'Foreign technical assistance to date has not helped develop Ukraine's analytical competence within and outside the government.'
ceived, designed, and guided by donors. What went wrong? The political will to go the 'Western way' did not manifest in concrete policy decisions. There was no institutional capacity in the government to make radical political choices. Western technical assistance must be reassessed to enable Ukraine to do its own institutional capacity building.
Economic stagnation in Ukraine is exacerbated by poor policy decisions and the lack of an economic strategy. While the government has articulated an economic policy direction, policy implementation bears little resemblance to that vision. As a result, Ukraine has stumbled from one crisis to another, and the government has been bogged down in 'fire-fighting.'
Regarding donor participation, I see a discrepancy between the reform concepts and the technical assistance provided to make them possible. Reforms envisaged an entire change of the government's role: relinquishing overall administrative control over the economy through privatization and liberalization. The role of technical assistance was to help the government manage this change. Aid was crucial to build an understanding of reform, to develop new institutions and skills necessary to implement reforms.
The international community tends to believe that the cause of weak economic strategy lies in the lack of political will by the president and the government of Ukraine.
But they ignore the wide gap between the design of foreign assistance programs and the institutional reality in the former Soviet Union. For a long time, international donors have believed that Ukrainian government has the capacity to make reform decisions once they have been given the right recommendations, and that civil society in Ukraine would become active and independent when state control was removed.
Donors saw their role as advising the government on reforms and financially supporting the transition. While advising, donors believed that the government would take the lead in reforming economic and social institutions. However, offiicals lacked the skills needed to fulfill their new role.
During the Soviet times, the Ukrainian government did not have any real governing responsibilities. It was engaged in the distribution of resources and direct management of a huge, country-sized production line. No policy formulation was necessary, since all decisions were made by the Communist Party. The government was there just to execute orders.
After the Soviet collapse, the government was supposed to start justifying its decisions and proving to the public why they were better than the alternatives. But the government machine was unable to cope with the new challenges neither substantively (what to do?) nor managerially (how to make it happen?). Even during the present reform process, no new capacities to fulfill such tasks have been developed.
Ideally, the institutional mechanism of the Ukrainian government to carry out reforms should include:
* employing qualified experts for professional policy analysis;
* evaluation of the public costs of ignoring those decisions and of reinforcing them, and comparison of these decisions with defined goals;
* managing change through setting up a department of reform management able to formulate reform strategy, identifying driving forces and opponents of reform, and building political support throughout the country;
* putting organizational procedures in place to provide extensive support for government reform policies, including a system of communication with parliament, as well as procedures for public participation in policymaking.
Foreign technical assistance to date has not really helped develop Ukraine's analytical competence within and outside the government. Typically, Western consultants have been providing assistance to Ukraine in the form of already-developed recommendations. These experts have even avoided providing Ukrainian policymakers with the types of options they would give their own politicians, for fear of dulling the urgent reform message they hope to send. And the Ukrainian government is still expected to simply follow their prescription.
Not surprisingly, this approach has been unsuccessful at promoting economic reform in Ukraine. Clearly, successful implementation of an economic strategy for Ukraine requires that Ukrainians develop it themselves. Nevertheless, instead of supporting Ukrainian institutions, aid agencies prefer to spend money on creating numerous short-lived project-based entities, which leave little trace in the Ukrainian institutional landscape.
Why was the approach more successful in Central European countries? In Central Europe, the focus has been on European integration. As stipulated in technical assistance projects, government officials of Central European countries adjusted their institutions to EU standards together with their Western counterparts. In the former Soviet Union, technical assistance has been aimed at consulting, advice, and information sharing, with no institution building. The first project on administrative reform in Ukraine started in 1997, compared to 1991 in Poland.
Considering its overall high level of education, the Ukrainian government actually has remarkably few specialists with the knowledge and expertise necessary for government work in an open and transparent society. Public servants lack the skills needed to give strategic advice to the government.
Therefore, projects should be designed that facilitate the development of new government functions. Training programs must also be restructured.
The good news is that new types of technical assistance have been developed in Ukraine and supported by USAID and CIDA. The new programs focus on building the Ukrainian government's institutional capacity for sound and sustainable policymaking.
An innovative type of technical assistance, the Centers of Policy Excellence (CoPE), is a training program that has been designed so that it can be tailored directly to the recipient institution, by having the participants do individual assignments that are relevant to their job responsibilities. It has been successful in developing Ukrainian government participants into a new breed of policy analysts rather than administrators.
Vira Nanivska is Director of the International Center for Policy Studies in Kyiv. ICPS is a non-government research organization operationally financed by George Soros' Open Society Institute. ICPS conducts independent research and organizes dialogue between the government, NGOs, foreign experts, and the media.
