The Role of Local Resources as Factors of Regional Development

Local resources play an important role in weakly developed regions. The activation of those resources represents one aspect of conditioning socioeconomic development, which exerts a favourable influence on the lives of inhabitants and facilitates the effective use of funds invested inwardly from outside the region. Local resources represent unique—and socially and economically utilizable—features, factors and phenomena in a given area that is able to shape its internal potential for development. The research detailed here sought to identify the structure of local resources in three marginal regions of eastern Poland (the province or regions—Voivodeships of Podlaskie, Lubelskie and Podkarpackie) and to assess their development potential. The work showed that most resources were of average utilitarian and uniqueness value, often also characterized by considerable spatial differentiation. The several types of resources that were found to dominate included architectural forms and buildings, as well as valuable features that were helping to shape attractiveness to tourists. The resources of greatest utility in shaping local development, in fact, emerge as very positively evaluated from the point of view of uniqueness also. Equally, a group of highly unique resources is characterized by far more limited utility from the practical point of view. This may attest to the still-unused potential where the local resources in the regions studied are concerned.