Citizens’ budgets are quietly transforming Poland’s cities, towns and villages – and leading the way in Europe

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Notes from Poland is run by a small editorial team and is published by an independent, non-profit foundation that is funded through donations from our readers. We cannot do what we do without your support.

By Callum MacRae

Wisława Szymborska Park in Kraków opened just two years ago, but Cracovians have already come to know and love it as a precious area of public green space right at the heart of the city.

And it is Cracovians themselves who are responsible for the creation of the park, which was funded through a so-called “citizens’ budget”, under which residents can propose, discuss and vote on projects to be implemented using municipal funds.

Poland has become a global leader in this kind of participatory budgeting. Today, more than 50% of such schemes in Europe are found in Poland, where participatory budgeting is now mandated by law for every major city and has also been adopted voluntarily in many smaller municipalities.

The result has been the beginnings of a minor revolution in local governance, with the steady spread of citizens’ budgets quietly remaking villages, towns and cities.

The roots of citizens’ budgets in Poland

Poland’s experiment with participatory budgets began in 2009 with the Solecki Fund. While such schemes are most often conceived in the urban context, the Solecki Fund was targeted at small rural administrative units (in Polish: sołectwa), allowing them to request that a portion of the local budget be allocated to participatory budgeting.

The programme saw considerable success in its initial years (almost half of those eligible made use of the scheme in its first year), and continues to shape local governance in rural Poland, with around two thirds of the country’s almost 41,000 sołectwa today incorporating some form of participatory budgeting under the Solecki Fund.

With the precedent set at the rural level, participatory budgeting soon spread to urban government after Sopot introduced the first city-level citizens’ budget scheme in 2011.

“Slowly, more cities began implementing it as a form of civic celebration, as councillors in municipal and city councils demanded participatory budgets,” says Jarosław Kempa, an economist at the University of Gdańsk and a member of Sopot city council since the introduction of the original scheme in 2011.

From 2014 to 2019, the number of cities and towns running some form of participatory budget grew almost tenfold, from 35 to 320. When in 2019 citizens’ budgets became a statutory obligation for all cities with urban district (powiat) status, for most this was a matter of legal frameworks playing catch-up.

The schemes are even popular in towns where the legal requirement does not apply – in 2022, 43.5% of municipalities with a population greater than 5,000 implemented a citizens’ budget.

The impact of citizens’ budgets

Across the past 15 years, citizens’ budgets have become a powerful means for local democratic engagement in Poland.

“The initiative to establish a participatory budget in Sopot was an attempt by local government to offer pragmatic dialogue and engage the local community in the decision-making process,” says Artur Roland Kozłowski, a political theorist at WSB Merito University in Gdańsk. As the schemes spread after Sopot’s success, they became “a tool for genuine social activation and inclusion”.

Wisława Szymborska Park is a powerful symbol of the potential of these schemes to transform local economic decision-making.

Until 2019, when the proposal to build the park was submitted, the land on which it now sits was a (poorly kept) car park. The citizens’ budget gave residents of Kraków the opportunity – in a city plagued by some of the worst air quality levels in Europe – to consider how else they might like that land to be used.

Moreover, this symbolic power is only heightened by the presence of the former site of Dolne Młyny – once a popular hub for bars, restaurants and exhibition spaces located in a former tobacco factory – which sits across a street to the west of the park.

Despite concerted local opposition, the investors who owned the land on which Dolne Młyny sat evicted the tenants in 2020, with plans to build a luxury apartment and hotel complex that are yet to materialise.

Sitting amid the tranquil trees of the park and gazing across the road, the contrast can feel stark. On one side of the street, citizens have come together to turn a rundown car park into a thriving and much-needed public park.

On the other, the wishes of the local community were circumvented, and a well-loved cultural and entertainment space made way for (yet more) unaffordable housing.

Furthermore, Wisława Szymborska Park is just one of an ever-growing list of participatory budgeting success stories from across Poland: repairs to roads and pavements, new parks, more trees, cycle paths, sporting events and training sessions, public concerts, classes and workshops.

As a resident of Kraków, I frequently make use of citizens’ budget-funded parks, I train and race twice weekly with a citizens’ budget-funded running club, and I witness regular citizens’ budget-funded improvements to basic infrastructure in my local neighbourhood.

