Adrian Lubowiecki-Vikuk

SGH Warsaw School of Economics | SGH · Department of Consumer Behaviour Research

VUCA concept

The project focuses on the issue of a local government influence on the development of tourism and sport for all in Poland. It is done on the basis of the chosen municipal, rural and mixed type communes of the Wielkopolska Province. The main theoretical objective of the project is to make an extensive analysis and assessment of the local government significance in the development of tourism and sport for all. Further-more, the research purpose of the study is to identify the factors that decide on the local government’s activity in the process of tourism and sport for all development in the region. The other, not less important, purpose of the project, in its practical dimension, is an attempt to work out the appropri-ate assessment method of the local government’s involvement observed in various commune types, on the basis of the collected empirical data. Moreover, the utilitarian purpose of the project is to make a typology of communes that would consider local governments contribution into recreational and tourist development of the region. In her study, the author aspires to find the answers to the questions whether the level of local government’s activity depends on the commune’s status and what kind of factors affect the local govern-ment’s involvement in tourism and sport for all development. Wielkopolska Province, which is the second biggest in Poland concerning its area and the number of com-munes and the third biggest concerning its population, was chosen to be the subject of the research. The spatial scope of the first part of the research covered all the communes from the Wielkopolska Province except the city of Poznań. Due to the big number of communes in the Province, it was necessary to divide them into homogenous typological groups with respect to their similar tourist and recreational development potential in the area of political and economic factors. Application of the Ward’s method of the anal-ysis of concentration, turned out to be the most useful one, for communes classification, on this stage of the research. For the second stage of the questionnaire survey, however, 49 communes, including 7 of the municipal type, 19 of the rural type and 23 of the mixed type, were drawn. Next, between August 2009 and June 2011 some representative surveys were carried out. The surveys included 49 interviews with the rep-resentatives of local authorities, 1656 questionnaires with the inhabitants of the examined communes and 208 surveys with the people representing sports and recreational business who, in majority, were leaders of non-governmental organizations and private entrepreneurs. The survey forms used for the research pur-poses were prepared by the author of the above thesis on her own. The time range of the theoretical part of the thesis includes the years 1990-2010 and empirical part includes the years 2005-2010. The basic method applied for the research described in this thesis was the induction method. On the basis of the professional literature review, the analysis of various documents containing secondary data and own research, the author tried to make some general conclusions concerning the role of local governments in the development of tourism and sport for all, and also determine the factors stimulating local government’s activity in the development of tourism and recreation. A few research methods commonly found in differ-ent disciplines of science were applied in the thesis and in particular such as: a diagnostic survey, taxonomic methods and a method of a table of signs. Moreover, for the comparative analysis purposes, some other commonly known social and economic indicators were used in the project as well as an attempt of creating own synthetic measures was taken.