Introduction

1Ukraine’s decentralization reform launched in 2014 has been widely framed as a state-building and service-delivery modernization project that aimed to bring decision-making, resources, and accountability closer to citizens through empowered local governments and territorial communities (Romanova & Umland, 2019; Krawchenko, 2023). However, Russia’s full-scale invasion in 2022 has forced Ukraine to govern under sustained uncertainty and security pressure. In this environment, emergency legislation and wartime imperatives can legitimately concentrate authority while simultaneously increasing local responsibilities for ensuring the continuity of basic services and resilience. This creates a core governance dilemma: How can the gains and logic of decentralization and community initiative be preserved while operating within a wartime governance environment that can incentivize central steering, rapid command decisions, and risk-averse administrative behavior?

2In broader scholarship, Ukraine’s post-2014 decentralization has been analyzed as part of a post-socialist institutional reform trajectory with a distinctly Europeanizing direction. This trajectory links local self-government strengthening to democratization, state-building, and (increasingly) EU-oriented governance alignment. This literature emphasizes both the reform’s early achievements and the continuing constraints created by uneven administrative capacity, multi-level coordination problems, and legacy institutional practices that do not disappear during crisis (Rabinovych et al., 2025; (Keudel & Huss, 2023a). Locating the Ukrainian case within this post-socialist/Europeanizing reform stream is important for policy relevance. At the same time, it raises a practical question that becomes especially acute under wartime conditions: Which community-led governance instruments can function credibly when uncertainty, fiduciary pressure, and security constraints reshape participation, oversight, and intergovernmental relations?

3This article examines that dilemma through the lens of community-led and community-driven development approaches and asks what lessons may be realistically drawn from South Korea’s experience of state-supported community mobilization, commonly associated with the Saemaul Undong (New Village Movement), as well as from related contemporary donor-supported projects inspired by similar principles. The paper does not treat Saemaul Undong as a ready-made “model” to be copied. Instead, it treats it as an institutional template whose elements may or may not be transferable depending on incentives, administrative capacity, financing arrangements, and legitimacy conditions at multiple levels of governance.

4The study pursues two linked research questions. First, under wartime constraints, what governance and institutional conditions shape the feasibility of community-led development and local problem-solving in Ukraine’s territorial communities? Second, which elements commonly associated with the Saemaul Undong experience and with community-driven development practice are potentially translatable to the Ukrainian recovery context, and what risks arise when institutional “success stories” are moved across settings?

5The paper’s contribution is threefold. Empirically, it synthesizes qualitative evidence from interviews and documentary materials to map how community initiative, local government capacity, and higher-level steering interact under uncertainty. Conceptually, it integrates the community-driven development debate with a neo-institutional and policy-transfer perspective, emphasizing institutional translation rather than blueprint transfer (March & Olsen, 1984; North, 1990; Dolowitz & Marsh, 2000; Scott, 2014). Practically, it derives a set of translation conditions and design cautions relevant for donors and policymakers seeking to support community-led recovery while avoiding common pitfalls such as elite capture, depoliticization of conflict, and donor-driven compliance rituals (Cooke & Kothari, 2001; Platteau, 2004; Mansuri & Rao, 2013). Concretely, the paper traces (i) how communities and local governments coordinate priorities, (ii) how resources are allocated and monitored, (iii) how higher-level steering interacts with local discretion, and (iv) how wartime uncertainty reshapes incentives for participation, transparency, and local leadership. The paper links these mechanisms to design conditions for feasible institutional translation.

6The article proceeds as follows. Section 2 develops the theoretical framework, clarifying (i) the evolution and critiques of community-driven development, (ii) decentralization debates and central–local accountability trade-offs, (iii) wartime governance constraints, and (iv) a translation-oriented lens for assessing institutional transfer. Section 3 explains the methodology and data. The subsequent sections present findings and discuss implications for recovery-oriented local governance and community initiative.

Theoretical framework and literature review

Community-Driven Development: Evolution, Promises, and Critiques

7Community-driven development (CDD) refers to development approaches that shift substantial control over planning decisions and investment resources to community-level actors, typically with facilitation and financing support from the state or donors (Asian Development Bank, 2006). The rationale is institutional as much as technical: by creating participatory procedures and local control mechanisms, CDD aims to improve targeting, reduce information problems, and strengthen citizen–state relations through practical engagement in collective choice and oversight (Mansuri & Rao, 2004; Wong & Guggenheim, 2018).

8However, the CDD literature also documents persistent tensions between participation as a governance ideal and participation as an operational requirement. Critical scholarship argues that participation can become a depoliticized managerial technology, where complex power relations are reframed as technical “community needs” and where compliance with participatory forms substitutes for substantive accountability (Cooke & Kothari, 2001; Hickey & Mohan, 2004). Related development critiques emphasize how donor interventions may reproduce top-down problem definitions and reshape local politics through seemingly neutral “capacity building” and “empowerment” programs (Ferguson, 1994; Escobar, 1995; Li, 2007). In such cases, participation may coexist with unequal bargaining power, selective representation, and informal gatekeeping that limits the emancipatory potential of “community control.”

9A major empirical debate concerns whether CDD systematically changes local institutions and social relations, or whether it mainly delivers local public goods under certain conditions. Experimental and quasi-experimental studies have found that CDD can improve the delivery of small-scale infrastructure and increase meeting activity, but impacts on deeper governance outcomes such as accountability norms, inclusion, and local power hierarchies are often mixed or limited (Casey et al., 2012; Humphreys et al., 2019; Mansuri & Rao, 2013; Wong & Guggenheim, 2018). These findings reinforce a key lesson for institutional transfer: CDD outcomes depend heavily on design features, facilitation quality, and the broader political economy context rather than on participation “as such.”

