contributed to shaping the problem of the current study and justifying the necessity of developing measurement tools for alignment between theory and implementation. In a similar vein, the study by Taha (2020) showed that institutional leadership should be translated into executable policy tools, while Zidan (2023) analyzed institutional discourse in the context of policymaking, confirming that institutional impact is only achieved by linking orientations with executive activities.

International studies have presented advanced analytical models such as the Resource–Product–Market (RPM) model developed by Reed (2023), which is one of the conceptual engines behind building the index used in this study. This model measures the relationship between resources, products, and markets, and the researcher believes it provides a coherent functional representation of strategic alignment, supported by a composite index calculated mathematically using network theory.

The study by Zoughbi (2022) contributed to formalizing the principle of institutional alignment within civil organizations, providing overlapping indicators to measure it within quantitative frameworks and a critical methodology, while Anekwe et al. (2020) reviewed the conceptual dimensions of strategic orientation and demonstrated its measurability and employment in multiple models. The study by Ghamdi (2020) supports the idea of integrating digital innovation in civil institutions as an applied model for entrepreneurial orientation, enhancing the pivotal role of digital oversight in analyzing performance dimensions.

Thus, it can be said that previous studies formed a solid knowledge and methodological base that assisted the researcher in:

The alignment between declared strategic orientations and actual work achievements is one of the most important indicators that reflect the institution’s awareness of its strategic discourse and its commitment to transforming it into tangible procedural practices on the ground. This alignment is a fundamental pillar in building institutional trust, achieving sustainable performance, and enhancing competitiveness in changing work environments. Kotb (2024) indicated that institutions demonstrating harmony between their strategic orientations and executive activities achieve higher levels of efficiency and organizational flexibility.

This vision reflects authentic ethical values; for the harmony between word and action is one of the principles emphasized by the Holy Quran in the verse:

The text indicates that the contradiction between discourse and practice is not merely a functional defect but represents ethical condemnation that weakens the credibility of the actor, whether an individual or an institution.

Despite the wide rhetorical interest in strategic orientations among several Arab institutions, such as the Palestinian AMAN Coalition, which is credited for seriously announcing its objectives and areas of intervention through its official platforms, the actual relationship between those orientations and the published activities still requires a systematic analytical reading.

Continuing to neglect this type of analysis may deepen one of the most significant gaps in institutional commitment, especially in contexts that require digital transparency and integration between planning and implementation. Moreover, the scarcity of studies linking published orientations with execution practices weakens researchers’ ability to evaluate the credibility of institutional discourse, keeping it within the realm of theoretical claims. A study by FasterCapital (2024) showed that institutions that neglect aligning their strategic objectives with their actual activities face challenges in achieving institutional impact and suffer from performance and communication gaps.

From this standpoint, the current study seeks to examine the extent to which the declared strategic orientations of the AMAN Coalition reflect its actual published activities and analyze the nature of institutional commitment to these orientations as an entry point for understanding institutional transparency in the Palestinian and Arab digital context.

Thus, the problem can be crystallized into the following questions.

This study aims to achieve a set of scientific objectives stemming from its main and sub-questions, which are as follows:

This study does not rely on theoretical hypotheses, as it depends on the descriptive analytical methodology and the analysis of published content, making it an exploratory analytical study that aims to measure the alignment between strategic orientations and executive activities without testing causal or predictive relationships.

The study relies on the descriptive analytical methodology, as it is best suited for dismantling declared orientations and inferring the relationship between them and actual institutional activities. This methodology has been employed to analyze the content of official documents issued by the AMAN institution, allowing for the extraction of strategic orientation dimensions and estimating the extent of their coherence with operational applications in a civil oversight environment.

The study community consists of the official documents and publications issued by the AMAN institution, which is a Palestinian oversight entity concerned with promoting integrity and combating corruption. The institution issues periodic reports, organizes training and awareness programs, and participates in formulating public policies, providing a rich analytical database for measuring the alignment between institutional discourse and field activities.

