Challenges faced by cities and regions in focus at Ukraine Recovery Conference

European Committee of the Regions emphasises the potential of municipal and regional partnerships to help Ukraine re-build and recover. 

The international community has now clearly recognised that local government will be key to Ukraine's reconstruction and recovery, leaders of the European Committee of the Regions said at the Ukraine Recovery Conference on 12 June, welcoming the Conference's focus on local challenges and the creation of a coalition to support Ukrainian municipalities and regions.

Speaking in Berlin at the year's biggest international gathering devoted to Ukraine's recovery and reconstruction, the president of the European Committee of the Regions (CoR), Vasco Alves Cordeiro, and the chair of its Working Group on Ukraine, Aleksandra Dulkiewicz, called on the EU and international donors to take the next step – to help the systematic development of partnerships between regions and cities as a means of accelerating Ukraine's reforms and modernisation as well as its recovery and reconstruction.

President Cordeiro underlined that "to empower local and regional authorities in Ukraine, the decentralisation process must continue. We are also working to put in place a training programme for these authorities". The European Alliance of Cities and Regions for the Reconstruction of Ukraine, which was co-founded by the CoR, is itself developing an initiative to support Ukrainian experts and officials working on municipal investment projects. The future programme, TIPS4UA, will see the Alliance cooperate with U-LEAD, a multi-donor EU programme that has been supporting Ukraine's decentralisation for almost a decade. 

The delegation of the CoR recognised that "Ukraine needs more support for partnerships between local and regional authorities from Ukraine and the EU", echoing a call from Svenja Schulze, Germany's Federal Minister for Economic Cooperation and Development, for all Ukrainian cities and towns to have international partners by the end of 2025.

Aleksandra Dulkiewicz, who is the mayor of Gdańsk as well as chair of the CoR's Working Group on Ukraine, urged the EU to throw its weight behind cooperation between sub-national governments, by creating "a framework programme for financing region-to-region and city-to-city partnerships, using funding from the Ukraine Facility and contributions from donor countries".

The local and regional dimension of Ukraine's recovery was one of four themes that shaped the Ukraine Recovery Conference in Berlin. The German and Ukrainian governments, which co-organised the URC, also launched a Coalition for Sustainable Municipalities whose signatories pledged to provide financial or technical support for municipal partnerships and for the development of project-management skills in Ukrainian local administrations.

President Cordeiro voiced the CoR's support for the Coalition for Sustainable Municipalities, saying that its principles and aims "broadly reflect the recommendations" handed over by the European Alliance of Cities and Regions for the Reconstruction of Ukraine to the governments of Ukraine and Germany in March, at the European Summit of Regions and Cities.  

Quotes:

Vasco Alves Cordeiro (PT/PES), president of the European Committee of the Regions: "There is no process for the recovery or the enlargement without involving local and regional authorities. We are seeing a growing recognition of this important role, in particular in this Ukraine Recovery Conference in Berlin, as called for by the Alliance of Cities and Regions for the Reconstruction of Ukraine, led by the European Committee of the Regions. While continuing to support the recovery, we must not forget the emergency Ukrainian cities and regions and their people are facing now, which is energy supply during winter. This needs to be addressed now, because it is a condition for their survival."

Aleksandra Dulkiewicz (PL/EPP), the CoR's chair of the Working Group on Ukraine and mayor of Gdańsk: "War destroyed most of my city, Gdańsk, and it took many difficult years to re-build the city after 1945. So the first lesson from Gdańsk is that the best way to help Ukraine's recovery and reconstruction is to stop the destruction caused by Russia. Gdańsk is a city of solidarity, and in recent decades our partnership with Lviv has been deeply rewarding for both cities. I would like to see hundreds more towns and cities in the EU establish partnerships in Ukraine."  

More information:

• At the Ukraine Recovery Conference, held in Berlin on 11-12 June 2024, CoR President Vasco Alves Cordeiro spoke at a panel on 'Empowering municipalities and regions – Enhancing capacities at local level'. Mayor Aleksandra Dulkiewicz spoke at a panel on 'Seizing municipal partnerships for recovery and EU rapprochement'. Recordings are available on the URC website. President Cordeiro also held bilateral meetings, including with Oleksiy Kuleba, Executive Secretary of the Congress of Local and Regional Authorities under the President of Ukraine, Matthias Cormann, Secretary-General of the OECD, and Manuela Schwesig, President of the German Bundesrat.
• A number of other CoR members attended the Ukraine Recovery Conference in their own capacity as local and regional leaders. They were: Patrick Molinoz (FR/PES), vice-president of the Bourgogne-Franche-Comté region and chair of the CoR's Commission for Citizenship, Governance, Institutional and External Affairs (CIVEX); Valdas Benkunskas (LT/EPP), mayor of Vilnius; Christian Debeve (FR/RE), member of the Grand Est Regional Council; and Mark Speich (DE/EPP), secretary of state for federal, European and international affairs, North Rhine-Westphalia.. The CoR's rapporteur on the Ukraine Facility, Dario Nardella, also attended; he is no longer a member of the CoR and was on 9 June elected to the European Parliame nt. 
• The website of the Ukraine Recovery Conference 2024 can be found here. The first Ukraine Recovery Conference (URC) was held in July 2022 in Lugano, Switzerland, and identified the methods, priorities and guiding principles for the recovery process for Ukraine. The URC in 2023 was held in London sought to mobilise public- and private-sector funding for Ukraine, with the European Commission using the occasion to announce a €50 billion package – the Ukraine Facility – to fund Ukraine's recovery and reconstruction. This year's URC in Berlin focused on four dimensions of Ukraine's recovery – business, human, local, and EU-related reforms – as part of an effort to encourage a 'whole of society' approach.  
• The Statement of the Coalition for Sustainable Municipalities can be found on the website of the Ukraine Recovery Conference 2024.  
• Recommendations by the European Alliance of Cities and Regions for the Reconstruction of Ukraine to the Ukraine Recovery Conference 2024 for a decentralised recovery and reconstruction of Ukraine are available in English, Ukrainian, German, and French. In May, the CoR highlighted some of the core recommendations of the Alliance at the International Summit of Cities and Regions in Kyiv. 
• At the Ukraine Recovery Conference 2024 in Berlin, the European Commission announced a Municipal, Infrastructure and Industrial Resilience Programme for Ukraine, worth over €180 million in guarantees, loans and technical assistance. The European Investment Bank (EIB), the lending arm of the European Union, signed an agreement to provide an additional €100 million, to restore municipal services such as a clean water and to rebuild social infrastructure, including hospitals, housing, and schools. 
• The TIPS4UA programme – Training and Internship Programme Support for Ukrainian municipalities and inter-municipal cooperation – will be implemented in cooperation with U-LEAD with Europe and the active engagement of Alliance members and support of individual local and regional authorities in the EU, as well as of municipalities and inter-municipal cooperations (IMCs) in Ukraine. It will provide training to professionals working in local administrations in Ukraine focusing on reconstruction and project management with an "internship" component in an EU local/ regional administration. U-LEAD is a multi-donor EU programme that has been supporting Ukraine's decentralisation for almost a decade.