ZPP Newsletter
Warsaw, 5th June 2019
Entrepreneurs want a well-governed Poland
On 5th June 2019, a social campaign was launched under the title Well Governed Poland. This is yet another undertaking of the Union of Entrepreneurs and Employers, within which the demands are raised to improve the relations between officials and citizens and entrepreneurs as well as to increase the efficiency of administration.
The main difficulty experienced by many citizens and companies in relations with officials is inequality. From the very beginning, the administration looks down on its partners. The relations of administrative bodies with citizens are unequal in nature – officials have a certain amount of power. Restrictive formalism and the lack of openness to the participation of social bodies in both governing or legislating also leads to citizens losing confidence in state authorities. The problem intensifies when officials disregard the public opinion’s voice during legislative procedures or when implementing new regulations. And to what effect? Acts that need to be amended several times, there are gaps in regulations, decisions are inconsistent with court judgments. The citizen remains an ignored party and has no guarantee that the legal reality in which he operates will not change dramatically in the blink of an eye. Will there be a public holiday in two months’ time on Monday? Can the store one runs be open, because it handles courier shipments? These things may seem trivial and not affecting the majority of society in a significant way, however, the amassed sum of incorrect practices end up as enormous problems for the functioning of the Polish administration.
It is a well-known fact that everyone’s a critic. However, proposing one’s own solution to a problem is a bit more difficult. Nevertheless, this is the task undertaken by the Union of Entrepreneurs and Employers. The campaign Well Governed Poland will be a platform for discussion about positive administrative practices, a source of knowledge and information about efficient management of public goods, as well as the place for honest reflection on the state’s operations. The basis for the campaign is the concept of Good Governance which focuses on the authorities’ openness to the voice of the public. This means carrying out broad social consultations both at the stage of decisions planning how to solve a given problem as well as during the implementation of individual ideas. The basic goal of Good Governance is efficiency manifested in planning the effects of adopting a new law, striving for a compromise accepted by all interested parties, so as to satisfy their needs to the maximum extent and thus avoid the law being broken or the situation when it being exercised is avoided at all cost.
By means of a campaign conducted mainly through Twitter and the Polska Dobrze Rządzona (Well Governed Poland) website, the Union of Entrepreneurs and Employers wants to set a substantive discussion in motion concerning the state of Polish administration.
“We are entrepreneurs, so obviously we care about the state’s development and that of its economy. We will achieve more with cooperation with the administration than without it. Therefore, we want the legislative process to be transparent and diligent, and the officials to take our proposals and feedback into consideration. If the goal of legislation is to create good laws, then someone has to start taking seriously both the collection of our positions and the analyses thereof. This will allow us to build trust in the state, which is necessary if we want entrepreneurship in our country to develop dynamically. The potential of Polish economy has been blocked for years by the ruling class, who often adopt they want first, without taking the opinion of the social partners into account, and then still implement it the wrong way,” says Cezary Kaźmierczak, president of the Union of Entrepreneurs and Employers.
Bearing in mind the due diligence assessment of the activity of the state, examples of the Good Governance will be published as articles on the website of the campaign. Individual policies and solutions will be analysed in terms of their compliance with the campaign’s leitmotif. Moreover, absurd or surprising examples of law adopted by Polish parliamentarians will be collected in the section called Legislative Roulette.
