In Wisława Szymborska Park: Reflections on 15 Years of Citizens’ Budgets in Poland
This is a guest post by Callum MacRae (Jagiellonian University, Krakow)
Tucked behind the public Voivodeship library, connecting Karmelicka street to the east with Dolnych Młynów to the west, lies Krakow’s Wisława Szymborska park. The park is new to Krakow, having opened just last year. But, sitting just a short walk from the historic old town, those who live in the city have already come to know and love it as a precious area of public greenspace. On warm days, the park’s carefully considered design is alive with people; playing, chatting, reading, passing time, watching the world go by.
But the park represents more than just an impressively successful example of green, public, urban design. It is a product of Krakow’s Citizens’ Budget scheme, having been approved in the 2019 round of funding, and as such it also represents the power and potential of Poland’s remarkable modern engagement with participatory budgeting in local government.
That engagement began in 2009, with the launch of the Solecki fund to promote community participation in spending decisions in small towns and villages, and it spread to larger towns and cities in 2011, when Sopot adopted the Citizens’ Budget scheme that became the blueprint for similar schemes across the country. By the end of the decade, participatory budgeting was mandated by law for every major Polish city and had become so widespread that today more than 50% of all European participatory budget schemes are found in Poland.
What is participatory budgeting?
Participatory budgeting is a simple and direct way of expanding democratic control. Whereas the specifics of budgetary decisions are usually left to local government officials, participatory budgeting aims to include the local community directly, allowing them to advance, discuss, and vote on different proposals for the use of local funds. The hope is that since citizens will be able to influence decisions about how funds are spent, they will be able to directly shape policy to better fit their needs and apply greater scrutiny to local governmental decisions.
Wisława Szymborska Park is a powerful symbol for the radical potential of this idea. Until 2019, when the proposal to build the park was submitted, the land on which the park now sits was host to a (poorly kept) car park. The Citizens’ Budget afforded Krakovians the opportunity to decide whether—in a city plagued by some of the worst air quality levels in Europe—they would rather have that land used for parking cars, or a public park. Now, where a few years ago a handful of cars sat in a dilapidated lot, flowers and trees grow, children play, friends meet, and the city breathes and lives a little lighter.
Challenges in the Polish scheme
If you walk west through the park, and cross Dolnych Młynów, you will find yourself confronted with a quite different scene, generated by a quite different procedure for economic decision-making. Tall boards close off a stretch of land that, until recently, was home to Dolne Młyny, a well-loved warren of bars, restaurants, venues, and exhibition spaces. Despite the impressive success of the area, and in the face of concerted local opposition, the investors who owned the land turfed the tenants out in 2020, with plans for a luxury apartment and hotel complex that are yet to bear fruit.
It’s worth pointing out that Poland’s flirtation with participatory budgeting over the last fifteen years has a series of significant limitations. Most obviously (and in stark contrast to Brazil’s Porto Alegre scheme that still serves as the paradigm example for theorists and policymakers) Poland’s Citizens’ Budgets cover an extremely limited amount of local government finance—generally under 2% of the total budget.
Additionally, Poland’s schemes adopt little of the infrastructure of existing schemes (such as Porto Alegre’s) for encouraging deeper and more inclusive public deliberation about different proposals, like popular assemblies that institutionalise a process of public debate over different budgetary proposals.
Moreover, many sociologists have found that participatory budget schemes work most effectively to empower local communities when they engage and are engaged by civil society institutions, such as labour unions and community associations. But that engagement thrives best in those deliberative institutional structures that are lacking in the Polish model. Without those civil society institutions acting as conduits for broad engagement, the schemes can lapse through low participation into the preserve of the privileged few with the spare time and effort to devote to them. (Though participation varies considerably, in some cities, including Kraków, it is worryingly low.)
Citizens’ Budgets and the Future
Despite these limitations, Poland’s current Citizens’ Budgets hold genuine potential for an improved scheme that avoids these issues. Poland is unique in Europe in having such schemes across the entire country, as opposed to a few isolated experiments, as well as in having a legal infrastructure that requires such schemes in major cities. Moreover, the schemes have proved surprisingly popular, quickly becoming an accepted part of the political consensus.
However, as well as providing infrastructural potential for more ambitious schemes, the existing Citizens’ Budgets also offer inspiring success stories, like Wisława Szymborska Park, that provide enticing hints of why more ambitious schemes are worth fighting for. Crossing Dolnych Młynów and passing from the boarded-up development site to the quiet groves and flower beds of the park beyond, one can peer into two different visions of how Poland’s economy might be made to work in the coming decades. On the one side, unaccountable investors make decisions over the heads of the local community, and thriving spaces of culture disappear to make way for yet more unaffordable luxury apartments. On the other, citizens come together to decide to transform ramshackle parking lots into beautifully designed and much-needed public greenspace.
Poland is one of Europe’s fastest-growing economies, and choices made now about the shape of that economy will have huge effects over the coming decades. Sitting in Wisława Szymborska Park, one can glimpse a tantalising hint of the sort of society Poland could become if it were to seize its unique opportunity to use policy tools like Citizens’ Budgets to allow its people a greater say over the ends to which that growth is put.
Callum MacRae is a POLONEZ BIS Marie Skłodowska-Curie Fellow at the Interdisciplinary Centre for Ethics at Jagiellonian University. His current research is on the nature of domination, its connection with freedom and equality, and the implications of these issues for questions of institutional design and economic justice. His work has appeared in journals such as Erkenntnis, The Journal of Value Inquiry, and the Critical Review of International Social and Political Philosophy.
