(Illustration by Ariel Davis)
On February 24, 2022, Russia invaded Ukraine, dramatically escalating a conflict that had been brewing since at least 2014, when Russia seized Crimea and invaded Donbas. Despite repeated diplomatic overtures by the United States and European allies to suspend or end hostilities, President Vladimir Putin intensified the military assault and bombing campaigns during the late summer months of 2025.
As the war grinds on, it has become clear that reconstruction cannot wait until the end of hostilities. “For us, it serves as a vivid example that life must go on despite the war,” said Mustafa Nayyem, former head of the State Agency for Restoration and Infrastructure Development of Ukraine, in 2024 about a bridge reconstruction project. “People can’t give up on life because they still have tasks. … Thus, despite the war, the recovery effort is underway.”
The institutional disruptions that the invasion caused, particularly at the national level, have created space for new, local coalitions to flip infrastructure and land-use policy from the top-down approach favored during the Soviet Union to a bottom-up approach to reconstruction that leads with local knowledge and centers social equity in the decision-making process.
Ukraine entered the war with a national infrastructure law dating from the Soviet era that generates little public value for Ukrainians. (Here, “public value” refers to the term coined by Harvard political scientist Mark Moore to describe the benefits that well-functioning governments create for society.1) The Soviet-era infrastructure law makes it difficult for local governments to incentivize or require environmental stewardship in the face of the accelerating climate crisis. It limits municipal authority, discourages adaptive land-use planning, and lacks legal mechanisms for community participation in design.2 As a result, infrastructure projects often exclude green space, overlook local climate risks, and proceed without public input. Institutional inertia has also slowed the adoption of modern, climate-resilient infrastructure models. Legacy systems and insufficient reform in legal and administrative structures have slowed implementation of Ukraine’s climate pledges, particularly investment in sustainable infrastructure.3
Ironically, Russia’s effort to create more distance between Ukraine and the West by escalating hostilities in 2021 has had the opposite effect. While institutional and legal constraints remain, the war has inadvertently opened opportunities for reform. For example, Ukraine has responded to the Russians’ widespread destruction of Soviet-era infrastructure by rebuilding roads, bridges, and buildings meeting European standards for environmental stewardship and climate resilience.
Ukraine’s legislature is boosting this effort. A proposed new law would reorient the national government toward increasing public value through infrastructure projects. “On the Foundations of Green Recovery in Ukraine,” which the Ministry of Environmental Protection released publicly in June 2025, proposes accelerating a just, green reconstruction effort by establishing legal criteria for evaluating green infrastructure projects, enabling alignment with the EU’s taxonomy for sustainability activities, and embedding sustainability into the national legal framework. The law would allow Ukraine to channel both domestic and international funding toward forward-looking, low-carbon infrastructure development.4 (At the time of publication, the proposal has not yet been ratified.)
“This legislation sets out a new logic for Ukraine’s recovery, based on the EU’s green principles and the foundations of sustainable development,” Olena Kryvoruchkina, deputy chair of the Verkhovna Rada’s (Ukraine’s parliament’s) Committee on Environmental Policy and Nature Management, said at the national presentation of the draft law. “Its goal is not simply to rebuild what was destroyed, but to create energy-efficient and safe infrastructure—avoiding outdated practices inherited from the past.”5
While the draft law is a crucial first step, its successful implementation hinges on robust collaboration between local government, community stakeholders, and businesses in cities and communities throughout the country. During times of crisis, such as armed conflict and major natural disasters, community guidance is fundamental to ensuring that reconstruction projects meet the essential needs of at-risk populations using cultural sensitivity and trauma-informed approaches.
In April 2023, a new platform for collaboration between universities, local communities, and donors emerged in Ukraine: the Alliance of Ukrainian Universities. Its creation was a direct response to the unprecedented challenges brought by the full-scale war, as communities across the country faced the urgent need not only for physical reconstruction but also for reimagining their role in the broader societal transformation taking place during these turbulent times. Over the past two years, the alliance has become a mechanism for coalition building, bringing together academic expertise, grassroots needs, and financial support from international donors and businesses.
