Pride and Prejudice: Local Leaders’ Attitude Towards Place-Based Collaboration in the Warsaw Metropolitan Area

The goal of the paper is to identify and discuss the factors shaping the local leaders’ attitude towards collaboration in the Warsaw Metropolitan Area. The focus is on the relations within the political space (between the representatives of local government units, i.e. Warsaw and other communities, and between other communities themselves), as well as between organisations operating within the political space and organisations operating within the economic and cultural space (i.e. business support organisations, self-regulating trade associations and institutions of higher education). This article is based on research carried out within the framework of the social, economic and political diagnosis of the Warsaw Metropolitan Area, which is aimed at preparing WMA strategic plan. For the purposes of this article, in-depth interviews (IDI) were carried out with local authorities and officials of WMA municipalities, representatives of chosen business organisations, trade associations and representatives of institutions of higher educations located in the Warsaw Metropolitan Area (171 interviews). The qualitative analysis has been related to the concept of inter-organisational collective action and to the lost in collaboration processes. There also attempt have been made to outline the place-based collaboration notion. The elements, which affect to the largest degree the relations between WMA organisations, include: a widespread use of negative stereotypes (which replaces the reliable assessment of partners in the absence of greater experience in the scope of cooperation), large impact of external financing on the administrative and political cooperation (potentially resulting in lower durability of cooperation, and thus lower efficiency of expenditures and accuracy of projects), as well as lack of trust and mutual competition. Overcoming barriers of institutional cooperation seems to be a challenge necessary to create a metropolitan area management system and to develop a metropolitan area that would be potentially competitive to other metropolitan areas, both domestically and in Europe.