The systematic content analysis tool was used to dismantle the relationship between the dimensions of strategic orientation and the published executive activities. A functional model was adopted, which the researcher believes contributes to measuring the degree of strategic alignment by constructing an analytical matrix that links each dimension to a set of related activities, and then quantitatively evaluates this relationship based on a standardized functional criterion.

The study relied on the Resource–Product–Market (RPM) model as the analytical basis for measuring strategic alignment. According to Reed (2023), this model is one of the most prominent models used to measure an institution’s coherence through a triad:

This model has been adapted in this study to be used as an evaluation matrix linking the declared strategic orientations in the institution’s documents to the officially published executed activities, to analyze the degree of interaction between institutional discourse and operational practice.

The SAI, referred to here as the Strategic Alignment Index, was employed as a quantitative mechanism to measure the degree of coherence of each activity with the associated strategic dimension. This index was constructed based on three interrelated functional components:

This index has been utilized in this study even though it is used internationally to refer to the Student Aid Index, which is applied by the U.S. Department of Education to assess students’ financial eligibility. The researcher concluded that this use does not conflict with the adaptation of the term in this study, given the difference in the subject matter and the method of utilization, with a substantial functional similarity present.

In the educational field, the SAI (student) index is used to calculate the gap between available resources (income and assets) and students’ financial needs, thus serving as a composite index that expresses the degree of coherence between actual capabilities and expected outputs (U.S. Department of Education, 2023).

When this logic is transferred to the institutional context, the SAI (strategic) index is used to measure the gap between the declared theoretical orientations of the institution (as a cognitive resource) and the executed activities (as a functional output), based on their targeted impact on society. This complex measurement pattern is considered an acceptable functional extension of the principle of strategic alignment, as addressed in contemporary institutional evaluation literature (Zoughbi, 2022; Reed, 2023).

The final index is calculated based on the average of the three values on a scale ranging from 0 to 1, where the degree of alignment is interpreted as in Table 3.

Innovation in the AMAN Coalition is reflected through the employment of digital tools for community oversight and support for investigative journalism as unconventional mechanisms aimed at enhancing integrity and transparency.

The average alignment index for the innovation dimension is:

Overall SAI = (0.81 + 0.82 + 0.71) ÷ 3 = 0.78.

Evaluation: High strategic alignment reflecting effective innovation in institutional orientation.

The detailed structural analysis shows that innovation is effectively represented in the use of digital tools for community oversight, support for unconventional patterns such as investigative journalism, and the use of interactive media. The strongest alignment (SAI = 0.82) is observed in the support for investigative journalists, while the interactive awareness content, despite being innovative in form, requires stronger impact evaluation mechanisms.

The orientation towards leadership is reflected in the AMAN Coalition’s commitment to presenting political position papers, influencing public policies, and advocating for structural amendments that reflect intellectual and institutional leadership in the oversight field.

The average alignment index for the leadership dimension is:

Overall SAI = (0.88 + 0.81 + 0.77) ÷ 3 = 0.82.

Evaluation: High strategic alignment.

Leadership is most strongly reflected in position papers that directly target legislative reform, while oversight statements, although bold, show somewhat lower impact due to variability in external responsiveness.

This dimension expresses the institution’s ability to effectively target community groups and engage them in building oversight and accountability activities through specialized training, participatory forums, and functional engagement tools that meet the needs of beneficiaries.

The average alignment index for the focus on beneficiaries dimension is:

Overall SAI = (0.85 + 0.80 + 0.71) ÷ 3 = 0.78.

Evaluation: High strategic alignment reflecting the institution’s ability to integrate beneficiaries into the oversight process.

This dimension embodies the institution’s ability to adapt to national and political variables by adjusting its institutional discourse and activities according to evolving contexts, which enhances performance flexibility and maintains coherence with the oversight and social environment.

The average alignment index for the environmental responsiveness dimension is:

Overall SAI = (0.83 + 0.79 + 0.75) ÷ 3 = 0.79.

Evaluation: High strategic alignment reflecting the institution’s ability to adapt and responsively engage.

The researcher faced several methodological and environmental challenges that required high procedural flexibility and accuracy in selecting analytical tools. The main limitations can be summarized as follows: