The Physical Development Act has been analysed after 4 years of its functioning and some serious defencies and weaknesses were identified:

• the governmental level of planning system is complicated and has not enough enforcement possibilities for implementation of strategic decisions. At the same time there is no effective procedures for coupling the system with bottom-up feedbacks.
• there are no rules defined enough of settling the possible controversies on the governmental programmes to be incorporated into the regional plans and programmes. Also at the local level, the respective issues are difficult to be introduced properly. The communes and the local communities in general, have many possibilities to avoid location of unwanted programmes and projects, eg. through prolonging the procedures of preparation of local plans, sustaining social and juidicial processess etc.
• the procedure of public participation is recognised very often as rather formal, legalistic. The place and time (of the day) of the display of the development plan are for many people rather inconvenient to attend – usually these are the official premises and hours. There is no public discussion foreseen in the Act (some innovative planners organise such events), effective procedures of settling disputes/objections are lacking and for rejected objections and protests the “higher”, public interests are usually pointed out as justification (for their rejection),
• both at the local and regional level the planning is not comprehensive - devided into the physical development and strategic plans,
• at the local level (which according to the Law is crucial for the planning system), the complex space is defragmented into a lot of very small, not co-ordinated planning units, subject of the development plans, whereas the comprehensive plans are prepared rather seldom and have rather superficial methodology and too general decision content (the provisions of them seem in many cases to avoid solving the strategic issues).

All these and some other failures of the Physical Development Act result in its general amendment being prepared and discussed at the Parliament.

The Polish contribution was prepared by
Jacek Lendzion MSc. (planning) and
Krzysztof Lokucijewski Ph.D (constitutional and administrative law)
“Environment & Development”, Gdansk
Tel. +48 58 556 11 93
E-mail: envidevelop@usa.net

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