Suchergebnisse

The author presents three selected types of situations depicting the participation of persons with disabilities, their caregivers and supporting non-governmental organisations, in designing and monitoring the public policy towards disability in Poland. The first type of situations concerns supporting inclusive education. The second type concerns the support system for the caregivers of the persons with disabilities, while the last one refers to the alternative report prepared by NGOs, dealing with Poland's implementation of the U. N. Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities. In each of these cases, the author examines the reasons behind the decision to participate, the process, and the final results of participation. The results show that - although the NGOs of the persons with disabilities have the possibility to participate in the discussion on disability policy - their influence on that policy is insignificant and limited to exceptional situations.

Ireland's industrial relations have come into a new stage of relationship between the government and social partners after a period of effective social partnership functioning. One of the symptoms of this new approach is a mechanism based on the public service agreements. The Public Service Stability Agreement 2013-2018 - Lansdowne Road Agreement (LRA) can be an example of that kind of pacts. The main goal of this paper, therefore, is a presentation of the agreement including an analysis of its significant records and atmosphere around the pact. To achieve the goal the paper is structured as follows: the introduction includes a short description of social pacts as well as new public service agreements. The second part draws our attention to LRA's records. The third section discusses the attitude of different actors of industrial relations to Lansdowne Road Agreement. Finally, the conclusion is a short summary giving answers to the researched questions.

The political events that took place at the end of 2003 in Georgia, in 2004 in Ukraine and in 2005 in Kyrgyzstan are popularly called the Rose, Orange and Tulip Revolution or collectively: the Colour Revolutions in the post-Soviet space. At first glance the term "revolution" may seem appropriate. The Colour Revolutions have resulted in the regime change in all the three states. However, from a decade-long perspective one may notice that the revolutionary changes in the political systems of Georgia, Ukraine and Kyrgyzstan did not actually take place. The post-revolutionary reality: the Russian-Georgian war and criminal charges against the revolutionary Georgian President Micheil Saakashvili, the infamous ending to the political career of the revolutionary leader Victor Yushchenko just four year after the Orange Revolution and the spectacular collapse of the Victor Yanukovych regime, which led to a hybrid warfare with Russia, or Kyrgyzstan's permanent political instability following the revolutionary events of 2005 require yet another insight into what has happened in Tbilisi, Kiev, and Bishkek. Without an in-depth analysis of the events, it is impossible to understand the fundamental social and political dynamics of the ongoing and future changes in Eastern Europe, the Caucasus or Central Asia. The re-evaluation of the Colour Revolutions is not only of historical importance, though. It is also a universal lesson concerning the most important challenge that all the democratic social movements active in the authoritarian or post-authoritarian states have to face: how to manage large-scale civil disobedience protests of a disappointed society while the ruling governments do not follow democratic rules and the international community does not fully comprehend the significance of the ongoing changes.

The examination of public policy in Poland should refer to the terms, analytical categories as well as theories, which have already been postulated in this research field. The article aims to present an overview of the development of public policy theories in the long run. To begin with, the typological and stages approaches were presented. The theories of public policy were presented as two broader classes based on the differentiation into rational and interpretative paradigms. The application of the first one was examined in greater detail in the area of defining the choices of the ways to address public issues. The interpretative paradigm was presented mainly in connection with the argumentative approach as well as an attempt to combine the rational and interpretative approaches in the context of a rational discussion. The overview ends with the presentation of a few ways of organising the public policy research field through the research questions, the research areas, the theoretical-methodological framework as well as the archetypes of the public policy analysts' activity.

The first part of the article is dedicated to the classic approach to security in three areas: the security of the individual, the state and on the international stage. Then the author conducts an analysis of the interdisciplinary approach to security. He characterised the behavioural as well as sociological and economic theories. The author analyses the government policies pertaining to internal security in the last fifteen years. He explained the legal and constitutional rules of the government administration in Poland and then characterised the system of institutions responsible for security within the country involving a critical analysis of internal security policy, i.a. its effectiveness and efficiency. The author formulates the thesis which holds that within the last fifteen years the governments have failed to design an effective policy of internal security, so far. The postulated concepts and governmental proposals have been designed as temporary measures and under political pressure without much consideration for systemic solutions. The policy of internal security lacks the systemic approach deriving from the theory of organisation.

