ACADEMIA Letters Does Technical Support for Amalgamation of Local Governments Have an Impact? The Case of Ukraine Glendal Wright, Public Finance and Local Government Consultant, Kyiv, Ukraine The issues of providing technical assistance by the donor community has been of intense interest (Lucas, 2009). There has been no lack of international donor technical support for the merging of local government units as part of the decentralization process. The financial support must be in the hundreds of millions of USD, maybe even into the billions. The amalgamation of local governments was promoted as one of the main solutions to problems ranging from promoting democracy, improving service delivery, alleviating poverty, and ameliorating conflict situations. Ukraine is one of the very last to implement decentralization reform through amalgamation beginning in 2015. Ukraine chose to implement this reform through a voluntary amalgamation approach, rather than mandating. The approximately 10,000 local government units were to be amalgamated into approximately 1,500. However, from 2015 on to 2019 there were only approximately 1,000 amalgamated units and the effort met strong resistance from some urban areas that did not want to merge with rural neighbors and the district level of government that was made redundant from the amalgamation. Consequently, with local government elections scheduled for late 2020, the government changed from the voluntary approach and mandated the amalgamation into approximately 1,450 units. Amalgamation was encouraged by numerous international donors, particularly the EU, with offers of technical support. On the Ukraine government website there is a listing of these programs under international cooperation. Academia Letters, July 2021 ©2021 by the author — Open Access — Distributed under CC BY 4.0 Corresponding Author: Glendal Wright, [email protected] Citation: Wright, G. (2021). Does Technical Support for Amalgamation of Local Governments Have an Impact? The Case of Ukraine. Academia Letters, Article 1909. https://doi.org/10.20935/AL1909. 1 Source: www.decentralization.gov.ua website The above is only five of over a dozen programs that are identified on the decentralization website. It is evident from the data in the table above that the international community has made a substantial contribution, both in terms of technical and financial support over the past five years. The total funding level is probably within the range of 200 million USD for all the programs. Ukraine undertook the amalgamation reform with substantial zeal and dedication and we can now examine if there is any indication that the technical support Ukraine has received has had a policy impact on this reform effort? EU Program: Ukraine Local Empowerment, Accountability, and Development (U-LEAD) Program We can examine one of the more prominent and visible programs in Ukraine to see what the policy impacts have been through this support. An examination of the program objectives and impacts may lead to an understanding of whether this technical policy support has impacted the amalgamation process. The European Union has provided a substantial level of support for implementing decentralization in Ukraine over the past several years. While there are several EU programs, the main EU funded project may be considered the Ukraine-Local Empowerment, Accountability, and Development (U-LEAD) program. According to the U-LEAD website that identifies the following objectives: 1. Enhancement of the capacities of key stakeholders at the national, regional and local levels to implement the regional policy and decentralization reforms (GIZ). 2. Empowerment of amalgamated communities to deliver high quality administrative services to their citizens aims at contributing to the ongoing decentralization reform in Ukraine, implemented by SIDA. https://donors.decentralization.gov.ua/en/project/u-lead Academia Letters, July 2021 ©2021 by the author — Open Access — Distributed under CC BY 4.0 Corresponding Author: Glendal Wright, [email protected] Citation: Wright, G. (2021). Does Technical Support for Amalgamation of Local Governments Have an Impact? The Case of Ukraine. Academia Letters, Article 1909. https://doi.org/10.20935/AL1909. 2 The two components identified above indicate a policy implementation activity by the GIZ for the decentralization reform. However, SKL International, which is the implementer for SIDA indicates that during the Roll-Out Phase of the project it has “policy advising to relevant Ukrainian stakeholders.” (http://sklinternational.se/projects/project/u-lead-witheurope-ukraine-local-empowerment-accountability-and-development-programme) In order to determine if this project has had a policy impact we can examine through their websites some indication of what policy level support they have provided and is this linked to some of the key policy issues related to reform. According the fiscal page of the SKL website this activity is described as follows: “The project’s objective in this component would be to keep influencing policymaking processes on the national level, and to support the advancement of the reforms by providing operative financial analysis of the performance of hromada budgets. The project is largely focusing on MinReg and MinFin and would provide continued support to the reform monitoring effort through capacity building and analytics.” http://sklinternational.org.ua/en/fiscal-2/ The reports produced by this project are largely focused on providing statistical information on the financial resources and expenditures of the local government units. While they do address some of the key aspects of fiscal decentralization and have some recommendations, the linkage to any changes in the policy and legal framework is not established. The reports are primarily from the years 2017-2019 after much of the fiscal decentralization and amalgamation process was already well underway. Consequently, it is difficult to see how this technical assistance has impacted the policy decisions of the decentralization reform. More Legitimacy Than Impact All this leads to the main interest of this