10Two risks are especially salient for CDD in fragile and high-stakes environments. The first is elite capture, where local elites or brokers dominate information, agenda-setting, and resource allocation, converting “community choice” into a legitimizing narrative for unequal distribution (Platteau, 2004). The second is donor dependence and proceduralism, where project incentives prioritize reporting compliance and short-term outputs over durable institutional change and locally owned problem-solving (Mansuri & Rao, 2013; Bennett & D’Onofrio, 2015). In post-conflict and conflict-affected contexts, these risks intensify because social trust can be low, security pressures can constrain open deliberation, and local institutions may face urgent workload expansion without stable financing and staffing (Bennett & D’Onofrio, 2015).

11For the purposes of this paper, CDD is treated not as a single “model” but as a family of institutional arrangements that attempt to (i) create legitimate local arenas for collective choice, (ii) allocate resources through rule-bound procedures, and (iii) generate accountability through transparency and oversight. Whether these arrangements function depends on political incentives, administrative capacity, and the alignment between formal rules and local norms.

Decentralization Debates and the CDD interface

12Decentralization debates typically begin with fiscal federalism arguments that local governments can better match public goods to local preferences and information, potentially increasing allocative efficiency (Oates, 1972; Tiebout, 1956). Yet the political economy literature has long emphasized that decentralization also creates new accountability problems: local officials may be easier to capture, local inequality may translate into unequal political voice, and local administrative capacity may be insufficient for newly devolved responsibilities (Prud’homme, 1995; Bardhan & Mookherjee, 2006; Faguet, 2014). Empirically, decentralization can improve responsiveness where local political competition is meaningful and information flows are robust, but it can also deepen territorial disparities when fiscal equalization is weak or when local patronage dominates allocation (Faguet, 2014; Bardhan & Mookherjee, 2006).

13CDD frequently appears as a complement to decentralization because it promises to strengthen local accountability and citizen engagement through participatory budgeting, community oversight committees, and deliberative forums (Mansuri & Rao, 2004; Asian Development Bank, 2006). In practice, however, CDD can also compete with decentralization if it creates parallel project institutions that bypass elected local governments, re-centralize discretion in donor-managed rules, or reward communities for compliance with external templates rather than for locally negotiated priorities (Mansuri & Rao, 2013; Wong & Guggenheim, 2018). This is why the institutional relationship between CDD mechanisms and local self-government structures is decisive: CDD arrangements can either reinforce democratic decentralization by increasing transparency and citizen voice, or weaken it by displacing political accountability into project administration.

14A related strand of decentralization scholarship highlights that “local” is not automatically democratic. Representation and accountability depend on how authority is constituted, how information circulates, and what sanctioning mechanisms exist (Ribot, 2002). This point aligns directly with CDD critiques: participation mechanisms do not necessarily produce inclusion unless they confront informal power and ensure credible representation, especially for vulnerable groups.

15A complementary strand of scholarship situates decentralization and local democratization in post-socialist Central and Eastern Europe within broader Europeanizing institutional reforms. This literature highlights how reforms unfold through institutional legacies and layering (rather than clean replacement), producing persistent center–local coordination frictions, uneven subnational capacity, and recurring tensions between autonomy and oversight. These tensions are often intensified by EU-alignment incentives, conditionality, and multi-level policy instruments that reshape accountability and administrative routines (Hughes et al., 2005). Comparative accounts of CEE local government reform and territorial governance further suggest that decentralization outcomes depend not only on formal devolution but also on whether new participatory and fiduciary practices become embedded in everyday administrative life, rather than operating as parallel “project” structures (Swianiewicz, 2014). Using this post-socialist/Europeanizing lens strengthens the policy relevance of the Ukrainian case because it clarifies why externally supported community-driven mechanisms may face both enabling conditions (reform momentum, stronger municipalities) and path-dependent constraints (legacy practices, compliance burdens, recentralizing counter-pressures) in the post-2014 reform trajectory (Romanova & Umland, 2019), even before the additional stressors of wartime governance and martial-law adaptations are introduced (Rabinovych et al., 2025).

2.3. Central–local Relations under Wartime Uncertainty

16Wartime governance introduces a special constraint to both decentralization and CDD: legitimate security imperatives and emergency legislation can concentrate decision-making authority, accelerate executive discretion, and compress deliberative processes. At the same time, wartime conditions often increase the functional load on local governments and communities, which must deliver services, manage displacement pressures, coordinate volunteers, and maintain basic infrastructure under uncertainty. This produces a governance environment in which decentralization trajectories may temporarily shift toward central steering while relying on local implementation and improvisation. This emergency “central steering / local delivery” configuration—especially under martial law—has been widely discussed in the Ukraine-specific governance literature and in broader work on decentralization under extreme events and crisis governance (Rabinovych et al., 2025; Keudel & Huss, 2023b; Lago-Peñas et al., 2025).

17For institutional analysis, the key implication is that decentralization and community participation cannot be evaluated as if they operated under normal political conditions. Wartime environments reshape incentives by increasing the cost of policy failure, discouraging administrative experimentation, and privileging speed and control. These environments also affect legitimacy dynamics: citizens may accept stronger central authority for security reasons, but also demand visible competence and fair distribution from local authorities who are closest to everyday hardships. In such contexts, the question is less whether centralization is “good” or “bad,” and more how multi-level governance can maintain accountability, prevent opportunistic capture, and keep recovery-oriented local initiative compatible with emergency constraints.

