Regional Policy as an Instrument of Institutionalizing Political Participation of Territorial Communities of Ukraine in the Context of Post-War Recovery

Abstract

The article substantiates that Ukraine’s regional policy in the post-war period ceases to be an exclusively technocratic mechanism of resource redistribution and acquires features of democratization that institutionalize political participation of communities. The author argues that the effectiveness of regional policy is determined not only by the presence of strategic documents and vertically organized instruments of public administration, but by the extent to which communities have real access to participation institutions and the extent to which they actually use them to influence decision-making. It is demonstrated that there is a gap in Ukraine between the declared necessity of public involvement and the factual availability of participatory mechanisms: in particular, after 2022 the scope of participatory budgeting practices has significantly decreased. The article shows that the growth of political interest among Ukrainians after 2014 and especially in 2023 (confirmed by sociological data) creates a “window of opportunity” for the reformatting of regional policy: the existing social demand for participation must be transformed into mandatory and standardized procedures of community participation. It is argued that the institutionalization of political subjectivity of the community requires a shift from a unified to a differentiated place-based approach, the introduction of mandatory participation metrics and reporting, synchronization of the state strategy with territorial channels of participation, and adaptation to EU requirements. It is emphasized that without regular participatory practices, the democratic potential of regional policy will not be realized, and the reconstruction risks remaining centralized and legitimacy-vulnerable.