ABSTRACT
There are three tiers of elected sub-national governments in Poland:
16 regions (województwo), which are NUTS-2 units, thereby making them
the core bodies for the implementation of EU cohesion policy in Poland;
314 counties (powiat) plus 65 cities of county status (cities which are responsible for both municipal and county functions–usually the biggest Polish cities, most of them with more than 100,000 residents); 1
almost 2,500 municipalities (gmina).
The municipality is the only tier that is protected by the Polish constitution, so both regions and counties ( powiats) could in theory be abolished by a normal decision of the Parliament. This situation has come about because during the drafting of the 1997 Constitution, there was no consensus on the future shape of the territorial organisation of the country. The regulation, which states that ‘the basic level of territorial self-government is the gmina, whilst other tiers will be established by the Parliament’, was one of the compromises that was reached in order to adopt the Constitution.