2.4 Analytical lens: Institutions, Transfer, and Translation conditions

18To assess the feasibility of learning from external experience, this paper adopts a neo-institutional stance in which institutions are understood as a combination of formal rules, informal norms, and incentive structures that shape actor behavior across levels of governance (March & Olsen, 1984; North, 1990; Ostrom, 1990; Scott, 2014). From this perspective, CDD performance is not a property of participation procedures alone. Rather it is a joint product of rules (who decides and how), incentives (what is rewarded and sanctioned), and capacities (who can actually implement and monitor decisions).

19This stance is paired with a policy-transfer and institutional-translation approach. Policy transfer research shows that governments and donors often borrow policies, instruments, and narratives from elsewhere, but transfer can fail when it is driven by symbolic legitimacy, weak diagnosis, or misfit between borrowed mechanisms and local institutions (Dolowitz & Marsh, 2000; Benson & Jordan, 2011). Translation perspectives further emphasize that ideas change as they move: “models” are edited, simplified, and reinterpreted by intermediaries, producing hybrid arrangements rather than replicas (Czarniawska & Joerges, 1996). This is particularly relevant for development-reform narratives such as CDD and Saemaul Undong-inspired mobilization, which travel globally through donor programs and success-story discourse.

20Accordingly, the paper evaluates institutional learning through a set of translation conditions. These conditions synthesize insights from neo-institutional analysis of rules and enforcement (North, 1990; Ostrom, 1990; Scott, 2014), policy transfer and translation research (Dolowitz & Marsh, 2000; Benson & Jordan, 2011; Czarniawska & Joerges, 1996), and CDD evaluation findings on capacity, capture, and proceduralism (Mansuri & Rao, 2013; Platteau, 2004). First, problem fit matters: mobilization mechanisms that were designed to solve one governance bottleneck may be ineffective or harmful if the receiving system’s binding constraint is different. Second, political settlement and legitimacy matter: community initiative requires credible local authority and perceived fairness to avoid capture and factionalism. Third, administrative capacity and fiscal reliability matter: without predictable funding, staffing, and basic procurement competence, participatory plans risk becoming performative. Fourth, accountability architecture matters: transparency and oversight must be linked to sanctioning power, otherwise participation can become ritualized. Fifth, uncertainty conditions matter: in wartime or post-war recovery, design must anticipate risk, urgency, and fragmented information, prioritizing simple rules, clear mandates, and resilient coordination mechanisms.

21Taken together, the literature suggests that the main analytical task is not to identify whether “CDD” or “Saemaul Undong” is preferable as a model, but to specify which institutional components can plausibly reinforce Ukraine’s local governance under uncertainty. The empirical sections therefore focus on (i) how communities and local governments coordinate priorities, (ii) how resources are allocated and monitored, (iii) how higher-level steering interacts with local discretion, and (iv) how wartime uncertainty reshapes incentives for participation, transparency, and local leadership. This framework also highlights likely failure modes, especially elite capture, donor-driven proceduralism, and parallel structures that weaken democratic accountability.

Research design and methodology

Research Design

22This study uses a qualitative, theory-guided design to assess the institutional translation of CDD mechanisms to a wartime and post-war recovery environment. Rather than treating Saemaul Undong as a transferable blueprint, the study examines which governance elements may travel across contexts and under what conditions, with particular attention to multilevel coordination, leadership and collective action, and integrity and accountability safeguards under uncertainty (North, 1990; Ostrom, 1990; Dolowitz & Marsh, 2000; Benson & Jordan, 2011; Scott, 2014).

Data Sources and Scope

23The analysis draws on two complementary sources of evidence. First, a structured documentary review was conducted to situate the institutional environment of recovery governance and decentralization in Ukraine and to clarify formal requirements relevant to donor financing and European integration. These materials include policy and strategy documents, recovery planning frameworks, and program documentation relevant to regional development and community-level projects. Second, the empirical core of the study consists of 20 semi-structured expert interviews conducted between April 15, 2024 and June 13, 2024. The interviews were used to elicit stakeholder assessments of feasibility, risks, and design requirements for community-led recovery mechanisms, and to identify the institutional constraints that shape implementation under wartime conditions.

Sampling Strategy and Participants

24Participants were selected through purposive, criterion-based sampling to ensure coverage of perspectives directly relevant to community-led recovery, regional development, and institutional design questions (Patton, 2002). The sampling strategy aimed to include stakeholders who could speak to (i) local governance and regional development practice in Ukraine, (ii) donor-supported community development programming, and (iii) the Saemaul Undong experience and its contemporary policy interpretation. The final interview set included both Ukrainian stakeholders (recipient-context perspectives) and Korean stakeholders (source-context perspectives), encompassing academic, policy, and practitioner roles. Interviews are referenced in the findings using anonymized identifiers to protect confidentiality.

Interview Protocol, Analytical Propositions, and Evaluation Criteria

25The interview guide was designed to generate comparable judgments across participants while allowing contextual elaboration. Questions were organized around four clusters: (1) governance and multilevel coordination mechanisms for community-led recovery projects; (2) leadership development, social cohesion, and participation sustainability; (3) incentives, monitoring, and accountability safeguards (including risks of capture and procedural compliance); and (4) compatibility with donor fiduciary requirements and European integration direction. Additional prompts explored how wartime governance conditions alter the incentives and feasibility of participatory and decentralized implementation arrangements.

