Lokalne formy rozwoju, samoorganizacja i potencjał sprawczy
LOCAL FORMS OF DEVELOPMENT, SELF-ORGANIZATION AND AGENCY

Summary/Abstract: In my article, I focus on bottom-up development processes associated with the forms of co-operation and success-building present in Western Mongolia and in rural areas of central Poland. In both cases, I emphasise the existence of long, but ever-changing local traditions of societal self-organization and grass-roots forms of development activities, which are often powerful enough to be the leading cause of change. I survey the forms of cooperation in post-pastoral communities associated with the city of Bulgan located by the southern slopes of the Altai Mountains, whose inhabitants re-produce a new their economic practices, act according to their own post-pastoral idiom andcome up with development ideas immersed in a contemporary Mongolian spirituality, rooted in local ways of achieving success. Likewise, I refer to the history of cooperation and coping in impoverished post-transformation Polishvillages near Szydłowiec, analysing spontaneous self-organisation processes and the production of certain alternative, community-based technical and social knowledge. These situations stand in opposition to the descriptions found in programmes offered by development institutions, which quite often still have a vision of the organisation of local social life as a passive structure, requiring externally driven change and, to a certain extent, resisting the development and modernisation processes. I also wish to suggest an approach to local cooperation that resists the existing logics of constructing development. It draws on local ideas and practices, ways of transforming social life and new economic projects, which as local forms of development become a separate world that is extremely important to understand.

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