Bibliogr. s. 128-129. Strona wydawcy: https://www.wuj.pl

Establishing principles for regional development requires a detailed specification of the goals to be achieved, which would provide sustainable regional development according to expectations of its citizens or other entities operating in the region. Before the plans can be accepted for execution, they must be verified considering both external and internal conditions, regarding actual and predicted status. As for Polish conditions at the beginning of the 21st century, a specifically important challenge is considering the regional policy which, apart from being created regionally, is a result of various decision-making processes on national or EU level. These circumstances require the regional authorities to employ decision supporting instruments based on more or less standardized criteria. While the traditionally used SWOT analysis may constitute a starting point of standardization of the region-related data, in order to take ultimate decisions, and especially to prepare development variants as well as optimal solutions, more complex methods are required. In the current paper, AHP method was selected as the proper way to tackle multi-criteria decision-making problems, in parallel to the simple priority ranking method accepted by the authors of the Programme for Regional Development of the Małopolska Voivodeship for 2004-2006.