26The analysis was guided by analytical propositions derived from the theoretical framework (Yin, 2018) and refined during analysis. In brief, the propositions were that: (P1) CDD-inspired mechanisms are more likely to be feasible when treated as institutional building blocks (authority allocation, monitoring routines, enforceable rules) rather than as culturally specific mobilization narratives; (P2) the feasibility of community-led recovery depends on multilevel coordination arrangements that preserve local agenda-setting while ensuring auditability and enforcement capacity; and (P3) wartime and post-war uncertainty increases the importance of “integrity-by-construction” design—transparent procedures, grievance channels, and credible sanctions—because informal power and urgency can otherwise amplify capture risks.

27Based on these propositions, interview evidences were evaluated using a consistent set of criteria: institutional compatibility (fit with existing local government structures and rules), administrative capacity requirements, legitimacy and participation risks, accountability architecture (transparency, auditability, sanctioning power), and robustness under uncertainty (simplicity of procedures, resilience of coordination, and adaptability to changing constraints).

Thematic Analysis Procedure

28Interview data were analyzed using reflexive thematic analysis (Braun & Clarke, 2006; Braun & Clarke, 2019). Coding followed a hybrid logic combining deductive and inductive steps. A deductive coding frame was derived from the analytical framework (multilevel governance, leadership and cohesion, incentives and accountability, and external-financing compatibility), while inductive coding was used to capture themes that emerged from the interview material, including context-specific constraints and implementation risks.

29The analytic steps were as follows: (1) familiarization with transcripts and notes; (2) initial coding across all interviews; (3) consolidation of codes into a working codebook and iterative refinement through constant comparison across interviews; (4) development of candidate themes and sub-themes; (5) review of themes against the coded dataset to ensure internal coherence and distinctiveness; and (6) definition and naming of themes and their linkage to propositions and evaluation criteria. A summary table (presented in the Findings section) documents the mapping from illustrative codes to themes and to the analytical propositions to make the inference chain transparent.

Background and findings: adapting saemeul-inspired community-driven development to wartime and post-war ukraine

30This section separates (i) contextual background derived from policy and secondary sources and (ii) interview-based findings that specify the conditions under which a Saemaul-inspired community-driven model could be translated into Ukraine’s recovery governance.

Background: Decentralization Achievements, Unresolved Constraints, and Wartime Governance

31Ukraine’s decentralization reforms (2015–2020) expanded local responsibilities and fiscal autonomy and, during the full-scale war, local self-government has repeatedly demonstrated operational resilience in emergency conditions (Keudel & Huss, 2023a; U-LEAD with Europe, 2023). At the same time, institutional capacity remains uneven across municipalities and sectors, and transparency and integrity risks differ substantially by locality, which matters for any community-driven recovery model that channels resources through local actors (Transparency International Ukraine, 2022; OECD, 2022). Under martial law, governance is additionally shaped by heightened uncertainty, emergency decision-making, and security constraints that affect participation, planning cycles, and oversight capacity. Recent Ukrainian policy discussions also emphasize that regional recovery governance must differentiate approaches by security status and territorial risk, including macro-regional distinctions that remain relevant beyond the ‘hot phase’ of war (CSI, 2024).

Background: Institutional ‘fit’ - Mapping Saemaul Architecture onto Ukraine’s Recovery and Regional-Development System

32Saemaul Undong combined a national-level policy signal with structured multi-level promotion (national–provincial–community), a disciplined training and leadership pipeline, and performance-linked incentives that encouraged collective action at village level (Choe, 2005; Yi & Choi, 2013; Rieznik & Lee, 2024). For Ukraine, an analogous architecture is conceptually plausible because regional development policy already rests on formal coordination mechanisms and planning instruments, including the state framework for regional policy and multi-level implementation arrangements (Verkhovna Rada, 2015; OECD, 2018). Moreover, EU-linked recovery programming (including the Ukraine Facility) places explicit weight on decentralization, citizen engagement tools, transparent governance, and regional development planning - elements that overlap with the governance logic of a Saemaul-type model (Ukraine Facility, 2024; OECD, 2022). However, the existence of institutions ‘on paper’ does not guarantee implementation coherence: municipal capacity, inter-agency coordination, and monitoring systems determine whether such counterparts can function as an effective promotion network in practice (OECD, 2022; United Nations, 2007). Table 1, below, provides a compact functional mapping of Saemaul governance components to potential Ukrainian counterparts. For an overview of the evolving vertical division of responsibilities and capacity challenges across levels of government relevant to this mapping, see OECD’s work on decentralization and regional/municipal governance in Ukraine (OECD, 2018; OECD, 2022).

Table 1. Functional mapping of Saemaul governance components to potential Ukrainian counterparts

Saemaul component	Core function	Potential Ukrainian counterpart / entry point	Translation condition under uncertainty
Multi-level promotion system (national-regional-community)	Coordination + implementation discipline	Inter-ministerial coordination; oblast-level coordination; Regional Development Agencies	Clear mandates, monitoring routines, realistic staffing; avoid purely ‘on paper’ counterparts
Leadership training pipeline	Local facilitation and mobilization capacity	Community leaders and starostas; municipal project teams; training hubs	Training linked to integrity, procurement, grievance handling; ongoing coaching
Participatory planning arenas	Legitimate priority-setting and ownership	General meetings; participatory budgeting instruments	Security-sensitive formats; inclusion rules; transparent selection criteria
Incentives and co-financing	Collective action + sustainability	Local co-financing; maintenance plans; municipal budgeting routines	Predictable funding and maintenance commitments to reduce donor dependence
Transparency and auditability routines	Integrity safeguards	Open-data disclosure of selection/procurement; grievance channels	Independent oversight capacity; enforceable sanctions; locality risk profiling
Sequenced piloting	Learning-by-doing under uncertainty	Pilot hromadas selected by security status/capacity	Macro-regional differentiation; phased scaling with stop/go criteria

Source: Authors’ synthesis based on Saemaul literature and Ukrainian policy documents

Results: Interview-Based Themes on Adaptation Conditions under Uncertainty

33The thematic analysis of 20 expert interviews yielded four major themes (summarized in Table 2). Below we elaborate each theme with supporting evidence from the interviews and situate them within the adaptation conditions framework. Sections 4.1-4.2 provide documentary and literature-informed background needed to interpret the case; from Section 4.3 onward, the evidence and claims are grounded in the 20 expert interviews and their thematic coding, with the code-to-theme audit trail shown in Table 2. Table 2 summarizes how recurrent codes were aggregated into themes and linked to analytical propositions for institutional translation.

