Civil society in action

Abstract

The paper tries to sum up a few years' experiments concerning the participation of local communities in the programs of local development strategy creation. The conclusions and notices are made by the author although they have been drawn on the basis of papers and discussions carried out with a lot of people. Their inspiring output made the author formulate some generalization.
The base of the paper is the author’s direct participation in working out local development strategies or a dozen or so communities in the Kujawy and Pomerania Districts, and particularly in Piotrków Kujawski (1996-1997), Mrocza (1998 and 2000), Czersk (1998-2000), Dobrcz (1999), Białe Błota (1999-2000) and Koronowo (2000). One of their key methodological assumptions was organizing and supporting active participation of local communities in the process of building the development strategy. The public opinion poll was carried out on larger and smaller groups of people in all the communities. The author was personally engaged in the polls and their analyses, and in at least a few programs he was also both an expert and animator ("facitator”) of the events and activities in a local community. Therefore, basing on practice and experience, the author points to the need of reflection on the usefulness of social science - its engagement and objectivity, and, on the other side, he shows an ambiguous role of an expert, e.g. in the process of formulating the mission of development and strategic aims by local communities. The paper is also based on more and more numerous specialist literature and on derivative reflection on realizing the idea of the local development strategy.