In spring 2024, the alliance took a survey of local governments, community organizations, and businesses that demonstrated the importance of greater, more adaptable collaboration. Specifically, researchers identified a relationship between low self-reported community resilience and low interaction between local governments and stakeholder groups like community organizations and businesses.6
Consequently, the alliance has prioritized engagement with communities around sustainable recovery—including project management, strengthening local governance capacity, and building inclusive, justice-oriented development strategies. As Taras Dobko, rector of Ukrainian Catholic University, stated at the first meeting of the alliance in Lviv:
In a situation where many people are on the front lines, even more have gone abroad, and others are internally displaced, communities are facing a shortage of human capacity. So, the question arises: How do [universities] strengthen, develop, and build their operational capability? How can we help them work with donors? Universities have unique interdisciplinary expertise they can share with communities: in project management, for example, in restoring infrastructure, improving water and air quality, or developing community strategies. These are universities that don’t stay on the sidelines; they immerse themselves in community life and invite the community into theirs.7
These institutional shifts and civic innovations reveal both the urgency and the opportunity for new models of collaboration. As traditional governance structures remain under strain, Ukraine’s reconstruction has increasingly depended on partnerships that combine local knowledge, community resilience, and external resources. In what follows, we explore how these partnerships have taken shape on the ground and the practical approaches to cocreation, capacity building, and accountability that are reconfiguring recovery efforts in real time.8
Tools of Cocreation and Shared Ownership
In Spring 2023, six higher-education institutions—Taras Shevchenko National University of Kyiv, Dnipro University of Technology, National University of Water and Environmental Engineering, Sumy State University, Ukrainian Catholic University, and Kyiv School of Economics—established the Alliance of Ukrainian Universities as a coordinated institutional response to the challenges faced by the state and society in the aftermath of the full-scale Russian invasion the previous year. The alliance is currently in the process of expanding its membership; among those expressing interest in joining is the National University of Ostroh Academy.
Examples from Lutsk and Lviv show that even under martial law, participatory budgeting can adapt to wartime needs by funding shelters, humanitarian aid, and services for displaced persons.
The alliance is registered as a nongovernmental, nonprofit organization. The highest governing body is its Council of Members, composed of the rectors of the participating universities. The council is responsible for the strategic planning of the alliance’s activities and development. Council meetings are held twice a year and serve as a forum for evaluating organizational outcomes and setting future priorities.
Operational coordination is carried out by the alliance’s management team, which comprises deputy rectors from participating universities. The team implements the decisions of the council and oversees the day-to-day functioning of the organization. Leadership within the management team rotates annually, allowing each university to initiate large-scale projects in turn, fostering cooperation with local communities, identifying priority themes, and shaping strategies for securing external funding. This rotational principle ensures the equitable distribution of leadership responsibilities among member institutions and fosters institutional cooperation on the basis of partnership.
The alliance actively supports community-led initiatives that share ownership between local government and community stakeholders. Five core partnership tools have helped foster collaboration in wartime Ukraine:
Participatory budgeting is a transparent and democratic mechanism that enables residents to cocreate recovery priorities and strengthens trust in local authorities. Examples from Lutsk and Lviv show that even under martial law, participatory budgeting can adapt to wartime needs by funding shelters, humanitarian aid, and services for displaced persons.
Coalition platforms bridge donors, academia, and local communities to pool expertise, build capacity, and manage complex projects.
Public-private partnership frameworks create predictable channels for donor and private investments in vital sectors such as health care, municipal facilities, and ports. These frameworks can simplify investor participation, reduce bureaucratic hurdles, and align more easily with EU standards.
Cluster models are specific public-private collaborations dedicated to providing an ecosystem for innovation, workforce development, and long-term recovery planning. The cluster framework shows how businesses can move beyond traditional donor roles to become long-term civic partners. While partnership frameworks typically operate at a national or sector-wide level, clusters are more localized, focusing resources and stakeholders within a specific region to promote innovation and support sustainable recovery.
Performance metrics and accountability systems are systematic assessment tools that measure the number of implemented projects and jobs created, financial sustainability, and long-term social impact. Examples include Alliance of Ukrainian Universities-led projects in Zelenodolsk, Sheptytskyi, and Varash that track outcomes such as water access for displaced residents, uninterrupted heating for schools, and improved emergency medical response.
Together, these tools provide a replicable architecture for recovery planning. They show that even in conditions of extreme disruption, partnerships can be structured to deliver both immediate relief and lasting systemic value. Let us explore them in turn.
Participatory Budgeting
Participatory budgeting is one of the most visible and democratic tools for involving citizens in community life. It enables residents to propose and choose initiatives that are implemented with local budget funds. This process is competitive: Proposed projects are not automatically funded but must compete for public support. Residents evaluate various initiatives and cast their votes, and only those projects that receive the strongest community backing are prioritized for local funding. This competitive aspect not only ensures transparency and fairness in decision-making but also encourages participants to design realistic, high-impact proposals that directly address local needs.
