POLAND: Dangers of contract culture

The conference was organized by the best and most known Polish think-thank: the Institute of Public Affairs with cooperation with the Batory Foundation and Trust for Civil Society in Central and Eastern Europe. The conference gathered NGO activists, policy-makers and representatives of academic world from Poland, Great Britain, Hungary, Germany and Ukraine who discussed various developments of the third sector in their countries. Many issues were discussed, yet particularly interesting were the discussions on the consequences of the development of the contract culture in the third sector. As the presentations showed, regardless of the level of the development of civil society in a given country, in most European countries one can observe the process of decentralization of service delivery. This takes mainly form of government contracts offered to nonprofits to deliver services that were so far delivered by the government agencies. Such contracts for the realization of public tasks certainly offer nonprofits a good and reliable source of funding. Yet, it poses certain risks for their mission as well. Specialists in the nonprofit field of represented countries in harmony stressed that more and more organizations focus on such contracts so much that there are abandoning many activities that they were carrying out before to become quasi-government agencies. In this way, the third sector in losing many of its traditional characteristics. Especially in danger, according to the panelists, is the nonprofit function to sustain liberal democracy and serve as control of the government.