ENVIRONMENT PROTECTION AS A TOPIC OF OUR MUNICIPALITIES' STRATEGIC DEVELOPMENT PLANS

Issues of the creation of strategic development documents remain in the Czech Republic at the centre of discussions by experts - theoreticians as well as representatives of public administration ranging from the national to local level. The thesis focuses on two research questions, specifically (1) if there is a link between targets set on the national level and the local targets and (2) whether the locally set targets correspond to the actual local situation, monitored on the issues connected with environmental protection. Methodologically, the thesis has made use of an analysis of a randomly selected set of strategic development documents of towns and municipalities in the Czech Republic and a comparison of their results with the national level documents, and secondly it was an observation with a relatively objective indicator of the environmental situation in the municipalities, which is the ecological stability coefficient (ESC). The findings indicate the fact that almost one third of strategic plans on the local level pay no attention whatsoever to one of the major strategic priorities of the country environmental protection. Therefore, in response to the research question "if there is a link between targets set on the national level and the local targets", one can give only an ambiguous answer, because clearly there is some link, but its strength is considerably smaller than expected and furthermore quite evidently there is no correlation between the real quality of the environment in a municipality and the quantity of targets focusing on these issues in the municipal strategy.