(Illustration by Ariel Davis)
Before the full-scale invasion, participatory budgeting was a common approach to setting public budgets in Ukrainian communities, funding new public spaces, organized youth events, and expanded social services. However, in 2022, the process effectively stopped. No city held competitions for new projects, and only 27 percent of projects from previous years (mostly from 2021) were implemented. As the war progressed, individual cities began to gradually restore the practice of public budgeting, adapting it to wartime conditions and the goals of recovery and reconstruction. The alliance has helped to facilitate such efforts. Ukrainian Catholic University, together with the Fiscal Policy Research Center, organized the certification program Joint Community Budgeting: From Needs to Analytics to help representatives from local civil-society organizations and community members build capacity around influencing the local budgeting process.
In 2023-24, competitions were held in 39 communities, including the regional centers of Ivano-Frankivsk, Vinnytsia, Lutsk, Ternopil, and Khmelnytskyi, and prioritized projects for shelter construction, support for defenders, and integration of internally displaced persons. Lviv and Chernivtsi also resumed the implementation of some of the initiatives from previous years, such as allocating municipal resources to support volunteer-led initiatives.9
“We wholeheartedly support the return or emergence of participatory budgeting in every community,” says Larysa Bilozir, people’s deputy of Ukraine and head of the Subcommittee on Administrative Services and Administrative Procedures. “In addition, they must meet the requirements of the time—the topics of the projects must be aimed more at covering the needs of the war and everything related to it (security, shelter, education, medicine, humanitarian aid, volunteering).”10
As these examples show, even in wartime, participatory budgeting can remain a relevant tool that strengthens trust in local authorities, enhances transparency, and promotes community resilience.
Developing Horizontal Governance
The Russian Invasion has, predictably, disrupted governance across the country, leaving vacuums to be filled by local actors, organizations, institutions, and partnerships among them, exemplified by the Alliance of Ukrainian Universities.
The alliance has identified that many local governments, NGOs, businesses, and donors lack the organizational capacity and range of skill sets needed to successfully negotiate and implement their programs, including grant applications, communication, project management, and strategic planning. Representatives are often not well educated or motivated enough to overcome these barriers. As a result, the alliance team has focused on building trust across stakeholder groups by prioritizing face-to-face communication, tailoring support to the specific needs of partners, and using a flexible planning approach. These measures lower entry barriers for less experienced or less motivated representatives, offering them practical guidance and building their confidence in participating more actively.
For instance, the alliance confronted a shortage of expertise in territorial communities. Many communities lack specialists in project management, analytical work, fundraising, communication, economic development, and spatial planning. This gap limited the communities’ capabilities and made them dependent on external experts. Thanks to support from alliance universities, some communities have been able to take steps to strengthen their own capacity. For example, in Sheptytskyi alliance members helped residents craft strong grant proposals, while in Marhanets, they led workshops on practical project-management tools. Beyond training, the alliance also advised communities on selecting contractors and how to establish partnerships to successfully implement their projects.11
The full-scale invasion has accelerated a transition in the Ukrainian economy from heavy governmental influence—a legacy of the Soviet era—to a nimbler approach emphasizing public-private partnerships.
One of the most transformative aspects of the Alliance of Ukrainian Universities has been its use of service-learning pedagogy. Through this approach, universities equip communities with solutions, tools, and access to expertise; students with real-world learning opportunities and civic engagement; and universities with a platform to act as drivers of social innovation. Service learning has bridged gaps between education and practice, turning classrooms into laboratories of democratic action. Student and faculty participation in community-based projects has strengthened local communities’ agency. For example, in 2024, courses run through Ukrainian Catholic University helped implement 41 projects using the service-learning model.
“It is important for us that university representatives come to us,” says Oksana Chubatko, deputy head of the Verkhovyna, a small, mountainous settlement in Ivano-Frankivsk Oblast. “We feel that we are not forgotten, that we are needed.”
Of course, the implementation of such initiatives has confronted obstacles. They face extremely limited time for planning and research because of the war, difficulties in data collection in frontline areas, lack of qualified personnel within local communities, overburdened community representatives who have little time for educational activities, irregular communication caused by shelling and infrastructure damage, and minimal international cooperation due to mobility constraints. These conditions reflect the harsh realities in which universities must operate and find ways to innovate.
