Authors

Maryna Rabinovych¹;  ¹ UiT, Norway

Discussion

Ukraine’s decentralization reform, launched in 2014, is widely depicted as a success story among post-Euromaidan reforms and an important driver of Ukraine’s resilience to Russia’s full-scale invasion. Contributions focused on the role of local self-governance in Ukraine’s continued resilience to Russia’s invasion mention stronger capacity of local self-governance bodies, their immediate access to resources and citizens’ increased trust to local authorities as the key pathways the 2014 decentralization reform has contributed to municipalities’ ability to address multiple challenges of the war situation (e.g. Keudel and Huss, 2023; Rabinovych, et al., 2023). 

Existing research, nonetheless, has only tangentially focused on the implications the martial law has had on the operation of Ukrainian local self-government bodies and their interactions with military administrations at the local, district and regional levels. This aspect is important not only for deepening an existing scholarly understanding of the operation of Ukraine’s local governance system amidst the war. It also contributes to finding effective governance solutions for Ukraine’s reconstruction and summarizing lessons learnt from Ukraine’s experience for European municipalities, aiming to increase their preparedness and resilience to conventional and hybrid security threats.


The paper thus combines legal analysis with insights from stakeholder interviews in the regions of Sumy, Chernihiv, Kherson, Kharkiv and Zaporizhzhia to illuminate on the interactions with local self-governance bodies and military administrations under variegated effects of the war on the municipalities in these regions. These regions were selected for analysis specifically because municipalities there have different experiences of the war, including intense fighting and movements of the frontline, occupation, deoccupation and relocation of population and businesses. It is demonstrated that, amidst a clear vertical of military administrations with broad authorities, introduced by the martial law, local self-governance bodies and leaders have remained important actors in local affairs, even when it comes to the governance of hromadas under occupation.

Notwithstanding the diverse practices of interaction between local self-governance bodies and administrations, we see that pre-war mutual exposure, openness to quick issue-specific engagements, and in-person meetings with district and regional administrations’ representatives commonly stand out as best practices, relevant both in the reconstruction and knowledge transfer contexts. With this, the paper offers both a scholarly and a policy contribution, stressing the value of continuous exchange between local self-government and state bodies under crisis, as well as transnational policy learning.