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2008:2 Actors of Local Development - Orlicko

Zdenka Vajdova (ed.)

The objective of this study is to describe two factors that have a significant impact on regional
development. One is the level of development of civil society in the region and the other is the nature
of the social network of actors in local development. The region that forms the focus of this study is
Orlicko in the in the District of Ústí nad Orlicí in the Pardubice Region, and specifically the area
encompassed under the Association of Municipalities of Orlicko on the Polish border. Indicators of
political and civic participation and indicators of partnership between the public, private, and nonprofit
sectors provide an idea of the level of development of civil society in Orlicko. These indicators
are examined on the basis of national and regional statistics and databases and surveys conducted by
the Public Opinion Research Centre. The social network of the most important actors in local development
is approximated on the basis of 35 institutions from the public, private, and non-profit sectors.
Data on the network were obtained through a specialised questionnaire survey of representatives of
these institutions. The quantitative characteristics of this network, such as its density and the
centrality or centralisation of the network, do not exhibit any extreme values that would suggest the
existence of any irregular conditions for cooperation between these three sectors. However, the
public sector is clearly the driving force of local development. The volume also includes a historical
look at the policy of settlement in the border region in 1945–1950 based on the study of documents
from archives in the Czech Republic and abroad. The volume also includes an important recapitulation
of current approaches to border region in terms of the typologies formulated out of sociological,
geographical, and historical research.

Keywords

Actors in local development, civil society, participation, social network analysis, the Czech border
region research, post-war settlement policy, Orlicko

Shrnutí

This volume contains four texts by different authors, prepared within the scope of work on the
project ‘Development Interests in the Border region (Based on the Example of Orlicko)’, supported by
the Ministry of Education, Youth and Sport under its National Research Programme II (project no.
2D06001) for 2006–2011. Orlicko here refers to the territory encompassed under the Association of
Municipalities of Orlicko in the District of Ústí nad Orlicí within the Pardubice Region and on the
border with Poland. Each of the four texts presents a different perspective on the border region issue,
but all of them are directed at understanding the development interests of this territory and the
possibilities for fulfilling them in an expanding Europe.
The first study, by Helena Nosková, presents the historical perspective. It focuses on the
processes and events that occurred in the Czech border region in 1945–1950. The policy of settlement
and introducing new settlers into the border region in these years was another major intervention
during the post-war years into the demographic and social structure of the territory, which had
numerous unintended consequences. The consequences of this policy, whether intended or not,
must be taken into account in any strategic planning aimed at the development of this territory. The
study describes a typology of border region based on the degree of continuity of – in this case its prewar
– population and it draws on numerous historical studies of population transfers, expulsion, and
other migration flows in the border region. The results of the author’s study of documents housed in
the National Archives and other archives in the Czech Republic, and of documents from the
Russkogo Gosudarstvennogo Archiva Sociologičesskoj i Političeskoj Istorii (RGASPI) and Russkogo
Gosudarstvennogo Ekonomičeskogo Archiva v Moskvě (RGEA) reveal how deeply the post-war
migration policy of Czechoslovakia was tied to the migration policy of the Soviet Union in the
1930s and 1940s. This link can be described as ‘following the example’, both institutionally – the
Settlement Bureau was established on the Soviet model and gradually came entirely under the
control of the Settlement Commission of the Central Committee of the Czechoslovak Communist
Party – and in policy itself. The ideological objective was, through concentrated pressure and social
work, to turn the new border-region inhabitants into a reliable buttress of the policy of the
Communist Party. However, in the years of crisis in the regime (1968, 1989) it turned out that the
population had been less corrupted by communist power than expected.
The border region is defined on the basis of a variety of different approaches. One typology was
mentioned above. Other approaches to this definition are described in the study by Daniel Čermák.
Drawing on a number of contemporary sociological and geographical studies, he describes the
criteria that are used in different typologies and presents an overview of these typologies, including
the euroregions. He attempts to classify Orlicko within the individual typologies. It is clear that the
characteristics of a given type of border region in a particular study may also be valid for Orlicko in
this type of classification. This kind of secondary research thus produced valuable information on
Orlicko after 1993. The most important asset of the study is the very detailed examination of the
changes in the number of inhabitants in individual municipalities in the Association of Municipalities
of Orlicko between the 1930 and 1950 censuses. This is based on data from the Historical Lexicon of
Municipalities of the Czech Republic 1869–2005 and on the Statistisches Gemeindelexikon des
Landes Bohmen (of December 1930). The results are shown in the third figure in Čermák’s study.
Civil society in Orlicko is the subject of the study by Jana Stachová. The degree of political and
civic participation and the level of partnership between the public, private and non-profit sector and
the very state of the non-profit sector itself are all indicators of the development of civil society in
Orlicko. An indicator of political participation in the study is the level of voter participation in elections
between 2002 and 2006 to representative bodies at every level. According to this indicator, the
District of Ústí nad Orlicí is a district with one of the highest levels of political participation. It was
only possible to examine trust in political and public institutions at the level of the regions. CVVM
surveys showed that respondents in the Pardubice Region express a relatively high degree of trust in
regional and municipal councils. Civic participation is conveyed by the number of non-governmental
non-profit organisations in the Pardubice Region and its districts. This number increased in 2004
and 2006 and the institutionalisation of the sector also deepened, evidence of which is the existence
and work of the Coalition of NGOs of the Pardubice Region. With regard to Orlicko itself, it lags behind
other parts of the Pardubice Region in terms particularly non-profit sector financing and the relative
number of non-profit organisations. Partnership between the private, public and non-profit
sectors in Orlicko dates back to the first half of the 1990s, and its initial purpose was the effort to
rectify the poor state of the living environment. At that time, the municipalities, organisations identified
as the sources of the pollution, and expert firms got together in an effort to solve the problems
of the living environment. Partnership continued with the preparation of the regional strategic development
plan and a more recent manifestation of partnership is the establishment of the Local Action
Group Orlicko in 2006.
The institutional actors in local development in Orlicko and their social network is the subject
of an analysis by Zdenka Vajdová in the last study in this volume. The social network of the most
important actors in local development is approximated on the basis of 35 institutions from the public,
private, and non-profit sectors, many of which are members of the Local Action Group of Orlicko.
Data were obtained from a specialised questionnaire survey of representatives of these institutions.
The questions applied in a formalised, standardised interview surveyed attitudes on the cooperation
and participation of sectors in local development and opinions on the use of EU Structural Funds,
social capital, and the social network of actors in local development.
The relational data were submitted to a social network analysis using UCINET software. The
quantitative characteristics of the network of institutional actors in the local development of Orlicko,
such as its density and the centrality or centralisation of the network, do not exhibit any extreme
values that would suggest the existence of any irregular conditions for cooperation between the
public, private, and non-profit sectors. It is more that the advantages and opportunities connected
with the position of an actor in the network of Orlicko are unevenly distributed. The central positions
occupied by the Association of Municipalities of Orlicko and the association called the Development
of the Region of Municipalities Pod Zemskou branou both stand out in, as does the position
occupied by the business entity REDEA Žamberk, providing management services for both the Association
of Municipalities of Orlicko and the Local Action Group of Orlicko. However, the public sector
is clearly the driving force of local development. The analysis of the opinions of representatives of
the institutions and actors in local development produced a number of interesting but not surprising
findings. They can briefly summed up as: the principle of partnership and participation is mainly
applied at the declaratory level; technical infrastructure and the development of transportation and
information technology drew most from the EU Structural Funds in 2004–2006; self government institutions
within accessible distance and knowledge of their agenda encourage the trust of local development
actors in those institutions.