Poland: Devolution of the welfare system

The challenges of the welfare system of the post-communist countries is, I think, similar to the challenges of the welfare system in any other developed country nowadays, even in old democracies. Namely, the welfare system proved to be too costly and ineffective in the fight against social exclusion and other social problems. Public welfare programs turned out to be very costly due to the rising demand for its services. First, there have been more and more people entitled to social benefits whereas the proportion of people actually working (and contributing to finance the systems through their contribution) has been becoming smaller and smaller. Such situation resulted from the rise of unemployment, slower development growth, growing number of people studying for higher education, earlier retirement age or the phenomenon of ageing populations (increase in longevity with decrease in birth rate), to name but a few factors. The growing demand for public welfare resulted not only from the actually growing number of those in need. Since about 1950s, in western democracies, as more and more issues from being private were becoming public, the societies gradually made the government responsible for dealing with more and more issues, and more differentiated ones. Even more visible is the situation in post communist countries, such as Poland. People raised in the regime in which state controlled everything (for better or worse) and was then responsible for everything as well, have hard time understanding that now they should be more responsible for their lives. They still blame the state, the government for most social, and individual problems. Poland has also the highest unemployment rate in the European Union, amounting currently to 17 %. Centrally driven systems are costly as much finances going from up to bottom are taken by bureaucracy required by extensive operational regulations. Centrally driven systems proved also ineffective as they often misallocate resources due to the lack of knowledge on local needs and environments. Moreover, it appeared that the non-conditionality of support in the traditional welfare state philosophy, especially in the form of simple transfer of resources (financial help) tended to contribute to the development of a dependency syndrome or learnt helplessness. Funded in a national state, based on work stability, and long term forecasting, welfare state is losing its basis in times of globalization, localism, and work mobility. Also their, strict bureaucratic requirements, lack of knowledge of individualized needs and a standardized form of help, provided only to those who know where to seek for it, left the most unfortunate excluded from any help, and as a consequence, from the life of the whole society. The state then is enable to address the needs of the poorest and most marginalized. The welfare state is adapted for well-defined, social populations, usually also significant due to its numbers. It does not know how to cope with purely individual problems or condition. Its inflexible and irresponsive to individual needs It was also appropriate for homogenous societies and its standardized for of help does not fit in the growing diversity of populations nowadays. Also the excluded do not for one group, but are scattered due to various complex problems. The standardized, uniform form of services makes these services low-quality. Role of nonprofits in providing welfare services. In such a situation, many scholars and practitioners have stressed the importance of local, less formal, especially self-organized non-profits, that are able to provide welfare services more effectively. This can be so because local organizations know local environments, local needs and people who need the help and thus can adjust provided services to the existed locally needs. Nonprofits services can be then also less standardized and more responsive to individual needs. Nonprofits can be more effective because they are often created by people who wish to help themselves and close relatives and friends, so such people are likely to work engaged and even for free to attain the goals. In general nonprofits tend to attract people with ideas, ready to help others help themselves, often for no or very low wages, rather than cold, obeying, no creative civil servants or inhuman officials. Projects of local organizations have less legal constraints and thus are much more flexible than national policies. In this way they are quicker to react on new and unexpected problems and threads. Small organizations have quite simple organizational structure, therefore they waste less resources on bureaucracy. Governmental help often creates so called dependency or learnt helplessness syndrome. Unconditional governmental benefits tend to make people passive. Nonprofits, on the other hand, tend to help people in a more holistic way. They do not only satisfy basic physical needs (which the welfare state usually limit itself to), but also engage the excluded in some group activities that include them back into society. Nonprofits go often beyond providing citizens with social security. Associations have various aims and satisfy various citizens1 needs and interests. They also provide citizens with the sense of belonging to society, through face-to-face relations with social groups, wider than a family or even a circle of friends, often called private groups, they foster social capital, i.e. the features of social organization, such as trust, norms and networks. Such sense of belonging is very important in today’s societies, which as a whole, fail to provide anything more than purely abstract bonds of citizenship. Development of the third sector, i.e. development of non-governmental organizations, becomes more and more important also due to the fact that it can employ citizens. Allowing for potential crises of public service and the market production sectors, creating new posts in social services can be a way of combating unemployment, increasing economic growth, and thus decreasing the number of excluded due to unemployment. Civil society, NGOs also promotes voluntary work. It changes the traditional attitude to employment as an activity exclusively done for profit. It stresses the questions of self-realization, the possibility of making a difference. So even if the voluntary work is not compassion-directed, but an alternate way of gaining professional experience, it is still socially profitable, for it presents constructive, not passive reaction of an individual to unemployment. Polish recent developments. Politicians and decision makers in many countries have agreed with and put into practice this reasoning that nonprofit organizations should participate in the provision of the welfare services and contract to them some services, provided before solely by the government agencies. Poland was not an exception here. In May 2003, Polish president signed into law the Act on Public Benefit Activity and Volunteering, first comprehensive law regulating the functioning of the nonprofit sector in Poland with its relation to public administration. The law, among other things, encourages local governments to contract some of their tasks out to local nonprofit organizations. Such contracts are then growing, nonetheless it is too early to estimate the scale of such contracts. Dangers connected with devolution of welfare services to the third sector. In my opinion, however, such contracting of welfare services to nonprofit organizations might have and already have a lot of negative consequences for the functioning of the very nonprofit organizations and the whole society. The nonprofit sector might provide certain welfare service more effectively and efficiently than the government, but at the same time it might stop performing other functions that were characteristic to it. Carrying out government contracts they stop play a role of watch dog, critics of government. Delivering services contracted by government they limit the provision of services complementary or alternative to it. Focusing on delivery of governmental contracts, they have no time left to concentrate on supporting civic initiatives, And so on and so fort. In short, they lose independence and autonomy and become in a sense the extensions of government agencies. Such negative trends have been noticeable already in other countries where contracting welfare services to nonprofits has been in place for decades. Now Poland is following the path and many factors would suggest that negative consequences of contracting with government might be even more present than elsewhere. Polish organizations face deep financial struggles and thus they are more eager to accept government contracts. It is so because it develops in a society with a weak culture of philanthropy and volunteering, low number of grant-making foundations or private rich donors, in a society which still believes that this is the government that should take care of social problems. Also, the free nonprofit sector in the capitalistic and democratic context has had no tome to develop its strong identity it has existed only since 1989, since the collapse of communism. And it is neither big nor strong sector. Although there are in Poland 45 thousand associations and 7 thousand foundations, only around 1% of citizens work in the non profit organizations.