The aim of the paper is to provide an overview of the existing studies concerning the phenomenon of public trust in government. Low trust in government has been frequently defined as a key problem influencing the policy process in many countries. The economic crises reinforced the importance of trust and triggered public debates on the necessary reforms of the public sector. The paper examines the key theories and research conducted by social scientists with a particular emphasis on the role of trust in risk societies. The review of the existing literature concentrates on the drivers of trust, showing the importance of two interlinked logics: the logic of consequences (the performance approach) and the logic of appropriateness (the process approach). The first one explains trust as a result of outputs and outcomes of government policies and services. The logic of appropriateness claims that trust is built on values and identity and depends on the adoption by governments the rules of integrity, openness, responsiveness and transparency. Trust in government is also deeply rooted in a broader system of rules, norms and values known as the trust culture. The last part of the paper is an attempt to trace an impact of an economic crisis on public trust. Studies of public opinion do not fully confirm the opinions on low trust and a decline in trust in government and trust in public administration in times of crisis. Some studies reveal considerable fluctuations of public trust in selected countries. In other countries, the public evaluation of government and public administration is high and there are only slight modifications in citizens' perception of the government.

The dynamic growth in consumption causes an increasing quantity of industrial and communal waste. The waste is the reason for many problems in all countries of the world, and preventing its abundant generation, its rational exploitation and, as the last resort, safe disposal is one of the important challenges posed to contemporary cities. Managing the waste economy or the waste management policy is the area of the interests of the European Union, both in legal and economic aspects. The legal aspects encompass the protection of the natural environment whereas the economic ones address the economical usage of waste under the municipal economy. Poland, following the E.U. trends, is adapting its legislation to the E.U. legislation. Thus it puts more weight to the 'waste' policy implementing some solutions in the area of waste management drawing on the Swedish or German models, i.e. trying, to give an example, to transform a part of the waste thermally this way generating fuel for the production of central heating and electric energy. The article is aimed at the presentation of the current issues in the area of the waste management policy in Poland, above all, pertaining to the amendment to the regulations covered by the Law on the Maintenance of the Order and Cleanliness in Communities. The article also aims to address the issues pertaining to the so-called "in house" orders connected with the management of communal waste by municipal companies.

The subject of the article are some of the relationships and analogies between urban space shaping and public policy making in the broad sense, both on the city (here Warsaw as a case study) and general, nationwide scale. It seems reasonable to claim that the state of public space in the physical sense to a large extent depends on the dominating concept and the performance of public policy pursued at different levels. But, vice versa, as well, i.e. the latter is often the product or in some sense reflects the established patterns of attitudes towards public places available and generally attended to, e.g. in an urban environment.

The educational reform designed by Prawo i Sprawiedliwość (the Law and Justice political party) fits in a pattern of the previous Polish reforms, primarily due to the way they were introduced. The political rather than substantive factors determine their design, they are introduced too hastily, and the appointed experts are treated as an embellishment. This mode of operation is characteristic not only of Poland. The researchers cited in the text (J. Nelson, M. S. Archer, N. Luhmann) indicate its root causes and limited effectiveness. The state remains the most important player in shaping the educational system despite the attempts to reduce its influence on education under neo-liberal policies. However, the current analysis of its limited effectiveness should lay the foundations for a policy, which would take into account the need to reckon with the interests of other actors as well as to develop a long-term strategy.

The author analyses the design and imposition of the bank levy that came into effect on the 1st of February 2016 both from the economic and legal perspective. The author portrays its origin as well as the main solutions. The risks connected with their implementation involving the capacity to collect the tax are outlined. The author also presents the development of the design of taxation of the banking sector in Poland in the past dozen or more years. The author conducts a comparative analysis of the various tax designs that prove effective in many E.U. Member States. This allows to show the similarities and tell the differences between the various state-specific designs and the ones adopted in Poland. The paper is also concerned with the consequences that the bank levy might bring about in Poland. The author postulates that the analysis of its design flaws makes it possible to evade taxation. The author puts forward alternative concepts, which would make the provisions of the law more precise. The bank levy applicable in Poland has also been subject to an in-depth analysis in the context of tax avoidance.

