Participatory Budgeting in Poland – Missing Link in Urban Regeneration Process (original) (raw)
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Practical experiences in implementing participatory budgets on examples of selected cities in Poland
2020
The article presents the idea of the participatory budget and the course of its subsequent editions in selected cities in Poland – Lublin and Olkusz. Since 2018, participatory budgets have been based on the binding law. For several years now, participatory budgets have played an important role in urban development policy in Poland and have been a part of the public debate on local development with the involvement of residents. The article describes selected parts of the 2018 Act and analyses the development of budgets in Lublin and Olkusz.
Participatory Budget as a Tool Supporting the Development of Civil Society in Poland
The NISPAcee Journal of Public Administration and Policy, Vol. XIII, No. 1, Summer 2020, 2020
Although three decades have passed since the fall of communism in Poland, the observed level of social activity in the country is relatively low. Participatory budget emerged as an idea to increase the involvement of citizens in decision-making processes concerning their immediate surroundings. In addition to their inclusion in the activity of local government, this form of citizen participation is expected to have a positive impact on residents' involvement in activities for the benefit of the local community. The aim of this article is to indicate the conditions that influenced the implementation of the idea of the first participatory budget in Poland and emphasizing the importance of the civic budget in managing public administration through partial decentralization involving local communities in social dialogue for local investment initiatives, especially in large provincial cities in Poland. The following research question was adopted in the paper: has the introduction of a participatory budget in Poland increased social activity and has it been conducive to the development of civil society. In Poland, the initiative to create a civic budget met good political conditions in the relatively small city of Sopot, which had the resources to implement the project. After successful implementation, this initiative was relatively quickly adopted by other Polish local governments, which then on their own introduced social consultations called the civic budget. The study showed that the participatory budget indeed activates the local community around various projects. At the same time, the question of directly translating this activity into an increase in the number of organizations, associations and foundations remains debatable. The introduction of the participatory budget to administrative management practice in local-government units in Poland should be considered in terms of the soft power impact of administration on the shaping and development of civil society, which is still in the development stage in Poland.
Miscellanea Geographica
Participatory budgeting has become a vital tool in making urban spatial planning more community oriented. Examination of how participatory budgeting has evolved is a pertinent subject in theoretical research and in practical applications. Projects proposed by local communities improve the quality of life in cities and enhance benefits offered by public spaces. The main goal of the paper is to present an overview and examine projects that transform public space, which have been implemented in selected Polish cities, namely in Katowice, Łódź, and Poznań within the framework of participatory budgeting exercise. Our research has demonstrated that in many cases participatory budgeting has acted as a catalyst of a variety of local bottom-up initiatives addressing public space in researched cities. It is thanks to the engaged and creative people at the local level that new functions which improve the quality of life are developed in cities.
Participatory Budgeting as a Tool of Environmental Improvements in Polish Cities
Economic and Environmental Studies, 2017
The phenomenon of participatory budgeting in Polish cities shows growing awareness of citizens' role in local development. Participatory budgeting is a tool of partial empowerment of residents through local budgetary policy. A social energy released by initiatives and proposed projects allows for implementation of relevant activities that from the residents' perspective improve quality and comfort of urban life. Research problem around which the article is focused is a question to what extent an interest of inhabitants is related to projects and tasks of environmental character in their cities. The empirical part of the paper presents an analysis of participatory budgeting in Katowice, Łódź and Poznań and applies to projects reported in 2015 and realized in 2016. The aim of this article is to identify the activities of residents of the selected cities related to improvement of the quality of environment through participatory budgeting. The studies clearly show that despite the apparent differences between the cities, the participatory budgeting is an important area of creativity and innovation of the residents towards quality of urban environment.
Cities under Participatory Construction: Scale, Dynamics, and Constraints of Participatory Budgeting
2019
Participatory budgeting (PB) is a means for city residents to have direct input into how and where public funds should be spent to address community needs. This paper examines the practice of PB within the context of post-socialist cities. Specifically, it focuses on scale, dynamics, and constraints of PB in all Polish cities with province capital status. First, literature on PB was synthesized. Second, documentary research was mobilized to provide source material infused with empirically grounded insights to aid the understanding of the practice of PB within the chosen context. The findings show great diversity in the financial scale, organization, and outcomes of PB in Poland. Furthermore, the study reveals three constraints that may hamper further development of PB: (1) lack of a legal basis of PB in the Polish legal system; (2) inadequate transparency of the project pre-selection procedure, including a lack of defined objective evaluation criteria; and (3) too much influence of ...