Table 2. Code-to-theme mapping: themes, adaptation conditions, and implications

Illustrative codes	Theme	Adaptation condition	Implication for a Saemaul-inspired model
Security status of territories; macro-regions; proximity to frontline/borders	Wartime uncertainty requires differentiated governance	Sequence pilots by security macro-regions; plan with contingency windows	Start in ‘rear support’ areas; build scalable routines before expansion (CSI, 2024).
Coordination commission; regional development agencies; local planning instruments	Institutional counterparts exist but are capacity-sensitive	Define mandates, decision rights, and reporting lines across levels	Treat the promotion network as a governance reform, not only a project pipeline (cf. Verkhovna Rada, 2015; OECD, 2022).
Planning vs reality; donor-driven projects stop after funding ends	Donor dependence and sustainability risk	Design co-financing, maintenance, and exit strategy from the start	Avoid short-cycle ‘projectization’; embed routines into municipal budgeting (cf. Bennett & D’Onofrio, 2015).
Clan-oligarchic penetration; ‘mafias’ in some communities; feudal fragmentation risk	Informal institutions and elite capture	Strengthen integrity safeguards and community oversight	Prioritize transparency tools and monitoring to reduce capture (cf. World Bank, 2005; Transparency International Ukraine, 2022).
Toloka tradition; war rallied population; social capital; mutual assistance; starosta role	Cultural translation and local leadership	Anchor collective action in existing practices and trusted local roles	Use elected legitimate local intermediaries (e.g., starostas) and revive mutual-aid repertoires (Decentralization, 2018).
Need for education and training; Korean emphasis on confidence and ‘we can do it’	Training and leadership pipeline	Institutionalize training and peer-learning as a core governance instrument	Build a scalable training system (regional hubs + village-level facilitation) (cf. Rieznik & Lee, 2024).

Source: Authors’ synthesis based on literature

Uncertainty, Security, and the Limits of Uniform Decentralization Trajectories

34Across interviews, experts emphasized that ‘one-size-fits-all’ community programming is unrealistic as long as territorial risks remain heterogeneous. Security status shapes whether communities can convene assemblies, keep staff in place, and supervise procurement and implementation. This reinforces the need for a territorially differentiated approach in which recovery CDD pilots are sequenced by security macro-regions and adapted to displacement and mobility constraints (CSI, 2024). Respondents described practical barriers created by displacement, staff turnover, and limits on convening broad gatherings, which together reduce the feasibility of deliberative routines in high-risk territories. They therefore recommended sequencing: piloting participatory CDD mechanisms first in relatively secure areas, while using simplified, auditable procedures and remote participation tools where physical meetings are not feasible. Several interviewees also noted that regional coordination and monitoring capacity must be strengthened to prevent uneven implementation across communities.

Why Ukraine Can Adapt - Conditional on Governance Capacity and Integrity Safeguards

35In discussing leadership, several respondents referred to the need for locally legitimate ‘New Village leaders’ (community leaders with facilitation and coordination roles comparable to Saemaul leadership functions) rather than a Korea-specific title. Interviewees generally agreed that decentralization created an enabling scaffold - local authorities have experience coordinating services and mobilizing community responses, including during wartime, which supports the feasibility of a Saemaul-inspired model (Keudel & Huss, 2023b). Yet they also warned against overly optimistic assumptions: uneven capacity and integrity risks mean that adaptation depends on transparent allocation rules, monitoring, and clear accountability across levels. Consequently, the model’s ‘why’ should be stated conditionally: Ukraine can adapt the model where (and when) municipalities have sufficient administrative capacity, trusted intermediaries, and enforceable safeguards that reduce elite capture and donor dependence (World Bank, 2005; Transparency International Ukraine, 2022; Bennett & D’Onofrio, 2015). Ukrainian interviewees stressed that leadership functions are legitimacy-based: effective facilitators must be trusted locally and able to translate community priorities into administratively feasible projects. Korean practitioners emphasized structured training and mentoring, arguing that leadership pipelines help sustain participation beyond single project cycles. Both groups highlighted that leadership roles should be embedded in clear accountability rules (disclosure, rotation, and conflict-of-interest safeguards) to reduce personalistic control and capture risks.

Cultural Potential and Institutional Translation

36The study did not conduct a separate ethnographic or survey-based mapping of ‘cultural potential’ across all Ukrainian regions. Instead, cultural-adaptation potential was assessed through expert interviews that repeatedly pointed to observable repertoires of collective action such as mutual aid, volunteerism, and local assemblies, as well as the wartime revival of shared practices such as Toloka. Toloka refers to a traditional Ukrainian practice of voluntary collective work where community members gather to help accomplish labor-intensive tasks (e.g., building, harvest, repairs) and the term is often used more broadly to denote grassroots solidarity and cooperative action. These findings support a cautious but affirmative claim: institutional translation is more plausible when the program’s participation routines align with existing social practices and when local leadership roles (including starostas or analogous community intermediaries) are perceived as legitimate (Decentralization, 2018; Rieznik & Lee, 2024). Interviewees pointed to mutual-aid practices and wartime volunteerism as cultural resources that can support collective action, but also emphasized that these repertoires vary across regions and are sensitive to conflict intensity and displacement. Accordingly, cultural fit should be treated as a diagnostic input to piloting rather than an assumed constant, with rapid assessments of local associations, participation histories, and conflict dynamics informing program design. This implies that a national framework should allow flexible participation modalities while preserving minimum integrity standards.

