Policy Translation and Resilience of Institutional Change: The Europeanisation of Ukraine’s Natural Gas Market

Abstract

Speaker: Ihor Moshenets (Central European University) Discussant: Inna Melnykovska (European University Institute) How does competition among different clusters of political and economic elites shape the durability of externally induced institutional change—and, consequently, the resilience of policy transfer amid macropolitical shocks? Empirically, this study explains the political contestation surrounding the Europeanisation of Ukraine’s natural gas market after 2011, following the country’s accession to the Energy Community. The analysis compares the differentiated institutional outcomes of three subsectoral reforms intended to introduce an EU-style liberalised energy-market model in Ukraine: the unbundling of the vertically integrated state-owned monopoly; the opening of the residential heating market to competition; and the establishment of independent regulatory oversight. In addition, the study examines how the trajectories of these subsectoral reforms shifted after Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022 and the subsequent wartime expansion of state market regulation. This serves to illuminate the local embeddedness and situational adaptation of previously adopted institutional changes. The study’s main theoretical contribution lies in explaining the contextual resilience of externally driven policy reforms by integrating insights from the policy-translation literature—which highlights the centrality of local agency in enabling policy transfer—with historical-institutionalist research on critical junctures.