Our motivation for undertaking this research was to verify the scope and results of public policies aimed at supporting peripheralised medium-sized cities, and to check how these policies have been perceived by stakeholders within these cities. We selected the Polish-German borderland as a case region for this, primarily due to a particular concentration of cities experiencing the detrimental effects of socio-economic transformation. These are also cities exposed to the consequences of radicalising political discourse. We chose two pairs of cities comparable to centres behind the border: Bautzen and Görlitz (located in East Saxony), as well as Zgorzelec and Jelenia Góra (the western part of Lower Silesia). We assumed peripheralisation, left-behind places and multilevel governance to be the theoretical frameworks to capture the dynamics of processes taking place within such peripheral(ised) medium-sized cities. Our main research objective was to investigate the way the public authorities have been navigating their respective paths within the multi-level urban development / regional policy systems. The main conclusion of the research is the low institutional capacity among the public authorities in the given cities to allow them to be able to reverse negative trends.

中文翻译：

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多层次体系内的地方决策：德国萨克森州和波兰下西里西亚省经历社会经济转型的外围中等城市的治理研究

我们进行这项研究的动机是验证旨在支持周边中等城市的公共政策的范围和结果，并检查这些城市的利益相关者如何看待这些政策。我们选择波兰-德国边境地区作为案例区域，主要是因为经历社会经济转型不利影响的城市特别集中。这些城市也面临着激进政治言论的后果。我们选择了两对与边界后面的中心相似的城市：包岑和格尔利茨（位于东萨克森州），以及兹戈热莱茨和耶莱尼亚古拉（下西里西亚西部）。我们假设外围化、落后地区和多层次治理作为理论框架来捕捉这些外围（化）中型城市中发生的过程的动态。我们的主要研究目标是调查公共当局在多层次城市发展/区域政策体系中引导各自路径的方式。该研究的主要结论是，特定城市公共当局扭转负面趋势的机构能力较低。