Experts of the civic coalition Reanimation Package of Reforms want faster action on decentralization to complete local self-governance reform. With parliamentary elections approaching in October, they believe that a window of opportunity is closing.
Over the past three years, Ukraine has made considerable progress in shifting funding and authority to the country’s localities. But lawmakers, local tycoons, and the central authorities are still thwarting some of the changes.
The decentralization process increasingly resembles the aborted police reform, which ended after its initial success with lower-level patrol officers, the group of experts suggested during a Jan. 23 press conference.
At the event, the Civil Society Institute and the Reanimation Package of Reforms called on the Verkhovna Rada to step up its efforts to pass major bills needed to complete the first stage of decentralization, which is supposed to be concluded by 2020.
The bills in question cover the procedure for creating territorial units, local civil service and employment, local development plans, zoning in the territorial units, and streamlined registration of vital records, according to Ivan Lukerya from the Reanimation Package of Reforms.
“Nothing can be worse than incomplete reforms,” he stressed.
Elections approaching
Should the parliament manage to pass these laws within the first two weeks of its next session in February, the country will be able to hold the 2020 local election on the basis of the new territorial structure, said Anatoly Tkachuk of the Civil Society Institute.
But without speedy action, lawmakers will likely get distracted with their re-election campaigns, and the next convocation of parliament could prove unpredictable.
Tkachuk stressed that society is feeling frustrated with lagging decentralization efforts, particularly with the Rada’s current tendency toward reversing the process.
Local self-governance expert Oleksandr Serhienko criticized the way new districts have been formed on the basis of newly unified territorial communities in Chernikhiv, Mykolaiv, and Kherson oblasts. As a result of consolidation, each of the oblasts will have four districts. Currently, they have 22, 19, and 19 districts, respectively.
The problem is that these new districts do not comply with the regional development strategy and “district administrative centers are often located far from the geographic center of the district,” Serhienko said.
Such large territories require strategy for good governance, he added.
Furthermore, sometimes towns favored by local tycoons are selected to become administrative centers, rather than towns with historical or infrastructure significance. The government should have the “right to draw a map for unified territorial communities,” Serhienko said.
“We must move from a voluntary process to a mandatory one,” he added.
