Planning as a Part of the Structure of Poland’s Local Governments’ Cooperative Potential

The aim of the article is to identify the main constituent parts of cooperation planning and to define their roles from the perspective of assessing levels of cooperative potential. Co-operative potential is a new area of knowledge that has generated interests among representatives of management sciences. They perceive the dichotomies of cooperation phenomena that can be analysed, not only as creating relationships, but also in the context of a process that require the planning of appropriate resources. This new trend of knowledge is a part of the concept of cooperative potential, while the objective analysis of planning aspects constitutes one of the elements of its structure. The article presents a 5-dimensional model of cooperative potential, developed on the basis of the organization concept of H.J Leavitt using the "inductive top-down theorizing concept" methodology (Shepherd, Sutcliffe 2011). The research was located in the Podkarpacie voivodship, where the subject was a randomly selected sample of 58 local government units (level NUTS5). The analysis shows that the cooperative potential of the surveyed offices is at a low level. The analysis also indicates that although the local government offices are aware of activities necessary for the preparation of such entities for the implementation of cooperation, they lack formalization and improvement in most of the criteria. The role of planning in the structure of cooperative potential is of a strategic nature. Majority of the offices surveyed have attained high levels of excellence in this area following the to fulfil existing legislative Acts. The article is one of the first studies using the model of cooperative potential as a tool for research.