Strategic Planning in the Reformed Local Government in Ukraine. An Example of the Herca Municipality in the Chernivtsi Oblast

Abstract

Reforming public administration is a complex and lengthy process, especially in so-called transition countries. Practically, for the first twenty years after regaining independence, Ukraine was only creating the foundations of a decentralized public administration, partially combining Western models and the structures of the Soviet administration that had been functioning for decades. It was only in the second decade of the 2000s that a milestone was made towards a significant reconstruction of the structure and functions of public administration, guided by the standards of Western democracies. The culmination of the process of reforming the public sector was the creation of local government at the community level. Along with the process of creating independent territorial units, a need arose to formulate long-term development plans as the basic instruments of social and economic development policy at the local level. This process in many cases was and is supported by the activity and experience of Polish institutions implementing various projects in Ukraine, the purpose of which is to develop a development strategy for territorial units. The aim of this article is to present the conditions of territorial decentralization in Ukraine after regaining independence in the early 1990s and the results of the strategic project implemented in 2021 by the employees of the Department of Public Administration of the Institute of Political Sciences and Administration of UMCS. The main product of the implemented project was the development of the Herca Municipality Development Strategy in the Chernivtsi Oblast in Ukraine, based on the participatory-expert model. The results presented below refer in particular to the description of the process of elaborating the development strategy and the conclusions of the strategic analysis carried out.