Source: The Conversation (Au and NZ) – By Tamara Krawchenko, Associate Professor, School of Public Administration, University of Victoria
The Congress of Local and Regional Authorities of the Council of Europe recently called for local and national authorities to work together to help Ukraine recover and rebuild four years after Russia’s full-scale invasion of the country.
The message is clear: cities and regions must lead, and their counterparts around the world should help them do it. The congress also calls on Russia to pay for the damage it has caused, pointing to frozen Russian assets worldwide as one source for those funds — an acknowledgment that recovery cannot wait for the war to end, since communities are already rebuilding under fire.
As a lead author of the report underpinning the congress’s call to action, I want to explain why it matters and why Canada, in particular, has both the track record and the responsibility to step up.
The scale of what needs to be done
The numbers are almost impossible to absorb. By the end of 2024, direct damage to Ukraine’s buildings and infrastructure had reached approximately US$176 billion, with more than 2.5 million households destroyed or damaged.
Total aggregate economic losses from the invasion are estimated at more than US$1.1 trillion. Nearly 6.8 million Ukrainians have also sought refuge abroad, the largest displacement of people in Europe since the Second World War.Behind every statistic is a community struggling to survive — a mayor trying to keep schools open under missile attacks; a municipal council managing hundreds of thousands of internally displaced persons with dwindling resources; a city engineer repairing the same water system for the third time after it was bombed yet again.
Local and regional authorities across Ukraine face these situations every day. And it is precisely because the challenges are so local — tied to specific communities and capacities — that the response must also be local.
Ukrainian decentralization reforms since 2014 have expanded the fiscal capacity of the country’s municipalities, enabling them to respond to the unprecedented shocks of war far more effectively than before. In fact, local budget revenues quintupled between 2014 and 2021.
Russia’s invasion disrupted these reforms.
Why city-to-city networks are different
The call to action by the congress asks local and regional authorities in Council of Europe member states to use “existing co-operation platforms and bilateral partnerships to offer practical support to their Ukrainian counterparts.”
It’s an appeal for cities that have solved difficult problems — managing mass displacement, rebuilding after disaster, reforming service delivery — to share what they know with Ukrainian cities doing the same under fire.
City-to-city partnerships are fundamentally different from top-down aid. They are peer relationships built on what scholars call horizontal assistance — the exchange of practical knowledge and structural social capital between cities navigating similar challenges.
Research on municipal technical exchanges, including a study of Seattle’s city-to-city delegations, shows these networks generate direct benefits: lower costs of accessing policy information, facilitation of collective action and long-term institutional ties that outlast any individual project cycle.
As the researchers who conducted the Seattle research point out, the exchanges “disseminate information, and through the personal relations they initiate, have a potential for influencing future resource decisions among cities and countries.”
This matters enormously for Ukraine. The most effective city networks are those oriented toward concrete policy transfer such as sharing regulatory frameworks, governance tools and public administration practices.
Ukrainian cities need exactly this: working models of how to manage housing allocation for displaced persons, how to deliver trauma-informed social services and how to rebuild energy infrastructure with built-in resilience.
Canadian municipal engineers who might advise a Kharkiv counterpart on water system resilience wouldn’t just be delivering aid — they’d be sharing hard-won professional knowledge among equals. That knowledge sticks in ways that consultant reports rarely do.
The lessons of past reconstruction
History offers clear guidance on what works. Comparative analysis of post-war and post-disaster reconstruction experiences identifies local community engagement and bottom-up leadership as the single most consistent factor separating successful from failed reconstruction.
Top-down donor interventions that bypassed local institutions, as in Iraq after 2003, produced waste, duplication and projects misaligned with community priorities. By contrast, programs that genuinely incorporated recipient input — like the post-Second World War Marshall Plan — achieved lasting results.
The review by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) of Ukraine’s recovery architecture echoes this: Ukraine’s reconstruction ecosystem remains fragmented, with co-ordination gaps among federal government departments, international donors and local authorities.
City-to-city networks can help fill that gap at the most practical level by channelling directly applicable knowledge to the local officials who most need it.
Read more: Engineering hope: how I made it my mission to help rebuild Ukraine’s critical infrastructure
Canada’s proven record, and its moment
Canada has been here before. Beginning in 2010, the Federation of Canadian Municipalities (FCM), financed by the Canadian government through Global Affairs Canada, built exactly this kind of peer network in Ukraine through the Partnership for Local Economic Development and Democratic Governance.
The $19.5-million, six-year initiative worked directly with 16 Ukrainian cities to strengthen local democracy, support small and medium-sized businesses and advance decentralization.
FCM’s municipal experts worked alongside counterparts in cities like Lviv and Dnipro, co-publishing Ukraine’s first municipal guide to local economic development and helping local governments design collaborative regional projects. A key partner throughout was the Association of Ukrainian Cities, a key municipal advocacy organization.
That program ended, but the relationships it built did not. And the decentralization reforms it supported are now widely credited — by the congress’s call to action itself, the OECD and scholars of Ukrainian resilience — with giving Ukrainian local authorities the capacity to respond as effectively as they have to the shocks of war.
The case for reinvestment
The congress explicitly notes in its call to action that decentralization reforms “have played a crucial role in Ukraine’s wartime resilience.” That is, in part, a legacy of Canada’s investment.
A new, scaled-up commitment through FCM building on existing relationships with the Association of Ukrainian Cities — drawing on FCM’s international programs expertise and connecting Canadian municipal professionals to their Ukrainian peers across the priority domains the resolution identifies (like in housing, social and mental health supports, economic recovery, emergency management, community energy and citizen participation) — would represent a return to a proven formula.
The congress’s call to action urges deeper, more focused work on local recovery and reconstruction. City-to-city partnerships stand out as one of the most cost-effective and sustainable tools: they share practical knowledge that endures, strengthen institutions over the long term and recognize Ukrainian cities as active participants in their own reconstruction.
Canada helped build local government capacity in Ukraine before the war. The Council of Europe’s Congress has now called on the world to do so again. Canada should answer that call.
– ref. Cities helping cities rebuild: How local partnerships are shaping Ukraine’s recovery – https://theconversation.com/cities-helping-cities-rebuild-how-local-partnerships-are-shaping-ukraines-recovery-280205