Since the beginning of the political transition in Poland an unproductive discussion has been continued concerning the role of economic self-government in the system of local government. The current legal regulations do not provide business chambers with the status of public legal unions. They tend to be based on the facultative nature of the ties between entrepreneurs, which is the main cause of the weakness of the Polish economic self-government, or rather the economic quasi-self-government. The consequential structural and programmatic weakness of entrepreneurs' organisation seems to be the major obstacle in creating an effective system of local governance that could equalise the excessively asymmetric relations between the local government and the representation of entrepreneurs. It is beyond doubt that the lack of such structures in the area of public institutions is the main reason for marginalising them by the government and local authorities, which do not see the need to make any concessions for the diffused economic environment. Given this context, the most rational solution seems to be the creation of a common economic self-government, which will be incorporated into the system of public authorities.

In search of the starting points of the title concept one can focus on the EU law as a broadly viewed basis encompassing the accession of the states to the European Union, thus their membership. In this context the following important question may be asked, i.e. where we obtain the knowledge of the European Union. Referring to the juridical correlation in place, we would then say that the answer lies in the respective treaty of the primary law of the EU It goes without saying that this answer is not subject to doubt. However, the answer itself does not prove comprehensive when we differentiate the foundation of the European Union, then the formal membership, and its development affiliation. Generally speaking, the first two areas legitimise the above presented 'from where' in a different way from the way it is subject to legitimisation in the third area. The particle gains in importance as we still tend to (ultimately) explain the development of the European Union through the European legislation. One can apply this approach, yet one should also bear in mind that such action proves, above all, one-sided. The action primarily proves anti-developmental as it finds itself unable to shed light on the EU in the numerous aspects of its functioning. For the reasons given above, the main thesis of the paper is that, in the methodological ways of examining the thought, the European Union should be subject to examination through the EU as a community, i.e. the EU within the EU To help exemplify the reasoning, I applied the familiar inter, which is broadly applied in the methodologies of science. I ascribe the generation of new concepts to it, the ones that allow to examine the complex structures of the EU, and through the examination it is hoped to coin new postulates that concern the steering of the EU as a way of practice. Undoubtedly, the inter is reconstructed on grounds of the up-to-date knowledge of itself. Only then do we conceptualise it, and arising out of this conceptualisation, we would reconstruct the postulates aimed at the EU, yet not in the narrow-juridical categories as the EU law does not exhibit a separately differentiated theory.

The author argues that the clerical mobility - related to the career paths of civil servants - is closely connected not only to politics understood as the struggle for power (leading political science point of view) but also to public policy. Against this background, he analyzes the occupational mobility of public officials, taking into account the processes of public administration politicization and professionalization. I search for the interrelations between this phenomena, civil service systems (career and position based) and governance models (Weberian bureaucracy, new public management, governance / good governance). He defines the type of the influence of mobility on the civil servants' professionalism and state agility. For this purpose, the author also examines the typical advantages and disadvantages of clerical mobility as well as the influence the politicians exert on it.

The author analyses the factors that weaken the influence of the principles of meritocracy on the institutions and public policy. He indicates that a meritocratic approach to governance in the programming of public actions has become a resource for obtaining legitimacy of power in Poland to a limited extent. The advantages of meritocracy (the "efficiency" and "justice") have not been exploited on a significant scale. As a result, there is a significant illegitimacy of the democratic system, as well as the weakening of the society identification with the state. This phenomenon is characterized by low prestige of politicians and a poor voter turnout. The author draws attention to the fact that meritocratic management mechanisms of public institutions in Poland are significantly reduced due to numerous factors - the appropriation of the state by political parties, institutional nomadism of the elite, the rules of political capitalism, a soft state and the institutionalization of non-responsibility or activities of various interest groups and backstage actors of politics.