paper, does this technical assistance for policy making support really impact decisions or simply gives legitimacy and cover for the government to pursue a political agenda rather than a real decentralization reform? The GIZ website related to the U-LEAD project states the following: “At present, implementation of the decentralization reform is not yet sustainable. State actors at national, regional and local levels still do not have all of the necessary skills and financial resources to carry out their duties and responsibilities effectively. The Ministry for Communities and Territories Development of Ukraine, which is responsible for implementing the decentralization reform, is Academia Letters, July 2021 ©2021 by the author — Open Access — Distributed under CC BY 4.0 Corresponding Author: Glendal Wright, [email protected] Citation: Wright, G. (2021). Does Technical Support for Amalgamation of Local Governments Have an Impact? The Case of Ukraine. Academia Letters, Article 1909. https://doi.org/10.20935/AL1909. 3 given support in order to improve coordination of the reform process and to effectively communicate the objectives and benefits of the reform.” https://www. giz.de/en/worldwide/39855.html As far as policy impact at the national level the above website only indicates that “At the national level, the support of the program has improved the steering capacities of the Ministry for Communities and Territories Development of Ukraine within the framework of the decentralization and regional development reforms.“ The website goes on to list a substantial number of trainings sessions and number of participants at the local level. The narrative in bold is highlighted as it indicates that the project emphasized its capacity building rather than influencing specific policy decisions; although that was the original intent of the project. The most striking example of the difference in the policy impact and the actions of the Ukraine government relates to the decision to do a mandated amalgamation. There was a difference of opinion about the wisdom of proceeding with this mandated amalgamation. According to the report “The Link Between Decentralization and EU Integration” this was highly questioned. The report indicated “The main concern of certain foreign experts was that a forced amalgamation of the remaining communities could lead to widespread protests.” (Umland and Romanova, 2019). They cited the experience in Germany during 2017 when a forced amalgamation of local governments in former East German states resulted in large citizen protests. All this leads to the question with regard to donor technical support: does this intended technical assistance for policy making support really impact decisions or simply gives legitimacy and cover for the government to pursue a political agenda rather than a real decentralization reform? According to one assessment of the decentralization reform it “is a largely domestically grounded and nationally developed transition” (Umland and Romanova, 2019). Despite these warnings and the increased resistance to forced amalgamation, the Ukrainian government proceeded with this decision in order to have amalgamated units covering all of Ukraine prior to the local government elections in October 2020, even though this timeframe seemed nearly impossible to accomplish. While it is difficult to always make direct connections between technical assistance and policy advice from international donor programs to beneficiary government policies and laws, there is no indication that these programs have impacted the progress of decentralization reform in Ukraine other than some analytical reports, capacity building and public information dissemination. There is little evidence that this technical support has had any significant or positive impact on the policy decisions that governments have made with regard to amalgamation in Academia Letters, July 2021 ©2021 by the author — Open Access — Distributed under CC BY 4.0 Corresponding Author: Glendal Wright, [email protected] Citation: Wright, G. (2021). Does Technical Support for Amalgamation of Local Governments Have an Impact? The Case of Ukraine. Academia Letters, Article 1909. https://doi.org/10.20935/AL1909. 4 the decentralization process. The failure of the Ukrainian oriented policy decision of initial voluntary amalgamation had to be reversed after five years and resorted to mandatory amalgamation, despite advice to the contrary. The Ukrainian policy-makers did not learn from the experiences from other countries or the research literature that demonstrated voluntary amalgamation had never succeeded (see Swianiewicz,2002, Swianiewicz, Gendzwill and Zardi, 2017, and Tavares, 2018) or that the financial benefits are realized (see Allers, Maarten; Geertsema, J. Biewe, 2016; Andrews, Rhys, 2013; Blesse, Sebastian; Baskaran, Thushyanthan, 2014; Blom-Hansen, Jens; Houlberg Kurt; Serritzlew, Soren; Treisman, Daniel, 2016; Lüchinger, Simon & Stutzer, Alois, 2002; Moisio, A. and R. Uusitalo, 2013; Steiner, Reto; Kaiser, Claire, 2017; Strebel, Michael A, 2018). The amalgamation effort in Ukraine is arguably one of the most expensive ever undertaken. Based on the programs identified, the international donor technical support probably exceeded $200m USD. For such a large amount of funding support, more impact from the donors on the policy decisions might have been expected and the results of the amalgamation more successful. Given this level of technical support it has to be said that much more should have been achieved. At the end of these five years, decentralization can only be said to have been partially implemented and there are many challenges ahead to come to a final completion. Academia Letters, July 2021 ©2021 by the author — Open Access — Distributed under CC BY 4.0 Corresponding Author: Glendal Wright, [email protected] Citation: Wright, G. (2021). Does Technical Support for Amalgamation of Local Governments Have an Impact? The Case of Ukraine. Academia Letters, Article 1909. https://doi.org/10.20935/AL1909. 5 References Allers, Maarten; Geertsema, J. 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