Although the current Russian invasion is causing large-scale destruction, Ukraine has already demonstrated resilience and some degree of success in delivering development outcomes under instability and emergency conditions. A concerted, across-the-board effort by national, regional, and local policymakers together with the strong sense of national unity that Ukrainians have so far demonstrated will help leverage the difficult road that lies ahead and to use post-war reconstruction as a springboard to greater economic dynamism, setting the foundations for a sustainable, inclusive, and multi-dimensional recovery and reconstruction.
Recovery and reconstruction strategies are often testing. Post-conflict areas are frequently beleaguered with sets of very specific challenges. These include (i) the need for coordination between the multiplicity of local, national, and international actors; (ii) increased urgency, which demands rapid responses by stakeholders; (iii) sparse resources, which need to be efficiently utilised; and (iv) capacity constraints, following the outflow of talent due to the conflict. Addressing these challenges is often easier said than done given the complexity and fast-evolving scenarios of post-conflict areas.
The importance of the 10 lessons learned in emergency and recovery contexts
In this article we argue that place-sensitive development policies will deliver the greatest returns in a highly differentiated post-conflict context across the whole of the Ukraine. We identify ten lessons learned extracted from other post-conflict situations that will assume heighted importance for a recovery process in stages. The recovery should build on solid foundations and evidence, and involve the largest possible group of stakeholders. The ten lessons are as follows:
Lesson 1: Assessing local conditions
The assessment of local conditions assumes great importance for developing both successful local development strategies and recovery policies. In a post-crisis context the assessment of local recovery and reconstruction needs normally represents the first step towards an effective strategic planning. In order to avoid one-size-fits-all and off-the-shelf types of interventions, a careful assessment of local conditions should:
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Understand the political environment and existing institutional arrangements;
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Map the in-country partners and their capacity;
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Assess the outflows of talent and the needs of internally displaced people (IDP);
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Estimate the scope of physical damage to infrastructure and productive sectors;
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Analyse contextual risks, including security, economic and social risks.
This exercise is key to ensure an effective prioritization and implementation of strategies which respond to place-specific needs and constraints.
Lesson 2: Ensuring buy-in from local and regional stakeholders
A strong political and civil support for the success of place-sensitive development policies will be key in the recovery effort. Local buy-in is often considered a conditio sine qua non for the successful implementation of policies solidly rooted in local contexts. Best practice stemming from post-disaster recoveries around the world points to the importance of identifying needs and priorities of affected communities by creating participatory processes that involve communities themselves in decision-making, service delivery, and recovery.
Lesson 3: Containing vested interests
In post-war and post-crisis contexts, the combination of the inflow of a greater amount of funds and institutions that are often left beleaguered in their capacities can create a fertile ground for increased corruption. Against this backdrop, containing and limiting vested interests, lock in, clientelism, and corruption will be essential, if subnational governments are to implement successful recoveries after the end of the war. There are a variety of areas of interventions for local government to act on. First, rendering corruption practices high-risk, low-reward activities through measures aimed at increasing the risks of effective detection, investigation, and prosecution is a necessary step. Second, it is essential to mobilize non-government actors in order to build a broad front for anti-corruption reforms as it has been found that civil society generally plays the most effective supportive role for corruption monitoring and advocacy in post-conflict settings.
Lesson 4: Assessing complexity and breadth of strategies
Recovery strategies will also need to address the most basic needs, such as adequate healthcare, transport infrastructure, and the rebuilding of education facilities. In contrast, territories less affected by the conflict-driven destruction may benefit more from narrow focused strategies, tackling more complex aspects of post-conflict reconstruction, including, for instance, the return of talent and the reconstruction of the industrial ecosystem. Part of a process in stages, the application of the complexity-breadth matrix needs to be informed by the careful assessment of local conditions and complemented by anti-corruption measures, in order to keep vested interests at bay.
Lesson 5: Establishing monitoring systems
Even during non-emergency contexts, robust monitoring systems can help supporting policy learning for both local public administrations and stakeholders, enhancing policy communication and facilitating the accountability and transparency of policy actions. In a post-war context of decreased institutional capacity, it becomes paramount to strengthen monitoring systems and increase transparency so that affected populations can hold governments and local authorities accountable for recovery outcomes. All this must be complemented and supported by strong political will and high-level leadership.
Lesson 6: Investing in capacity building
Post-war local governance capacity development in Ukraine will need to entail a number of dimensions, including (i) peacebuilding capacity; (ii) state building capacity; (iii) and development capacity. In this sense, the set up by the national government of specific, mission-oriented offices whose aim is to provide technical institutional assistance — perhaps, in collaboration with external agencies involved in the reconstruction of Ukraine — to local government units will enable the design and implementation of far more sustainable and resilient local recovery plans across the whole of Ukraine.