New Trends in Saemaul Undong and Relevance for Contemporary Ukraine

37Saemaul Undong has evolved from a nationally bounded modernization program into a more flexible ‘development template’ used in international cooperation and adapted to diverse institutional environments. More recent interpretations place stronger emphasis on capacity-building, training and knowledge diffusion, partnership with civil society, and the translation of participation routines into different political-administrative settings rather than replicating Korea’s original political economy (Yun & Woo, 2009; Yang, 2017; Rieznik & Lee, 2024). For Ukraine, this evolution is consequential because it supports an adaptation logic that prioritizes institutional learning, integrity safeguards, and locally legitimate leadership over the simple replication of a strong-state, centralized implementation style.

Implications for implementation

38To address concerns about feasibility and the limits of external intervention, the model should be operationalized as a bounded co-governance arrangement rather than an open-ended ‘external management’ scheme. First, select pilot territories using a security-sensitive territorial approach and specify ‘minimum conditions’ (basic staffing, procurement capacity, public disclosure routines) for participation (CSI, 2024; OECD, 2022). Second, establish a clear division of labor: national actors provide a policy mandate and monitoring framework, while local governments and community bodies lead participatory project selection and implementation within transparent rules (Verkhovna Rada, 2015; Decentralization, 2018). Third, incorporate sustainability mechanisms—co-financing, maintenance plans, and local budgeting routines—to reduce donor dependence and ensure continuity after external support ends (Bennett & D’Onofrio, 2015). Finally, embed integrity safeguards and open-data transparency tools to mitigate elite capture and strengthen public trust, recognizing that risks vary by locality (World Bank, 2005; Transparency International Ukraine, 2022). These steps operationalize the translation conditions discussed in Section 2 – problem fit, legitimacy, administrative capacity, accountability architecture, and robustness under uncertainty – and reduce the risk of symbolic policy transfer (Dolowitz and Marsh, 2000; Benson and Jordan, 2011; North, 1990).

Discussion

39This study set out to assess the feasibility of translating Saemaul-inspired community-driven development (CDD) mechanisms to Ukraine’s wartime and post-war recovery governance environment. Rather than treating Saemaul Undong as a replicable blueprint, the analysis adopted a translation perspective, emphasizing institutional fit, incentive structures, and enforcement capacity under uncertainty (North, 1990; Ostrom, 1990; Dolowitz and Marsh, 2000; Benson and Jordan, 2011; Czarniawska and Joerges, 1996). The interview-derived themes (Section 4) sharpen what the study adds to the CDD and decentralization debates: the relevant question is not whether participatory community development is normatively desirable, but which institutional building blocks can plausibly strengthen local recovery governance while limiting capture and donor-driven proceduralism (Mansuri & Rao, 2013; Platteau, 2004; Cooke & Kothari, 2001; Bennett & D’Onofrio, 2015).

CDD under Uncertainty: From Participation to Enforceable Governance Routines

40A core contribution of this paper is to reinterpret “community participation” as an institutional design problem under uncertainty. CDD scholarship has repeatedly shown that participatory forms do not automatically generate accountability or inclusion; governance outcomes are contingent on facilitation quality, enforcement mechanisms, and political economy conditions (Mansuri & Rao, 2013; Casey et al., 2012; Humphreys et al., 2019). The interview evidence in this study supports that caution and refines it for a post-war recovery context: when resources are abundant and urgency is high, participation is most sustainable when embedded in enforceable routines such as transparent eligibility rules, milestone-based disbursement, public disclosure, grievance channels, and credible sanctions for misuse, rather than when treated as an aspirational principle.

41This perspective directly addresses long-standing critiques that participatory programs can become depoliticized managerial technologies or compliance rituals (Cooke & Kothari, 2001; Hickey & Mohan, 2004; Ferguson, 1994; Li, 2007). The findings suggest that a Saemaul-inspired approach can contribute not by exporting a mobilization narrative, but by strengthening the institutional machinery that makes local collective action governable: rule-bound prioritization, consistent monitoring, and leadership pipelines that connect communities to higher-level support while preserving agenda-setting at local level. This aligns with the neo-institutional view that outcomes depend on rules-in-use, incentive compatibility, and the capacity to monitor and enforce (March & Olsen, 1984; North, 1990; Scott, 2014; Ostrom, 1990).

Decentralization and Capture: Why “Local” Is Not Automatically Democratic

42The study also contributes to decentralization debates by specifying how community-driven mechanisms can either reinforce or weaken democratic local governance. Decentralization is often expected to improve responsiveness, but the literature emphasizes risks of unequal capacity, local elite capture, and uneven accountability (Prud’homme, 1995; Bardhan & Mookherjee, 2006; Faguet, 2014). CDD programs, in turn, may mitigate or exacerbate these risks depending on whether they are integrated with elected local institutions or implemented through parallel project structures that shift accountability away from democratic channels (Mansuri & Rao, 2013; Wong & Guggenheim, 2018; Ribot, 2002).