In 2024, 163 different projects were funded in Kraków, from an original list of 1,100 proposals, with a total of 46 million zł (€10.8 million) allocated for implementation.

Taken together, such amenities constitute the lived environment that forms the backdrop against which our lives unfold. Through the citizens’ budgets, residents of Poland are increasingly afforded the opportunity to shape this backdrop to better meet their needs and wants.

Poland is setting the example in Europe

Interest in participatory budgeting has not been confined only to Poland in recent years. But the extent to which these schemes have become a systematised part of local governance marks the country out from its EU neighbours and beyond.

“Probably nowhere else in the world has this idea permeated such a wide cross-section of different communities and types of administration,” explains Kamil Orzechowski, CEO of Mediapark, a company that develops digital platforms to support local governments in collecting citizens’ budget project submissions and conducting votes.

“The idea of participatory budgeting in Poland has gone far beyond the standard approach, from the micro to the macro scale, from small villages and municipalities with a few thousand inhabitants, to towns, cities, and even entire provinces.”

Orzechowski attributes some of this remarkable success to the idiosyncrasies of Poland’s local government structures, particularly a series of reforms in the 1990s which gave municipalities and cities broad powers over their own budgets.

“The participatory budget was therefore not an empty gesture: it gave citizens the opportunity to make real decisions about the distribution of real money,” he says.

But some of the credit must also go to those residents who participate in the schemes, often in impressive numbers.

“The example of Częstochowa, where 800 projects were in 2024 submitted in a town of approximately 200,000 inhabitants, is astonishing,” Orzechowski notes, adding that statistically, that means there was one idea for every 250 inhabitants.

There is still room for Poland’s citizens’ budgets to expand

Despite these successes, the Polish scheme is not without its limitations. Most obviously, when compared with some participatory budgeting in other countries, Poland’s citizens’ budgets cover a relatively limited amount of local government finance – generally under 2% of the total budget.

Polish law requires a minimum of only 0.5% of the total budget to be allocated, whereas in Brazil – whose Porto Alegre scheme is often credited as the beginning of the modern participatory budget movement – the figure is typically between 2 and 10%, and in some cases even higher.

Moreover, though the extent of their proliferation through Polish society has been impressive, there is still room for more growth. Putting aside larger powiat cities, far fewer of Poland’s smaller municipalities (gminy) currently implement citizens’ budgets.

“Participatory budgets have been implemented in approximately 13% of gminy, or around 320 out of 2,477,” Kozłowski explains. “The need to introduce mandatory participatory budgets in municipalities and cities without powiat status should be considered.”

Though these limitations are significant, the existing legal infrastructure creates a national framework for future reforms – so long as the political will exists to implement them. And, as Kozłowski points out, this will depend on who is in government at the national level.

“Increasing the size of participatory budgets requires a stable financial policy from the central government, which was not forthcoming under [former ruling party] Law and Justice (PiS),” he says, adding that their “focus on limiting local government funding served to undermine openness to increasing the size” of citizens’ budgets.

An optimistic vision of Poland’s economic future

As well as providing a clear institutional pathway to extending the policy, the success of existing citizens’ budgets illustrates why more ambitious schemes are worth fighting for.

In Kraków, as one passes the boarded-up development site of Dolne Młyny and enters the peaceful gardens of Wisława Szymborska Park, two different visions of how Poland’s economy might work in the coming decades are offered – one in which unaccountable investors call the shots, and one in which important funding decisions are made directly accountable to local citizens.

Poland is one of Europe’s fastest-growing economies, and the choices made now about how to manage its growth will have lasting effects. Success stories like Wisława Szymborska Park offer a glimpse of a future in which residents are increasingly empowered to influence how the dividends of that growth are to be distributed.

Notes from Poland is run by a small editorial team and published by an independent, non-profit foundation that is funded through donations from our readers. We cannot do what we do without your support.

Callum MacRae is a political philosopher, and a Marie Skłodowska-Curie POLONEZ BIS Fellow at Jagiellonian University’s Interdisciplinary Centre for Ethics. You can find out more about his research here.

Main image credit: Mach240390/Wikimedia Commons (under CC BY 4.0)