Urszula Zawadzka-Pąk

This contribution deals with fiscal sustainability understood as “avoiding an excessive increase in government liabilities – a burden on future generations – while ensuring that the government can deliver the necessary public services, including the necessary safety net in times of hardship, and to adjust policy in response to new challenges”. The article aims the analysis of the legal framework for fiscal rules at the level of the EU and the national level in France and Poland. The research problem is to answer the question of how and whether the French and Polish regulations meet the international regulations in the field of fiscal sustainability. According to the research hypothesis, both countries only partially meet the EU requirements. The article is based on the detailed desk research method requiring analysis of the literature, statistical data, and EU and national legal regulations. The general conclusion is that both countries do not fully comply with EU commitments regarding fiscal rules. 

The purpose of this article is to conduct an axiological and legal analysis of the most popular model of participatory budgeting in Poland (the plebiscite model), being a special form of public consultation that allows the residents to decide each year on a part of the commune’s budget expenditure by direct voting. According to the paper’s hypothesis, both the PB legal rules as well as the practice of its application in Poland are not axiologically neutral, which means that they have a positive or negative impact on certain public values, appropriately strengthening or violating them. In the research, the combination of three coherent methods was used: (i) a literature analysis, (ii) the dogmatic and legal method, and (iii) interviews conducted with three groups of PB participants, i.e. municipal officials responsible for the organization of PB procedure, municipal councillors, and residents. The research covers six Polish cities and bases on a catalogue of nodal public values including: human dignity, sustainability, citizen involvement, openness, secrecy, compromise, integrity, and robustness. The research leads to the conclusion that the plebiscite BP in Poland is not axiologically neutral, its rules have both a positive and negative impact on particular nodal public values, however the scale of negative impact is greater than the scale of the positive one.