Abstract
The international literature offers a numberof motives which should incline local authoritiestoward strategic planning of local development;it also emphasizes that they should be stronglymotivated to do that. Meanwhile, their actualmotivation for such planning can remain low anddominated by motives so far unrecognized in theliterature. The article presents research confi rmingthis assumption, conducted in 2014 amongthe authorities of Polish small towns.The results reveal that the general motivationfor strategic planning of local developmentamong 37.7% of the authorities of Polish smalltowns is low. It also disclosed that the motivefor obtaining means from the EU funds (so farunrecognized in literature) was and is motivatingstrongly at least 68.6% of these authorities forthe discussed planning and, moreover, that it is ashort-lived motive. The article indicates that thissituation may also refer to other local authorities,not just the Polish ones. It also indicates that itis an unintended effect of the dependence ofmunicipal development projects’ support by themeans from the EU funds on including them inthe local development strategy. The fi nal part ofthe article presents recommendations of actionsto rectify such an unfavorable situation and forfurther studies of planning motives followed bylocal authorities.
Highlights
The concept of local development is frequently incorrectly or incompletely understood
The international literature offers a number of motives which should incline local authorities toward strategic planning of local development; it emphasizes that they should be strongly motivated to do that
The results reveal that the general motivation for strategic planning of local development among 37.7% of the authorities of Polish small towns is low
Summary
The concept of local development is frequently incorrectly or incompletely understood. In order to determine in which part of small town authorities’ the ‘for-EU-funds strategy situation’ occurred in the past, or is currently present, firstly the strategy content was searched for information (the fourth stage of content analysis) which explicitly stated that they were adopted primarily or exclusively to meet the prerequisites of calls for municipal applications to obtain means from EU funds (later referred to as evidentiary contents) Some authorities introduced such content into strategy in order to honestly inform what functions it performs, and to safeguard themselves against the allegations that it lacks the qualities necessary to carry out other functions. It turned out that it amounts to 87.4% (118 out of 135), which means the frequent occurrence of ‘out-of-date strategy situation’ after ‘for-EU-funds strategy situation’
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