Policy Work
Policy Reports
Parliamentary Strengthening in Ukraine: A Field Assessment for Learning, Evaluation and Research Activity II (LER II)], with Simon Conte, Graeme Robertson, Yuliya Shypilova, Kate Marple-Cantrell, Mariana Akyshina, and Kostiantyn Gieser. USAID. March 2020. 96 pages. Responsible for survey design and analysis. [Publisher Link]
Revolution and Reform in Ukraine: Evaluating Four Years of Reform, with Grigore Pop-Eleches (Princeton) and Graeme Robertson (UNC-Chapel Hill), PONARS Eurasia, July 2018. 70 pages. [Publisher Link]
Summary
In this volume, we assess the progress of reforms that Ukraine embarked on after its 2014 revolution and analyze the main factors that explain the successes and failures we see. We focus on a number of key areas—economic reform, governance and anti-corruption, security and criminal justice and language policy—and discuss the progress and challenges in each. The key to understanding patterns of relative success and failure, we argue, lies in understanding the interaction between Ukrainian civil society and the international community. We develop the idea of the "sandwich model" in which domestic civil society plays a crucial role in elaborating policy ideas and in policing progress in implementation, while the international community presses an often reluctant political elite into adopting reforms. The most progress in reforms has been made where cooperation between domestic civil society and international actors has been close and well-coordinated. In other areas, progress has been more limited. The "sandwich model" represents a new way of understanding how international and domestic actors can contribute to reform in a context where neither the government nor the opposition are unambiguously supportive of essential reforms. 