Main points
- Ukraine’s anti-corruption agenda is currently thriving and complex, but its sustainability depends on how deeply that agenda is embedded in Ukraine’s evolving political and social dynamics.
- Enduring reform requires more than plans and strategies; it depends on continuous adaptation of institutions and norms that is shaped by context. The analysis reframes anti-corruption as a ‘policy arena’ structured by interaction between competing actors and interests.
- Ukraine’s future anti-corruption trajectory can be understood through four alternative policy arenas with different levels of stability and risk. The most resilient pathway is an open, adaptive ‘maturity and innovation’ arena that limits undue political interference.
- This outcome depends on a favourable political economy, conceptualised here through a ’kite model’ of shifting influence among key actors. An important risk for Ukraine’s anti-corruption agenda is institutional and political isolation, where the sector becomes siloed, weak in delivering societal impact, and unable to counterbalance concentrated executive power within the kite model.
- Long-term effectiveness ultimately hinges on broad-based domestic ownership that embeds integrity across state and society rather than relying on external drivers. To help achieve this, practitioners could: 1) Shape the domestic political economy using the kite model as a diagnostic. 2) Develop a shared domestic vision for anti-corruption. 3) Further expand anti-corruption in sectors. 4) Support social capacity to strengthen the anti-corruption agenda. 5) Iternationally-led processes should be mediated locally. 6) Bring the anti-corruption policy arena together.
