Citizens Participation in Polish Cities: Tools and Challenges

After the post-socialist transition Polish cities underwent broad process of modernization. The first years after the regime change were devoted to reordering the administrative structures and changing the way of management. The EU accession of Poland in 2004 changed the situation completely, as city governments got real tool in a form of European structure and investment funds, with which they could intensify numerous investments. This process was conducted without real participation of the society, as there were no well-developed tools to involve the inhabitants on one hand and no real interest among citizens in public affairs on the other. This started to change around 2010, as the pressure on local governments started to grow, and people did not want to stand aside the realization of the investments in e.g. infrastructure they were to use on a daily basis. This enforced gradual developing numerous ways of involving inhabitants in the decision-making process. The most popular forms of engagement in Poland became consultations, participatory budgeting, neighbourhood councils and other consultative bodies. This four tools will be a subject of this analysis. It will be discussed in which forms they are introduced and in which way are realized. Very quickly it appeared that this new way of making decisions and constructing local policies pose new challenges, as inhabitants can bring a lot of new ideas, but also can cause new conflicts and become an obstacle, when e.g. some groups do not agree with proposed solutions and intend to block them. The most important and difficult part of this process is to develop simple, repeatable, fair and sufficient mechanisms, which give citizens their voice, but enable to realize tasks with no delays and with no additional costs by the local politics and administration. In the paper it will be analyzed: what chances this new approach brings, what new problems appear and how they affect the local politics. The participatory models of governance enforce redefinition of local politics and its openness to dialog with inhabitants. In this term the communication is a key issue, but again developing effective channels is a complex and difficult challenge. In the Polish case local governments and politicians learn this intensively with generally fruitful effects – the results of which will be presented in this paper.