Assessment of sustainable development management based on multi-criteria methods on the example of municipalities in Poland in 2020-2023

Abstract

In today's world, the principles of sustainability are playing an increasingly important role. Therefore, the purpose of this paper was to analyze the implementation of the concept of sustainability. In the theoretical part, a selected issue of sustainability was discussed based on the literature. The empirical part shows, based on the use of TOPSIS, VIKOR, and Hellwig methods, the state of implementation of sustainable development at the level of municipalities aggregated within NUTS1 regions in Poland. The analysis was based on sustainable development indicators published on the website of the Local Data Bank as a tool for the analysis of local government units (LGUs) in Poland provided by Statistics Poland. The research showed that better performance of sustainable development tasks was mainly observed in the macroregions with the largest metropolitan associations within their borders but regions with a lower level of development were also making high investment efforts to improve the situation on their territory. Furthermore, the rankings made it possible to identify the best and worst modes of acting towards sustainable development across all types of municipalities aggregated within the macroregions. The best-performing regions included the southern macroregion, the south-western macroregion, and the Masovian Voivodeship, while the worst-performing were the eastern, central, and northern macroregions.