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This article seeks to provide a conceptual framework and a methodological apparatus for investigating conflicts between central and local governments. Our work is inspired by contemporary recentralization processes seen in Europe, which are motivated both pragmatically (to counteract the financial crisis) and ideologically (the "illiberal turn"). These phenomena refer to the broader concept of conflict of interest, which is at the core of democratic systems. We see the limiting the autonomy of substatal actors as a sign of democratic crisis. Although our study draws upon empirical phenomena observed in Poland, its ambition is to provide a universal framework to analyze central-local relations. By combining the theoretical distinction between different dimensions of the political universum, with the easy-to-operationalize variables that make up the Local Autonomy Index our paper proposes two typologies to capture, respectively, centralistic actions, and local governments' reactions. These typologies can be used to map the patterns of central-local relations in particular countries, and facilitate comparative studies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

City-regions in Central Eastern Europe are still underrepresented in academic debate on metropolitan planning and governance. However, they may provide a valuable insight into the early stages of creating planning partnerships that struggle to cope with problems arising from uncoordinated spatial development in the period of post-socialist transformation, which was not addressed adequately by formal planning systems and regular territorial-administrative units. The paper presents a comparative analysis of six city-regions in Central Eastern Europe based on a review of strategic and planning documents, and direct interviews with representatives of key stakeholders in each area. The main findings of the paper include the significant but underestimated role of the second-tier local governments in metropolitan institutional setups and the crucial position of emerging coalitions of academics, metropolitan-oriented officials and planners for establishing a sustainable planning agenda in the city-region. City-regions in CEE do not follow the categorization of soft spaces of planning that is derived from other territorial contexts. This is because the spatial planning efforts within city-regional soft spaces in CEE are more sustainability-driven than growth-oriented. Yet, more ambitious spatial visions may be overshadowed by a strong focus of local elected politicians on infrastructure projects. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The post-socialist countries of Central and Eastern Europe (CEE) have been largely sidelined during the mainstream international debate on city-regional (or metropolitan) planning and governance. As the formal institutionalization of city-regions in CEE is relatively weak, the voluntary bottom-up approach to city-regional visioning is the only alternative. Through the empirical analysis of the experience of the Poznań city-region in Poland, based on face-to-face interviews with policymakers and a study of planning documents, the paper discovers the political relations of power behind the consensus-based strategic visioning and limitations of a voluntary approach when confronted with long-lasting local development policies embedded within the formal planning system. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article presents a model of functional-spatial structure in the strategy of supra-local development, which is an attempt to translate the assumptions of the new planning paradigm, referred to in the world literature as strategic spatial planning, into Polish ground. In this regard, the new legal regulations set forth in the Act of July 15, 2020 on amending the Act on the principles of development policy and certain other acts were used, which, due to their high generality, allowed the authors' approach to their interpretation and implementation. The paper presents the various dimensions of integration of strategic and spatial planning undertaken in the Polish legal system over the years up to the present day. In addition, the role of supra-local development strategies in integrated development planning in Poland is defined, and different types of functional areas are described, which are the starting point for differentiating the scope of the functional-spatial structure model. Then the description of the most important elements of the model was deepened, and other elements of the spatial dimension in the new supra-local development strategies were presented. The added value of integrating the spheres of strategic and spatial planning was pointed out, which is important for improving their effectiveness and efficiency, as well as for increasing public acceptance of the measures taken. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The aim of the article is to evaluate the outcomes of the post-1990 health-care system reforms in Poland in the context of New Public Management and post-New Public Management ideas. The most important arguments put forward in the public debate, both in favour and against the agencification, marketization and privatization of health services, are presented and discussed. They are confronted with quantitative data on the health situation in Poland. In the final sections, the programme of the recentralization and de-marketization of the hospital sector, proposed by the new government formed by the Law and Justice Party (in office since 2015), is analysed against the theoretical background of the post-New Public Management concept. Points for practitioners The transformation of the health-care system in Poland took place in 1999, almost 10 years after the democratic breakthrough of 1989, as a part of the second wave of territorial-administrative reforms. Commercialization and partial privatization of public hospitals following the New Public Management model of public sector reform has been much discussed in Poland for the last decade. Yet, this process, which is politically and socially very controversial, has proceeded at a moderate pace. The recent government's proposals for the de-agencification and de-marketization of health care may be interpreted as a post-New Public Management reform aimed at achieving higher standards of coordination within the system but also as another step towards the consolidation of political power for the ruling party. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article deals with questions of metropolitan citizenship and political orientations in Polish city regions. The study is based on three case studies of the Gdańsk, Wrocław, and Poznań metropolitan areas. The description of their institutional arrangements and socioeconomic conditions is followed by an analysis of empirical data sets deriving from face-to-face surveys conducted with the inhabitants of core cities and suburban zones. The results are confronted with three main hypotheses regarding fragmentation and structure of the city-region, differences between citizens of core city and suburban areas, and individual-level variables (age, education, and so on). The main finding of the study is that city-regionalism understood as mobility, interest in supralocal public affairs, and autoidentification is relatively well developed in Polish regions, while public support for politico-administrative city-regionalism based on institutional solutions is less common. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The political and socio-economic transition in Poland brought many spatial problems, including dynamic processes of suburbanization around the bigger cities, which require metropolitan-wide approach. But the national metropolitan reform process is still in an initial stage, and the only form of integrated governance in urban areas is provided by some bottom-up initiatives based on the cooperation of local governments. While the experience of ‘top-down’ approach to metropolitan region building in Poland is too short and incomplete in context of its impact on territorial polarization at the national level, the ‘bottom-up’ initiatives of local governments for metropolitan integration are key instruments to more balanced development and territorial cohesion within the metropolitan areas. In terms of metropolitan integration, the case study – Poznań Metropolis – is one of the most interesting examples for an evolutionary way from informal to legally binding institutional arrangements of urban–suburban cooperation. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]