PL
Kształtowanie społeczeństwa obywatelskiego dokonuje się w odpowiednich strukturach terytorialnych. Miejsce układów ponadlokalnych i ich funkcje decyduję o sprawności funkcjonowania państwa i stopniu partycypacji społeczeństwa w jego rozwoju. Zróżnicowanie poglądów na ponadlokalne podziały specjalne świadczy o politycznym charakterze zagadnienia i stopniu zaawansowania reformy administracji publicznej.
EN
This study is concerned with the physical planning aspects of the organization of a civic society, with particular attention paid to intermediate territorial structures. Democracy can be built in institutional and legislative, socio-economic and socio-cultural ways.Higher than local divisions translate decisions of the national government into the territorial system and provide a framework for creating structures of a new society. Here, culture plays a particular role, when it is seen in the context of European integration and the formation of contemporary national and regional awareness. The cultural identity should be used as a driving factor towards desired changes. The satisfaction of needs at a higher level involves the idea of common good, and the improvement of the standard of living depends on changes in the social mentality and awareness. The relative autonomy of higher than local structures creates a space for the free and independent realization of human abilities. Higher than local divisions must take into account both the reasons of state and the interests of the national government as well as the differentiation in predilections and strivings of territorial communities. Therefore, higher than local divisions must be an effect of negotiations between the power structures and the self-organizing society, conducted in the spirit of pluralism and decentralization. An effect of the negotiations should be a return to intermediate administrative structures (powiat) and large voivod- ships of regional scale, and they should be given an appropriate status. Territorial divisions are a political problem and they are strictly related to the way of excrcising power. In the light of discussion on the new territorial division of the country, the present situation can be described as a clash between "political centralism" and "regional realism".