Abstract

Despite its undeniable advantages, the competition procedure is not often used by the Polish contracting authorities. As of 2 March 2004, the competition proceeding has become fully optional in the Polish public procurement law. Competition is less popular than other procedures for the award of design work: it has been used in merely ca. 2.48% of the orders for architectural designs of the value below the EU public procurement thresholds, and in ca. 10.71% of contracts of the value equal to or above those thresholds. The popularity of competitions seems to decrease steadily. This is more noticeable with more valuable orders. There is a growing interest in the basic methods for the award of design work, in particular the open procedure, as well as the „design and build“ formula of procuring design services and construction works. The effectiveness of public procurement competitions is noticeably increasing. apart from illustrating the above phenomena using the statistical method, the authoress illustrates is looking for the underlying causes. The contracting authorities are divided into three groups: those that have had bad experience with the competition procedure, those that have not had any experience in this area, and those that use the competition procedure. The first two groups have been used to determine the reasons for the small and continuously declining popularity of competitions with the Polish contracting authorities. The authoress diagnoses many reasons for this phenomenon, though as the primary and most important reason for competition not working in Poland as a basic procedure for the award of public design work she indicates a low level of knowledge among the contracting authorities. Competition will undoubtedly be used more frequently for procurement of design work when the knowledge of public procurement and competition itself becomes more widespread.