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Description
The project’s aim is to explain causes and analyse mechanisms separating self-government from the local community in order to answer the main question: how to activate and strengthen democratic culture and civic awareness, so that local communities can regain power in a sustainable way?
The main outputs are:
• diagnosis of local democracy in Poland demonstrating the most important mechanisms blocking and/or enhancing civic participation in local decision-making;
• development of a model solutions for increased civic engagement and elaboration of policy guidelines and recommendations for policy makers at local government level
• dissemination and up-scaling of policy guidelines and policy proposals civil society participatory mechanisms and social capital building on local level.
The main activities are:
• integration of existing diagnoses of decentralization and civic participation in the EU
• development of a genuine research methodology and strategy for building stakeholders’ engagement for increased civic participation and democratization of local elites
• diagnosis of democratic culture and civic awareness based on all documents available (reports, statements, audio recordings or protocols of council meetings, local press etc.).
• ethnographic research conducted by a team, deliberately assembled to observe, lead individual and group interviews as well as gather materials in selected local communities
• individual interviews with actors important from the socioeconomic point of view
• two surveys involving representative population samples from the selected regions.