“Balance of local authority functions: Ukraine actualities in EU view”, Nr.S-PD-22-65

Project No.  S-PD-22-65             
Project title: „Balance of local authority functions: Ukraine actualities in EU view”
Project duration: from 2022-11-03 to 2024-10-31
Postdoctoral supervisor: prof. dr. Eglė Bilevičiūtė

Postdoctoral trainee: Alina Murtishcheva

Summary: The search for local self-government model is a common tendency for European countries as a matter of high importance for ensuring efficient governance as a guarantee of law governed state. Coordination of state authority and local self-government functioning is essential to rational distribution of public affairs and enable state to solve the most important questions at a time of economic, political, war challenges. Building democratic models of public administration determine the need to settle the role of local self-government, the principles on which this institution is organized and functions, its tasks, scope of responsibilities. Effective system of administrative supervision of local authorities and its liability are vital to ensure principle of constitutional legality.

Some European countries are focusing on decentralization of public administration, so reforming the system of local self-government is becoming a reform of decentralization, including changes in system of local self-government bodies, administrative and territorial reform, redistribution of powers and financial resources. This method was relevant for post-Soviet countries, which considered decentralization as a way to implement European standards, particularly, European Charter of Local Self-Government. Other countries’ experience demonstrates that ensuring of democratic principles may not exclude the tendency to centralization or recentralization as a process having replaced decentralization due to insufficient results of reforms. Both tendencies can be used to develop appropriate national model of public authority corresponding historical experience, territorial organization peculiarities, economic etc.

Therefore, further processes of transformation in the field of local self-government require comparative researches of such countries as Ukraine, Poland, Lithuania, Belgium, Great Britain, Italy, France in order to borrow best practices and develop a balanced model of local self-government to Ukraine, as the new candidate to EU.