Vision and mission statements: what do governors of Indonesian provinces say

The statement of vision and mission becomes magic and sophisticated sentence. It contains general directions transformed into some strategic steps and policies for public organisations. There has been a collection of literature discussing the vision and mission statements and their implications for the direction of the higher education movement and the performance of business organisations. Meanwhile, for public organisations, such research is rarely found. This paper aims to fill this gap by analysing the vision and mission statements of governors in Indonesia. A dataset of 33 vision and 34 mission statements was analysed using a corpus-assisted discourse study (CADS). The results of the research showed that the vision and mission statements contain not only the direction of regional development but also populist words that aim to attract public attention. This has implications for confusion from development planning agencies to synchronise vision and mission statements into the direction of regional development contained in development planning documents both long and medium-term. Therefore, we suggest that agencies that run the elections to set standards, thus, the vision and mission statements remain in line with the direction of regional development.