Ukrainian local governance, in turn, has undergone tremendous change since the launch of the full-scale Russian invasion. Prewar bureaucracies have dissolved, and civil-society organizations (CSOs), long at the forefront of advocacy and local development, have become de facto service providers. They deliver medical aid, coordinate logistics, and support displaced populations not through centralized mandates but through networks and partnerships that have grown out of earlier donor engagement and civic mobilization.12 Rather than reverting to prewar administrative configurations, Ukrainian communities are demonstrating that resource-constrained environments can catalyze civic-centered delivery systems that are adaptive, legitimate, and responsive.
In many cases, digital tools have enhanced these civic-state linkages, enabling faster response and joint planning across decentralized systems.13 For example, the Diia platform, a cloud-based open data portal, embodies Ukraine’s shift from Soviet-style bureaucracy to a digital-first state, giving citizens legally valid digital documents and access to government services through a unified platform. It reconciles centralized coordination with decentralized service delivery, functioning as a centralized digital backbone that empowers local governments to provide services more efficiently.
In this context of reshaped governance, universities have also stepped forward as important civic actors, often working alongside CSOs and municipalities to strengthen local recovery. A clear example is the collaboration between the Kyiv School of Economics (KSE), an Alliance of Ukrainian Universities member, and the NGO Mariupol Reborn through the Community Recovery Academy, an initiative that trains local government officials in specific skill sets related to reconstruction, such as economic development, supporting the return of displaced residents, and attracting funding for reconstruction projects. This partnership has also trained local recovery managers in conflict-affected communities.14 KSE’s Rector Tymofii Brik notes that education is not peripheral but central to Ukraine’s resilience, stressing that communities must have the knowledge and skills to rebuild on their own terms.15 KSE’s initiative also shows how universities are embedding their expertise directly into community-led recovery efforts.
These kinds of academic and civil-society partnerships reflect the horizontal governance that has taken shape in wartime Ukraine. Local governments have increasingly made space for civic and educational actors, bringing about joint delivery of services that are more responsive, more flexible, and more rooted in community legitimacy than traditional bureaucratic systems.16 These partnerships bring together civic trust, academic expertise, and community needs, creating coalitions that are both legitimate and feasible under wartime conditions. What is emerging is not just a temporary fix but a more lasting reorganization of service delivery, in which both universities and CSOs play central roles in shaping public provision in ways that would have been hard to imagine before the war.17 At the same time, cooperation has not always been seamless; some regions have faced fragmentation or gaps in coordination, which show the limits of informal arrangements.18
Such collaboration has been especially visible in education, training, and community recovery, where the expertise of universities meets the grassroots reach of CSOs. Ukrainian universities are not only producers of knowledge but also active partners in rebuilding governance, helping ground a new form of authority based on shared responsibility, urgency, and civic trust. Universities also serve as connectors, channeling international donor support and research expertise into local recovery, linking global resources to local needs. Rather than being just a wartime improvisation, this cooperation points to a long-term shift in how governance and public services will operate in Ukraine’s reconstruction.19
Public-Private Partnerships
The Dissolution of prewar hierarchies has also opened space for cross-sector collaboration. The full-scale invasion has accelerated a transition in the Ukrainian economy from heavy governmental influence—a legacy of the Soviet era—to a nimbler approach emphasizing public-private partnerships (PPPs). Recognizing PPPs’ potential to accelerate reconstruction, the Verkhovna Rada adopted the Law of Ukraine on Public-Private Partnership in 2025. It simplifies private-sector participation in recovery projects by cutting through bureaucratic hurdles, offering financial guarantees to investors, and speeding up the implementation of projects. The new law also enables international partners to provide financial support directly or through public budgets.
(Illustration by Ariel Davis)
“Public-private partnership is one of the key tools for attracting investment,” said Ukraine’s First Deputy Prime Minister and Minister of Economy Yuliia Svyrydenko about the law’s passage. “While the PPP concept has existed in Ukraine for some time, only two major concession agreements have been signed. With these legislative changes, we expect the PPP mechanism to finally function properly and bring up to $1 billion in investments over the next few years. This will primarily apply to sectors like ports, hospitals, and municipal facilities. In addition, the law brings our national legislation closer to EU standards.”20
One of the most compelling examples of effective collaboration between business, local government, and educational institutions is the Lviv IT Cluster. This is an initiative that predates the full-scale invasion but has gained special relevance during wartime. The Cluster unites more than 270 IT companies with universities and representatives of local government in developing a vibrant innovation ecosystem in the region.
