Scenarios for the Development of Polish Social Policy over the Next Decades

The pur­pose of the paper is to present sce­nar­ios for the devel­op­ment of Pol­ish social pol­icy over the next decades. We are con­sid­er­ing three such sce­nar­ios. The first one fore­sees the con­tin­u­a­tion of the con­cen­tra­tion of social pol­icy on its adap­ta­tion to cur­rent chal­lenges spe­cific to Poland. The sec­ond sce­nario assumes a grad­ual change of pri­or­i­ties for exter­nal chal­lenges related to glob­al­iza­tion processes, changes in the struc­ture of devel­oped coun­tries’ economies, as well as tech­no­log­i­cal progress and the con­struc­tion of a knowledge-based econ­omy. The final sce­nario is an attempt to answer the ques­tion of what the shape of the wel­fare state will be depend­ing on dif­fer­ent ways of respond­ing to the chal­lenges that will be ahead of it and on the goals that can be achieved at that time. The sce­nar­ios pre­sented by us are not of a prog­nos­tic nature, they are rather sub­jec­tive reflec­tions on prob­a­ble devel­op­ment trends in the area of social policy.