Participatory Governance in Ukraine: A Case Study of Anti-corruption Policy in the Period 2014–2018

Abstract

The 2013-2014 Euromaidan Revolution, which culminated in the fall of the authoritarian and notoriously corrupt regime of President Victor Yanukovych has become a symbol of the triumph of civic activism in Ukraine. Although those events have attracted significant scholarly attention, the question whether the Ukrainian civil society’s capacity for protest mobilization has successfully been channeled into sustained, formalized and productive forms of civic participation in the process of public policy making has remained largely unaddressed. Therefore, this paper sets out to examine whether civil society organizations (CSOs) have become more integrated into the Ukrainian public policy making process since the Euromaidan and whether the Revolution has led to a meaningful shift towards a more open and inclusive style of governance. Drawing on legal texts, external reports and semi-structured interviews with Kyiv-based anti-corruption activists, the study finds both a clear trend towards increased openness of the policy making process to CSO input in the immediate aftermath of the Revolution as well as the insufficient consolidation and institutionalization of such participatory mechanisms, which ultimately makes them vulnerable to the preferences of individual players and to broader changes in political attitudes.