Waste Management: Strengthening Citizen Involvement
In 1996, Dukla, a small Polish agricultural community located near the border with Slovakia, received a 2 million zloty loan from the National Environment Protection Fund to begin a new recycling program. The City Hall set up a program that required households to start separating their garbage, and also levied a small fee to cover processing expenses for the recycled materials. The program required each household in the community to sign a contract agreeing to the new rules and the fee.
The waste sites were built, but local community officials put off sending out the contracts to households; they were skeptical that the new regulations would be well received by residents. So, in November 1999, two months before the contracts were due, Dukla City Hall sought the help of Partners-Poland to convey the purposes and benefits of the recycling program to local residents and encourage them to sign the contracts.
Partners-Poland suggested that general communications between Dukla authorities and the local population should be improved, and the recycling program could provide a good start to an improved dialogue. Partners-Poland’s plan was threefold: gather people’s concerns about the recycling program, establish methods through which the authorities could respond to these concerns, and develop a promotional strategy for the program. Some 400 Dukla residents were surveyed, after which the mayor wrote a letter to the community addressing the issues most commonly mentioned in survey responses. Local elected officials (soltys) either organized meetings in their villages or visited families individually to explain the benefits of the recycling program and the reasons for the fee. Involving the soltys, Partners-Poland believed, would demonstrate that the recycling program was not just City Hall’s idea, but a project that had support among citizens’ representatives. After these meetings Dukla residents overwhelmingly signed the contracts, which the soltys delivered back to City Hall. By February 2000, 60 percent of Dukla households had joined the recycling program.
Surprisingly, the biggest problem Partners-Poland confronted in Dukla was not convincing people to recycle, but persuading local authorities that involving citizens in decision-making would be beneficial for the project. In the beginning, local bureaucrats were skeptical and complained that such consensus-building required too much extra effort and time on their part: “It is easier just to tell people what they have to do,” one official said. However, in the end they saw that Partners-Poland’s strategy was effective and acknowledged the advantages of consultation with their constituency: “The meetings with people were very important and probably we should organize more of them. Now we know what people are afraid of. It helps to avoid misunderstandings.”
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