Paper/Speech Details of Conference Program for the 26th NISPAcee Annual Conference Program Overview VI. Public Policy Analysis Development Author(s) Katarzyna Szmigiel-Rawska University of Warsaw Warszawa Poland Dabrowska Anna, Title Climate Change Strategies of Polish Regions – What has changed? File Paper files are available only for conference participants, please login first. Presenter Katarzyna Szmigiel-Rawska Abstract One of the main development trends in local government is "Europeanization" of regional policy (Ladrech 1994) understood as the impact of European Union on shaping and implementing policies at national and regional level. This phenomenon can be particularly evident in countries that are heavily "dependent" on EU funds (Swianiewicz 2011). Poland as the largest beneficiary of European Cohesion Policy among other Member States can be therefore a good example. Approximately 67 billion EUR was allocated in Poland, in 2007-2013; the allocation is over 86 billion EUR for the period 2014-2020. Almost 25% of cohesion policy funds (16.5 billion EUR) in the period 2007-2013 was operated by regional authorities, while during the period 2014-2020 this share has increased to 40% (31 billion EUR). As a result, Poland is not only the greatest beneficiary of the EU Cohesion Policy, but also one of the largest “laboratories for regional policy” in the world, having been involved in a continuous process of building a new model of inter- and intra-regional policy since 1999 (Żuber 2008). At the same time, policy measures aimed at counteracting climate change have been initiated and disseminated in interstate relations. The most important decision-making forum for this policy are the global leaders' meetings, commonly known as the Earth's Summits or the Climate Summits. They were held over 20 times between 1992 and 2015. Along with development of climate policy and the long-standing lack of widely accepted policy successes by 2015, public discourse began to raise the issue of implementing new instruments that would improve the quality of the undertaken activities. One of such instruments is an involvement of partners on regional and local level to national and Europe wide policy. In 2007, EU leaders adopted the 2020 climate package, in which three key objectives were appointed: (1) a 20% reduction of greenhouse gas emissions (compared to 1990 levels); (2) 20% share of renewable energy in total EU energy consumption; (3) a 20% incensement of energy efficiency. These are also the main goals of the Europe 2020 strategy for smart, sustainable and inclusive growth. The package is a set of binding rules to ensure that the EU reaches its climate and energy targets by 2020. To achieve this, the EU takes action in various areas, one of the main financial instruments for achieving these goals is cohesion policy. The investment priorities of the cohesion policy for 2014-2020 were shaped along with climate package goals. The main aim of this article is to answer the question, what are the changes in assumptions regarding the climate issues behind Polish regions’ development strategies? The research considers all sixteen regions in Poland. Using content analysis there is a comparison conducted between the documents prepared before (and for) the programming period 2007-2013 and 2014-2020. For this purpose QDA Miner and WORDStat software was used.