Models of participatory budgeting - the case study of Polish city (A. Polko)
Journal of Economics and Management, Vol. 19/2015, 2015
Participatory budgeting as a tool of deliberative democracy is more and more popular in Polish cities. Literature review shows that there is no one the best procedure. Comparing with the typology of participatory budgeting based on European perspectives, the most of Polish cities has chosen model similar to ‘Porto Alegre adapted for Europe’. The weakest link of the Polish approach is to put too much efforts on the projects contest and much less on good-quality deliberation. The case study presented in the last part of the paper shows that each next edition of participatory budgeting contributes to raising awareness and better understanding of the urban development challenges and it should lead to changes the procedures from voting approach to participatory governance approach.
'A Polish Case Study: Participatory Budgeting in the City of Płock'
in: Yves Sintomer, Rudolf Traub-Merz, Junhua Zhang (dir.), Participatory Budgeting in Asia and Europe - Key Challenges of Deliberative Democracy, Palgrave Macmillan, Hong Kong, p. 198-209, 2013., 2013
This chapter focuses on a local case of participatory budgeting in the Polish city of Płock. 1 However, it is of more general interest for two main reasons. First, participatory experiences are rare in Poland. As a pioneer in this field, Płock is often cited as an example or model, not just nationally, but also in Central and Eastern Europe. Second, this case sheds new light on the changing relationship between the public, the private and the non--profit sectors, in a context of systemic transformations marked by neoliberal policies and the retreat of the state.
Architecture and Urban Planning
Urban regeneration has been an ongoing process in many cities for decades. It has experienced various changes in terms of the main driving force, with public engagement becoming more and more important. One of the ways for communities to get involved in urban transformation is through participation in urban planning. Local communities are considered as partners in urban design processes, and in many countries their role in planning and design is defined by industry regulations. Still, one question is important – is public participation a formal tool or does it have an influence on planning and how it impacts decision making. Along with community involvement in planning processes, participatory budgeting has been developed as a public participatory approach in recent years. This gives a chance for inhabitants to participate in the budgetary decision-making process. The aim of this study is to analyse whether participatory budgeting, which is mainly municipal-led urban activism, answe...
Models of Participatory Budgeting - the Case Study of Polish City
2015
IntroductionParticipatory budgeting emerged for the first time at the end of 1980s in the Brazilian city of Porto Alegre. Since then, both the principles and effects of this most famous example has been discussed many times (Sintomer, Herzberg, Rocke 2008; Baiocchi 2005; Avritzer 2006). During the last three decades the idea of participatory budgeting has spread to many places in the world. Therefore, there are more and more cities in Poland where participatory budgeting has been introduced. In 2013, more than 70 municipalities in Poland implemented this tool of democratic innovation (Kraszewski, Mojkowski 2014, p. 4).Both the growing popularity of participatory budgeting and at the same time a very large diversity of approaches used by local communities leads to many research questions: Is participatory budgeting only a fashionable tool used by local governments to create a favourable impression on citizens, or it is more and more significant tool for local governance? Does partici...
International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health, 2022
Participatory Budgeting (PB) is considered a human-centered method of public resource management and investment planning, which strongly reflects the needs of the inhabitants of the municipality. The aim of this article is to assess the structure of the inhabitants’ needs expressed in the PB procedures in Częstochowa, Poland and their relation to the social and demographic characteristics of the city districts. The standard methods of quantitative and qualitative analysis were used (Pearson correlation coefficient and content analysis of the municipal documents), based on the data about: (1) the projects implemented in Częstochowa PB in the years 2015–2019; (2) the age structures and population density in the districts; and (3) qualitative data on district development characteristics. Based on the authors’ typology of projects, it was found that the most popular tasks were related to the comfort and safety of mobility and recreational facilities used for spending free time in public spaces. A relatively lower level of activity of the citizens was found when expressing their needs in central, densely populated districts with a high share of people aged over 65, and a relatively higher level of activity was found in the districts with a high proportion of people aged 0–18 and with lower population density. In the densely populated central districts, relatively high interest in the development of green areas was observed, while in the less populated developing peripheral districts, the preferred infrastructure was related to mobility. These correlations can be logically explained by the conditions related to the development processes of individual districts. The authors conclude that PB can be an important mechanism in determining local needs for the development of public spaces; however, it rewards the needs of the most active social groups.