Authors

Yuliya Bidenko¹;  ¹ Karazin Kharkiv National University, Ukraine

Discussion

The paper delves into the multifaceted efforts to rebuild and rejuvenate Ukraine during and after the Russian war against Ukraine. In response, stakeholders engaged in the Ukrainian recovery process has stressed the urgent need for a comprehensive institutional model that incorporates the perspectives of government and donors to civil society and local communities. For a long time the government has not devised a strategy for tackling the specific challenges faced by Ukrainian communities and regions as a whole. In contrast, some local communities have taken the initiative, launched pilot projects, and sought urgent reconstruction, often with the support of foreign partner municipalities, businesses, or local citizens. Within civil society, despite its significant role in Ukrainian resilience and the wealth of competencies and capacities it possesses, unity and a shared vision are lacking. While Kyiv-based think tanks advocate for future reforms as a framework for comprehensive recovery and democratic restoration, local experts and organizations grapple with specific issues, sometimes collaborating with local authorities and at other times critiquing local practices of on-the-ground reconstruction. At the moment despite the common regulations on the planning the comprehensive recovery, key Ukrainian cities and regions demonstrate their own models and instruments of involving civil society in planning, as well as complicated mechanisms of communication with donors or governmental bodies. The main research question is whether there is one unified model for Ukrainian reconstruction that the Government should develop based on the stakeholders’ proposals or if there is a multilayer recovery that could be or even already implemented simultaneously in the different regions with various sets of actors, instruments, and thus with different proportionality of resources, inclusivity, and transparency? To investigate this complex situation, I used a desk research methodology, analyzing the policies of governmental and international organizations. Also I analyze speeches, narratives and contexts of reconstructions on the central level, and in selected communities. Additionally, semi-structured interviews were conducted during July 2023 in Kyiv and in the war-affected, and de-occupied communities of Eastern and Southern Ukraine in January-February and August-Septenber 2024 (such as Kharkiv, Mykolayiv, and Zaporizhzhya), involving officials, experts, activists, and desk officers from major donors operating in the area.