Abstract
This case is about governance practices destroying social trust and about the lack of social trust destroying governance. It illustrates how public officials were unable to question the methods and goals of the planning process and eventually withdrew from problem-solving action, leaving the problem of anti-flood security unsolved.
What happened there was the worst possible scenario. In the face of resistance, they just dropped the issue of barriers. The area is at risk… we have not drawn any lessons from those events.
A national agency representative, interview, October 2013
Most of the data used for an analysis of this case were gathered by Robert Rządca (including fieldwork and collecting of archival documents).
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- 1.
The highest level of local government in Poland. The levels from lowest to highest are: municipality-province-region.
- 2.
The Central Village, where barriers were planned is located in the central municipality. The Mayor of the latter supported the project. Little Village is located in southern municipality. The Mayor of the latter opposed the project.
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Strumińska-Kutra, M. (2018). Governance Failure and Social Trust: Dispute over Building a Flood Prevention System. In: Democratizing Public Management. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-74591-6_7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-74591-6_7
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