European Union Support to Decentralisation Reform in Ukraine: a Peacebuilding Endeavour?

The Scholarly Article on Governance Reform was produced as part of the project “Whole-of-Society Conflict Prevention and Peacebuilding” (WOSCAP). It wants to contribute to the ongoing debate on the question of what role decentralisation can play in building sustainable peace, and under which conditions support to such reform
efforts can be successful. More specifically, it aims to analyse the EU’s capabilities to support decentralisation reform in Ukraine through a whole-of-society centred peacebuilding lens. This Scholarly Article builds on different debates in the academic and grey literature on themes such as decentralisation, peacebuilding, democratization, and statebuilding in order to lay the groundwork for the empirical analyses. The empirical data used builds largely on the case study report from Ukraine in the framework of the WOSCAP project, which is based on secondary literature and a substantive amount of interviews and fieldwork.