43The interview evidence reinforces this conditionality. Respondents emphasized leadership as an enabling mechanism, but simultaneously highlighted informal power structures as a binding constraint. This maps directly onto the elite-capture literature: local deliberation can be dominated by brokers who control information, networks, and access to resources unless transparency and sanctioning are credible (Platteau, 2004; Ribot, 2002). In this sense, the study’s translation conditions provide a practical refinement to the decentralization–CDD interface: Saemaul-inspired CDD is feasible as a complement to decentralization only when it strengthens, rather than bypasses, public accountability through disclosure, auditability, and grievance procedures that are institutionally connected to sanctioning authority.

Institutional Translation: What Travels and What Must Be Redesigned

44A third contribution is to specify “what travels” in institutional learning. This translation problem is especially salient in Ukraine because institutional learning is occurring inside a long post-socialist decentralization and Europeanization reform stream, where EU-alignment incentives and program instruments can reshape local governance through compliance architectures as much as through empowerment (Hughes et al., 2005; Swianiewicz, 2014). In such contexts, externally supported community-driven mechanisms can unintentionally harden parallel “project” structures if they privilege reporting rituals over integration with elected local institutions and sanctioning authority—an issue that becomes more acute under wartime recovery, when urgency and fiduciary risk encourage procedural tightening (Romanova &Umland, 2019; Rabinovych et al., 2025). This is why the paper’s translation conditions should be read not only through the lens of “fragile settings,” but also through the institutional reform literature on post-socialist capacity building, accountability trade-offs, and reform layering in Europeanizing governance environments (Swianiewicz, 2014). Policy transfer research warns against symbolic borrowing and stresses the importance of diagnosing misfit between imported mechanisms and recipient institutions (Dolowitz and Marsh, 2000; Benson and Jordan, 2011). Translation perspectives further emphasize that policies change as they move and become hybrids shaped by local actors, incentives, and constraints (Czarniawska & Joerges, 1996). The present study identifies a bounded set of transferable components from Saemaul-type governance: (i) a multilevel coordination logic that links central mandate and monitoring to local agenda-setting; (ii) a leadership development pipeline that produces trusted intermediaries; and (iii) performance-linked routines that encourage follow-through and maintenance.

45At the same time, several components require redesign for Ukraine’s context. First, strong-state steering embedded in the historical Korean model cannot be assumed to translate normatively or institutionally into a recovery context shaped by donor conditionality, pluralistic oversight demands, and varied local capacities. Second, mechanisms that rely on stable bureaucratic enforcement in the origin context must be adapted to a setting where wartime constraints and institutional uncertainty may weaken monitoring capacity and compress planning cycles. Third, the cultural dimension should not be treated as a deterministic “compatibility” claim. The study’s evidence supports cautious optimism about collective-action repertoires, but it does not replace systematic regional cultural assessment; hence cultural fit is treated as a condition to be tested through piloting rather than assumed.

46A further implication of the translation lens concerns external financing and accountability. In post-war recovery, donor and EU-linked fiduciary requirements can unintentionally generate parallel accountability systems, where compliance with reporting templates displaces political accountability to local electorates. This risk echoes the CDD critique that participatory programs can become procedural and depoliticized if participation is treated as a managerial requirement rather than as a rule-bound governance routine (Cooke & Kothari, 2001; Mansuri & Rao, 2013; Ferguson, 1994). Interviewees’ emphasis on a clear division of labor implies that translation should privilege nested governance: community forums propose and prioritize, elected local bodies approve and remain sanctionable, and higher-level authorities and external partners enforce integrity through audits and conditional disbursement. In neo-institutional terms, this nesting aligns rule-making and enforcement across levels, reducing opportunities for capture while preserving local ownership (North, 1990; Ostrom, 1990; Ribot, 2002).

Implications for Recovery Governance

47Finally, the findings translate into implementable design implications consistent with the CDD evidence base. CDD evaluations show that governance effects are highly contingent and that programs can succeed at delivering projects without producing durable accountability (Mansuri & Rao, 2013; Casey et al., 2012; Humphreys et al., 2019). For Ukraine’s recovery, this implies that program designers should prioritize “integrity-by-construction”: simple, auditable procedures; clear role separation across levels; and safeguards against capture and proceduralism (Platteau, 2004; Bennett & D’Onofrio, 2015). Under uncertainty, sequencing becomes part of design: piloting in territories with minimum administrative conditions, phased scaling, and adaptive rules based on monitoring results. This is consistent with the institutional claim that durable governance outcomes require complementarity between formal rules, informal norms, and enforcement capacity (North, 1990; Scott, 2014; Ostrom, 1990).

48This has two immediate consequences for wartime and early post-war governance. First, a Saemaul-inspired package should be treated as a sequenced set of “minimum viable” rules rather than as a full institutional blueprint. Under martial law, emergency procurement, and centralized security coordination, the practical space for local discretion is uneven and can contract rapidly. That makes simple and enforceable rules like clear eligibility criteria, transparent project registers, and auditable procurement routines more important than ambitious participatory designs that depend on stable routines (Scott, 2014; North, 1990). Second, because power concentration and elite bargaining can intensify during crisis, integrity mechanisms must be built into the vertical chain of authorization, not delegated to ad hoc community committees. This is consistent with evidence that CDD performs best when higher-level oversight and predictable funding accompany local prioritization, while the limits of decentralization and capacity gaps are acknowledged (Faguet, 2014; Prud’homme, 1995; OECD, 2022). In practical terms, the most defensible pathway is pilot-based implementation in municipalities with demonstrated administrative capacity and credible oversight, followed by gradual scaling as reform space re-opens and recovery financing stabilizes (Keudel & Huss, 2023a; Ukraine Facility, 2024).