“If we talk about local governments, it was the Lviv City Council that gave birth to clusters,” says Stepan Veselovsky, CEO of the Lviv IT Cluster. “The very idea of clusters, and all clusters in Ukraine, came from it. We confirmed the workability of this idea and the rapid achievement of results, and then other cities began to copy this idea and implement it.”21
In response to the challenges of war, the Lviv IT Cluster has not only maintained its operations but intensified its efforts to support the city and the region. Among its core initiatives is IT Research Resilience, which gathers analytics about the IT market during wartime, and IT Generation, a program providing free tech education for those looking to start new careers in IT. Also notable is ReStart Ukraine, a strategic effort involving the cluster in long-term planning for the postwar recovery of infrastructure, education, safety, and the urban economy.22
The Lviv IT Cluster also invests in critical infrastructure, including ensuring uninterrupted connectivity, supporting shelter spaces for teams, and codeveloping new academic programs with partner universities. This approach strengthens local communities, as businesses take on active roles not just as donors or employers but as long-term partners in recovery and development.
In this way, clusters in Ukraine are not merely tools of economic development. They are platforms for sustainable, systemic partnerships between business, government, communities, and international organizations. The Lviv IT Cluster stands as a strong example of how local initiatives can scale and transform systems even under crisis conditions.
Measuring Success and Ensuring Accountability
As President Volodymyr Zelenskyy moves Ukraine closer to joining the European Union, developing transparent measures of success and ensuring accountability of public and private actors is becoming increasingly important. The Alliance of Ukrainian Universities’ governance structure includes a systematic assessment of the results of cooperation between universities and territorial communities. Its performance criteria include the number of implemented joint projects and their scale; the number of people affected by the project; and the number of new jobs created, their financial sustainability, and their estimated long-term impact.
For example, the alliance worked with Zelenodolsk on an initiative to give the community access to alternative sources of water. The main goal was to drill new wells to provide drinking water to more than 18,000 community residents and 17,000 internally displaced persons. This initiative became not only an example of a large-scale project with a large social coverage but also a contribution to strengthening the resilience of critical regional infrastructure.23
Another example is the Sheptytskyi urban territorial community, which, in response to central-heating outages and the closure of the Nadiya mine (the main source of heat in the city of Sosnivka), helped to build three block-modular solid-fuel boiler houses for local schools. Thanks to cooperation with universities, the community was able to design a solution that will ensure an uninterrupted heat supply for three schools with 1,046 students and 157 staff. In addition to creating new jobs and improving learning conditions, the project will contribute to reducing CO₂ emissions and increasing energy efficiency.24
The Varaska community developed a project with the alliance to modernize the reception department of the Varaska Multidisciplinary Hospital to improve the quality and accessibility of medical services. The project aims to increase the speed of response to emergencies and to ensure the provision of emergency assistance to military personnel and employees of the Rivne Nuclear Power Plant, as well as residents of the community and neighboring areas. The project will update technical equipment, improve the ergonomics of premises, and introduce modern medical technologies. Its main goal is to reduce the response time of medical workers to emergencies to 5-10 minutes, thereby significantly increasing the efficiency of medical services, especially for the military and employees of the strategically important Rivne NPP, which produces more than 40 percent of the country’s electricity. This effort is especially critical given Russia’s constant shelling of Ukrainian energy facilities.25
Limitations
All In All, Ukraine’s experience offers a distinctive model of civic-state collaboration that can inform broader frameworks for postcrisis recovery. However, while civic-led partnerships in Ukraine have been effective, our research has also revealed important contextual limits. Among them are the following:
Fragmentation risks | Civil-society organizations often fill service-delivery gaps faster than formal institutions, but their highly decentralized and informal arrangements can create fragmentation, duplication, or uneven coverage. These outcomes highlight a weakness: While rapid and locally legitimate, informal systems may not scale consistently without stronger coordination mechanisms.
Short-term urgency versus long-term equity | Wartime governance prioritizes speed and immediate survival. This urgency can push recovery actors to privilege short-term fixes, such as emergency heating or temporary shelters, over more systemic equity goals like inclusive design or trauma-sensitive planning.