Lesson 7: Preventing zero-sum competition at the local level
In the context of development interventions, subnational governments have often been found to engage in a race to the bottom and facing a prisoner’s dilemma: although they would benefit by cooperating at the regional level, they act in their own self-interest, trying to offer the best incentives while tilting the playing field towards lower environmental, social, and governance (ESG) standards in the hope of outdoing regional competitors. These harmful dynamics can be exacerbated in post-conflict settings. The significant inflow of funds and the multiplicity of donors and actors, which usually follows emergency situations, can give rise to the increased risk of zero-sum competition among Ukrainian municipalities in pursuing efforts to secure additional funds from the national government and international donors. Against this backdrop, the national government needs to act as a guarantor of a level playing field.
Lesson 8: Designing coordination mechanisms
Successful recovery interventions require excellent multi-sector coordination across different tiers of governance. In emergency and post-conflict settings, the national government retains the role of facilitating coordination of recovery efforts at local government level and empowering local leadership in their interactions with national and line ministries and with international partners. For this purpose, the setting up of an ad-hoc, dedicated agency can help in facilitating vertical and horizontal coordination dynamics. In other post-crisis contexts, this has proven to be a successful strategy. In Ukraine, similar coordination and mission-oriented agencies —adapted to the specificities of territories following the conflict— should be considered as a way to build adequate platforms for facilitating a coordinated recovery.
Lesson 9: Redefining regional development clubs
In contexts of limited institutional capacity of subnational governments, the identification of development clubs, or territories or regions within a country (or across countries in the case of the EU) with similar characteristics and development constraints and/or potential is crucial for the implementation of place-sensitive strategies. These development clubs can then propose generally applicable policy guidelines informed by economic theory. In the post-war Ukraine, the formulation of policy guidelines for regional development clubs can remain useful in a variety of ways. First, it will enable a relatively rapid and efficient process of recovery policymaking, by avoiding the formulation of strategies ‘from scratch’ by local governments. Second, the definition of regional development clubs can aid in the identification of those regions and/or municipalities which display both similar levels of pre-war socio-economic and institutional development and comparable degrees of war-related destruction. Third, the division of territories in development clubs may allow for a relatively straightforward incorporation of the complexity-breadth matrix in a dynamic and comparative way: as municipalities and/or regions move towards higher levels of development vis-à-vis their past performance and peer territories, and they remedy to conflict-associated destruction, development and recovery policies will allow for greater complexity and more targeted interventions.
Lesson 10: Retaining a strategic focus
The risk of policy incoherence and mismatch between local conditions and recovery priorities needs to be addressed at the central level. To do so, greater use by senior national leaders of filters and criteria, such as relevance to conflict factors, feasibility, and peer support would alleviate such distortions to a considerable extent. Evidence from other post-crisis settings shows that the focus on policy coherence across the whole national territory is often more theoretical than real. Finally, the national government is also better positioned to retain a clear picture as of how local comparative advantages complement each other and, consequently, how local bottlenecks may be tackled creating broad-based synergies across municipalities and regions. A cooperative and collaborative effort in this sense is likely to make or break attempts to an effective prioritisation and harmonisation of interventions across post-war Ukraine.
Concluding remarks
This short paper has highlighted the heightened relevance of place-sensitive policies in emergency and recovery contexts. Even in post-war, post-conflict recovery settings, geography matters. It is clear that the conflict will have differentiated territorial impacts across Ukraine. Some cities and municipalities will have little left standing once the conflict is over, while other territories will hopefully be for less affected by physical and infrastructure damage. These latter territories will, nevertheless, still face the consequences of the psychological shock and scars of the invasion, the loss of talent linked to the massive displacement of people, loss of internal and external markets, and a serious disruption of basic services and industrial production.
Although the current Russian invasion is causing large-scale destruction, Ukraine has already demonstrated resilience and some degree of success in delivering development outcomes under instability and emergency conditions. A concerted, across-the-board effort by national, regional, and local policymakers together with the strong sense of national unity that Ukrainians have so far demonstrated will help leverage the difficult road that lies ahead and to use post-war reconstruction as a springboard to greater economic dynamism, setting the foundations for a sustainable, inclusive, and multi-dimensional recovery and reconstruction.
Link to the full Policy document.
This article is based on the Report “Local Government Reform in Ukraine: Towards Place-Sensitive Development Strategies" of 1 February 2022 and the Addendum Policy Note to the "Local Government Reform Report: the relevance of place-sensitive strategies in emergency and reconstruction contexts" of 17 April 2022, by Andrés Rodríguez-Pose and Federico Bartalucci.
Andrés Rodríguez-Pose holds the Princess de Asturias Chair and a professorship of Economic Geography at the London School of Economics (LSE), where he has taught since 1995. Prof. Andrés Rodríguez-Pose is collaborating with U-LEAD with Europe in advising Government of Ukraine in its decentralisation and regional development policy reform.
Federico Bartalucci has advised several international organisations, including UNCTAD, the World Bank and the Asian Development Bank. His assignment with U-LEAD with Europe provides advisory services to the Government of Ukraine in its decentralisation and regional development policy reform.