What This Study Adds to Practice and Policy

49Beyond theoretical contributions, the study offers three actionable insights for recovery programming. First, macro-regional security differentiation should be treated as a design parameter that shapes participation modalities and monitoring intensity, not merely an implementation obstacle. Second, interviewees stressed that sustainable community-led governance requires an institutionalized leadership and facilitation pipeline such as ongoing mentoring, peer learning, and integrity safeguards rather than one-off training tied to a single project cycle. Third, co-financing and maintenance commitments should be built in as eligibility conditions to reduce donor dependence and ensure continuity after external support ends (Mansuri & Rao, 2013; Ostrom, 1990; Bennett & D’Onofrio, 2015; Rieznik & Lee, 2024).

Empirical Refinement of Institutional Translation Theory

50The Ukraine case refines policy transfer and institutional translation scholarship in three ways. First, it shows that translation conditions can be operationalized as design criteria rather than left as abstract cautions: problem fit, legitimacy, capacity, accountability architecture, and robustness under uncertainty can be assessed through observable indicators such as staffing, procurement routines, grievance channels, and security status (Dolowitz & Marsh, 2000; Benson & Jordan, 2011; North, 1990). Second, the findings treat informality as dual: extractive networks raise capture risks, while collective-action repertoires can support participation. This implies designing formal procedures that activate cooperative practices while constraining gatekeeping through disclosure and sanctions (Platteau, 2004; Ribot, 2002). Third, integrity infrastructure such as open data, audits, grievance systems, and sanctioning authority emerges as a decisive dimension of transfer feasibility in high-stakes recovery settings, complementing classic emphasis on ideas, institutions, and administrative capacity (Dolowitz & Marsh, 2000; Benson & Jordan, 2011; Mansuri & Rao, 2013).

Boundary Conditions and Generalizability

51While this study focuses on Ukraine, the translation conditions are most relevant to post-conflict and fragile settings characterized by uneven local capacity, large-scale external financing with fiduciary conditionality, continuing security constraints, and influential informal networks. The Ukraine case also highlights a specific boundary condition: the study assesses adaptation feasibility under conditions where formal decentralization reforms preceded recovery programming. In contexts where decentralization is weak or absent, or where central authority remains uncontested, the institutional entry points identified here (Regional Development Agencies, hromada-level planning, multi-level coordination commissions) may not exist. This implies that the Saemaul-inspired governance model is most applicable as a complement to existing decentralization frameworks rather than as a substitute for them or as a standalone intervention.

Conclusion

52This article examined the potential for adapting Saemaul-inspired community-driven development mechanisms to Ukraine’s wartime and post-war recovery governance. The key finding is that adaptation is feasible through institutional translation rather than direct replication. Transferable governance building blocks include multilevel coordination routines, leadership development mechanisms, and accountability procedures, but their successful implementation depends on three critical conditions: adequate administrative capacity, robust integrity safeguards, and credible enforcement mechanisms (North, 1990; Ostrom, 1990; Dolowitz & Marsh, 2000; Czarniawska & Joerges, 1996).

53Across the analysis, the paper specified the practical mechanisms through which translation feasibility is made or broken—(i) local coordination of priorities, (ii) allocation and monitoring of resources, (iii) the interaction between higher-level steering and local discretion, and (iv) uncertainty-driven shifts in incentives for participation, transparency, and leadership—so that “adaptation” is testable as governance design rather than treated as a slogan. The study also highlights why the prospects for adaptation must be assessed conservatively in Ukraine’s specific context. Wartime governance brings institutional uncertainty: restrictions on ordinary institutional functions, compressed planning horizons, and shifting authority arrangements can persist into the post-war period. Recovery governance may also face internal political contradictions, including the potential suspension or partial rollback of reforms, and risks of power concentration and elite control over key institutions. These conditions amplify known CDD risks such as elite capture, unequal participation, and donor-driven proceduralism unless transparency, auditability, and sanctioning power are embedded by design (Platteau, 2004; Mansuri & Rao, 2013; Cooke & Kothari, 2001; Bennett & D’Onofrio, 2015).

54Accordingly, the paper’s conclusions are conditional and scenario-aware. A Saemaul-inspired approach is most defensible when implemented through (i) security-sensitive, territorially differentiated sequencing; (ii) a clear division of labor in which communities retain agenda-setting while higher levels provide standardized fiduciary rules and monitoring; (iii) a leadership training and facilitation pipeline that strengthens legitimate local intermediaries; and (iv) integrity safeguards that reduce capture risks and prevent participatory procedures from becoming compliance rituals. These conditions define not only “what should be done,” but what must be true for adaptation to be feasible.

55The study has limitations. It is based on expert interviews and documentary synthesis, not on region-by-region cultural measurements or population surveys. Thus, claims about cultural and institutional capacity differences across territories should be treated as hypotheses to be tested through piloting. Future research can therefore examine cross-regional variation in collective-action capacity and oversight institutions, evaluate pilot implementations using transparent metrics, and refine the translation conditions identified here based on observed implementation dynamics and integrity outcomes. Second, once recovery programs begin to operate at scale, evaluation designs that combine comparative case studies with measurable process indicators can assess whether the proposed accountability architecture actually reduces capture and strengthens local ownership over time (Yin, 2018; Patton, 2002). This agenda aligns with the broader CDD evidence base, which finds that short-run improvements in service delivery do not automatically translate into durable institutional change, and that effects depend on political economy and implementation coherence (Casey et al., 2012; Humphreys et al., 2019; Wong & Guggenheim, 2018). Future research may also track how wartime governance conditions evolve and whether post-war reforms face rollback risks.