Rozwój lokalny. Nowe podejście regulacyjne

The main purpose of this dissertation is to show the great need for establishing a legal infrastructure for local development in Poland, which, by facilitating local growth, will increase Poland’s competiveness in the constantly changing political and economic environment of the globalized market. In the last two decades, Poland has gone through significant transformation of its political system and many material legal, social and economic reforms. Because of such changes, today Poland seems to be a democratic and decentralized country in which local communities are legally guaranteed a right to perform numerous public tasks in their own name and at their own risk. The reality is different, however. In Poland, there are still so many constraints on local development that sometimes it is surprising that any growth takes place. This situation needs to be changed immediately if Poland is to successfully compete on the global market. The first chapters of this work discuss the importance of local political units’ existence, which in the 21st century seem to be the basic, indispensable element of modern state organization. In particular, it shows how important it is for developing countries to establish effective mechanisms for local growth based on the concepts of networked governance and multilevel governance that presently seem to balance the economic and social costs of adaptation to constantly changing global economics. The above is a general overview of the background for dissertation with regard to local development in Poland. The work defines local development as the growth of (i) urban, urban-rural and rural communes together with the surrounding poviat (province), and (ii) a city which possesses the rights of a poviat and finally, (iii) the development of a local functional system. It also shows the differences between the concepts of local development and regional development. Next, it discusses the main legal barriers restricting local development in Poland and tries to identify the source of such barriers. In particular, it analyzes whether the existing barriers on local development come from the currently binding law, i.e., the legal construction of local councils and their tasks, restrictions on local development, etc. The analysis included in this paper will show that the barriers to local development result more from the application of statutory law and so-called everyday governance than from defects in the legal regulations themselves. Thus, this work also examines the implementation of different functional mechanisms which may be implemented at each level of public administration, i.e., local, regional and national, to change this situation. In general, the proposed mechanisms are based on the general concept of the new regulatory approach, defined in this paper as a perennial process of change, which leads to the implementation of a new manner of governance at different levels of public administration, in particular at the local level. This three-phase process started in Poland in 1990 when Poland became a democratic country and local communities were restored as independent legal entities. The first phase consisted of major legal system reforms and led to the creation of multilevel governance structures in Poland. This phase seems to have finished in 1999 when “voivodships” and “poviats” were created as independent legal entities and received certain public competencies. The second and third phases of this process have already started, but are not finished yet. The main purpose of these phases is to increase the level of competitiveness of local Polish communes (gmina) by encouraging the central government to transfer more public tasks to the local level so as to allow to local communities to schedule and manage their long-term growth according to their needs and capabilities in full cooperation with the members of each locality, i.e., its inhabitants, entrepreneurs, etc.