Governing future in the war? How anticipatory governance practices contribute to the resilience of local authorities in Ukraine

Ukraine revealed puzzling resilience in the face of the full-scale Russian invasion on 24 February 2022. Local authorities, in particular, continue to provide public services and respond to crises arising from Russian attacks on critical energy infrastructure and housing and massive internal displacement. This study examines how local authorities use anticipatory and collaborative governance, assisted by digital technologies, to ensure the effectiveness and legitimacy of their emergency responses. The study is based on a survey of 241 local authorities and five focus groups with representatives of local and regional authorities, including one with mayors, conducted in May – September 2022. It also uses comparable data from an analogous survey completed in 2021. We conducted these surveys in collaboration with the Association of Ukrainian Cities and the Congress of Local and Regional Authorities of the Council of Europe. The study shows that communities that are anticipating a crisis are not only able to maintain resilience but also realize new opportunities. Through flexible networks of personal acquaintance, local authorities mobilize local and external resources to respond to co-occurring crises too large to tackle alone. They also adapted pre-existing participatory institutions to wartime needs and revived horizontal inter-municipal partnerships to seek external resources. Vertical intergovernmental coordination has been weak, although critical to building resilience in a decentralized state. Digitalization and the use of data in policy-making proved to be useful under conditions of available data protection while becoming an Achilles heel if no proper data management was in place.