The Russian full-scale invasion since 24 February 2022 subjected Ukraine to overlapping war-related crises, such as physical insecurity, internal displacement, and damage to critical infrastructure. Ukraine has shown an unexpected capacity to respond to these crises, being a decentralized state.
This is puzzling, given the contradictory evidence about the crisis response capacity of decentralised states. On the one hand, multiple decision-making centres may compete for scarce resources and influence, slowing down crisis responses. On the other hand, polycentric systems may be more agile as local decision-making units can provide more context-specific solutions compared to central government.
This presentation will illuminate the polycentric nature of Ukraine’s crisis response from 2022 to 2024. It will focus on how local authorities mobilize knowledge and resources and implement institutional innovations to address war-related issues, while also considering the legitimacy of their approaches. The study is based on three surveys of Ukrainian local self-government authorities and a qualitative case study conducted by the Congress of Local and Regional Authorities of the Council of Europe (in 2021 and 2022) and the Kyiv School of Economics (in 2022 and 2024).
Oleksandra Keudel is an Associate Professor at the Kyiv School of Economics and an Associate at the Harvard Ukrainian Research Institute. She researches democratic transformation and societal resilience, specializing in Ukraine’s local governance and sub-national politics. She holds a Ph.D. in Political Science from the Free University of Berlin and has been a visiting researcher at George Washington University, NYU, and Södertörn University. She authored “How Patronal Networks Shape Opportunities for Local Citizen Participation in a Hybrid Regime: A Comparative Analysis of Five Cities in Ukraine”, published with ibidem/Columbia University Press (2022). Her related paper received 2021 Best Paper Award at the Association for the Study of Nationalities Annual Convention.
