On September 4, 2019, the study “Inter-Community Cooperation: New Opportunities for Education and Healthcare” was presented in the conference room of Park-Hotel Golosievo in Kyiv. The study provides an insight into practices of cooperation agreements among territorial communities in Ukraine, as well as recommendations on such cooperation promotion.
The study was carried out by the Association for Community Self-Organization Assistance and the Foundation named after Hryhoriy Kakhymovych with the support of the International Renaissance Foundation.
Oleksiy Orlovsky, the head of the Democratic Practice Program, said the topic of the study lies at the intersection of three reforms the Foundation has long supported.
“In the near future, we shall expect the decentralization process in Ukraine to reinvigorate, as the President has instructed to complete the decentralization and community amalgamation process still in 2020. That is why I hope that today’s conference will help us form concrete recommendations not only for the relevant Ministry, but also for other state authorities, with the aim to successfully complete the decentralization process”, said Oleksiy Orlovsky in his the opening remarks.
The study authors Maria Dzupin and Oleksiy Kolesnikov believe that the potential of inter-community cooperation in the field of education and healthcare in Ukraine is still under-utilized. Inter-community cooperation in education and healthcare is not common: in almost half of the regions United territorial communities do not engage with each other at all, while those communities that do have some sort of cooperation, exercise it in its simplest forms.
The key reasons for this are as follows:
· low awareness of community leaders about opportunities of inter-municipal cooperation and their fear of new experiences;
· focus on integration and further development of the United territorial communities management and infrastructure;
· high degree of mistrust among communities and their general inability to negotiate and cooperate;
· lack of mechanisms in place to promote cooperation both at state and regional levels;
While there are no serious obstacles to inter-community cooperation in the legal framework, still, it would be good to adjust some of the legal provisions to facilitate inter-municipal engagement.
The study authors offer a number of innovations to boost inter-community collaboration:
· develop a legal mechanism to join existing communities by way of signing an agreement;
· develop a procedure to provide and use subsidies for education and healthcare within the framework of inter-community cooperation;
· develop a clear legal framework to allow transfer of state-owned facilities to legal entities bound by inter-municipal cooperation agreements;
· develop specific guidelines and templates of inter-municipal cooperation agreements in the field of education and healthcare.
The full text of the study is available at http://cooperation.acsa.com.ua/
The study was conducted by analyzing laws and legal instruments; agreements and practices of cooperation among territorial communities in Ukraine; expert survey of 23 experts; interviews of representatives of 12 communities exercising inter-municipal cooperation; and the relevant practices of Poland, Slovakia and Norway.