Dependence on intermediaries | Many smaller or rural communities remain dependent on universities or NGOs to navigate international donor requirements. While coalition platforms mitigate this reliance, it underscores ongoing structural inequities in access to resources, language capacity, and administrative expertise. The experience of the Alliance of Ukrainian Universities demonstrates this reality: Smaller communities, often lacking qualified staff in project management, data analysis, or international communication, require universities to step in as intermediaries to connect them with donors and external funding opportunities.
Operational constraints under fire | The war has imposed severe limitations on time, planning, and mobility. The alliance reports that frontline universities and communities face irregular communication due to shelling, damaged infrastructure, and power outages. Data collection is extremely difficult, qualified personnel are in short supply, and international cooperation is constrained by mobility restrictions. These conditions expose the fragility of even the strongest partnership frameworks when basic operational capacity cannot be guaranteed.
Political and donor volatility | Both public-private partnership frameworks and cluster models assume a degree of stability in funding and institutional legitimacy. In Ukraine, shifting political priorities, donor fatigue, or geopolitical shocks could undermine even well-designed partnerships, creating vulnerabilities in long-term implementation.
Trust asymmetries | Post-Soviet societies often exhibit high trust among neighbors but low trust in formal institutions. This cultural context means that sustaining trust between communities, local governments, and donors requires constant renewal and transparency.
These tensions do not negate the value of the frameworks but rather clarify their boundaries. Recognizing them ensures that Ukraine’s recovery lessons are not romanticized. Instead, they should be understood as adaptable strategies that require careful calibration to governance capacity, donor reliability, and community resilience.
Global Applicability
The Ukrainian experience underscores that effective recovery, whether from war or natural disaster, depends not only on funding levels but also on how partnerships are designed and governed. University alliances, civic-led coalitions, and business clusters reveal that legitimacy and resilience emerge when communities have ownership of the process, donors and governments provide enabling frameworks, and businesses act as active partners, rather than passive financiers.
For international donors, the lessons are clear: Fund participatory budgeting processes to ensure transparency and cocreation; invest in coalition platforms that link universities with local governments and communities; prioritize projects that integrate service-learning approaches, which simultaneously strengthen local capacity and train the next generation of civic leaders; and require robust accountability frameworks in grant design to measure both social and financial outcomes.
The Ukrainian example underscores the potential for universities worldwide to form collaborative structures that enhance academic exchange and reinforce community resilience in contexts of disruption and uncertainty.
For businesses, Ukraine’s model points to new roles. Adopt the cluster model as a vehicle for innovation and resilience. Engage in public- and private-partnership opportunities in health care, ports, energy, infrastructure, and municipal services. Support workforce retraining and education through cluster initiatives or university partnerships, which build long-term resilience in regional economies. These approaches position companies not just as investors but as cocreators of recovery.
For communities, these partnerships reaffirm that local knowledge and legitimacy are irreplaceable assets. Even under conditions of displacement, shelling, and resource scarcity, community voices shape recovery priorities and ensure that solutions meet real needs.
Ukraine’s recovery demonstrates to the world how resource-constrained environments can catalyze adaptive, equitable, and durable civic and state partnerships. In contexts ranging from climate disasters to postconflict reconstruction, the tools developed in Ukraine can serve as a global blueprint for action. By promoting these tools, we not only advocate for sustained US and international support for Ukraine’s recovery but also position its model as an adaptable framework for building resilience, legitimacy, and long-term development in societies under stress.
While rooted in the specific context of wartime Ukraine, the experience of the Alliance of Ukrainian Universities carries broader implications. The model of interuniversity cooperation, grounded in solidarity and societal engagement, can be adapted to address complex challenges faced by communities in diverse settings, including those affected by natural disasters, armed conflicts, or economic crises.
International university alliances already exist and could play an important role in supporting communities, including through cross-border cooperation. For instance, CIVICA, a European university alliance uniting 10 leading institutions, has expanded its activities to Ukraine within the framework of the CIVICA for Ukraine project. The goal of this initiative is to strengthen partnerships and promote exchanges between the CIVICA alliance and Ukrainian universities, with a focus on social sciences, the humanities, management, and public policy.
Ukrainian universities, in turn, are sharing their own experience of working with communities, thus opening opportunities for mutual learning and the dissemination of innovative practices at a global level. The Ukrainian example thus underscores the potential for universities worldwide to form collaborative structures that not only enhance academic exchange but also reinforce community resilience in contexts of disruption and uncertainty.
Read more stories by Valentyna Zasadko, Geoffrey Glenn & Adele Houghton.