Factors of the absorption of innovations in local government

The aim of this paper is to reflect on formal regulations and institutional practice that support and hinder the absorption of innovations in the Polish local government. In the context of local politics, an innovation may be understood as new procedures, tools and practices that are proposed to amend or replace old procedures, tools and practices not only to deliver community services of higher standards, but also to make the decision-making process socially inclusive and reflexive. This relates us to the model of deliberative democracy that is used in the study while we operationalize the quality of public consultations. Although public consultations are hardly a novel mechanism of policy-making in Poland, it seems that deliberative public consultations are rarely observable. Four hypotheses are proposed: H1: There are overt and covert rules regarding public consultations that inform actions of public officials. H2: Even the overt rules miss the reflection on the issues of data collection methodology that has a prime importance to the quality of results. H3: The public consultations are functional to the power system, but a function that can be derived from their definition (collecting information from citizens regarding their needs and preferences) is marginalized. H4: The agenda of issues to be consulted is established in the process of political negotiations and the consultations are the mechanism that is supposed to safeguard the stability of the system. Undoubtedly, there is a considerable confusion regarding formal rules for public consultations in Poland. An institution of public consultations is just mentioned in “the Act of 8 March 1990 on the local self-government”, but, importantly, a local community is positioned there as a sovereign of a collective decision. Attempts to regulate consultations in the national law that followed (presidential initiatives inspired by some think-tanks) was strongly and successfully opposed by municipalities. An argument, that in many cities public consultations had been defined in the local acts of law, prevailed. The dispute over competences of national vs. local authorities did not contribute to the resolution of some practical problems e.g. that local governments are not eligible to use some methods of information selection and gathering from citizens as it is not regulated by the law. Two empirical projects conducted by the Centre for Deliberation IS, Warsaw University, will provide further data enabling hypotheses testing. The first, “Monitoring of the quality of public consultations” (2011), will offer some background survey information. It will demonstrate how officials conduct public consultations and what they miss in the procedure. The second, “New perspectives for dialogue: model of deliberation and IT tools for social inclusion in decision-making processes” (2014-2017), will facilitate the case-studies based, in-depth analysis of interacting factors that influence the local government practice. We have prepared an IT platform that supports the process of careful consultations planning along with deliberative standards. This intervention will allow observations of how the learning process is mediated by factors other than access to relevant tools.