Russia’s full-scale invasion of Ukraine in 2022 has caused enormous destruction and loss, deeply affecting the country’s politics, economy, and society. Amid ongoing conflict, Ukraine has begun planning its reconstruction, which incorporates defense, humanitarian relief, and recovery agendas. This process created new arenas of cooperation and contestation among different actors and groups, making the question of how to rebuild inseparable from who participates in shaping the nation’s post-war future.

This project seeks to explore how civil society and professional groups influence and interact with governmental institutions, local self-governance structures, and international donors to create new formal and informal practices for designing and implementing reconstruction strategies. The study approaches the subject of recovery from a political science perspective, focusing on how, and under which conditions, Ukrainian civic activists, professional clusters, and local authorities acquire political and social agency, occupy formal and informal roles in reconstruction projects, and navigate relationships with the government, donors, and other civic actors.

By analyzing these evolving patterns of cooperation and tension, the research will contribute to understanding how bottom-up initiatives can coalesce with top-down recovery policies in the context of ongoing war, particularly in Ukraine’s largest and most war-affected cities in the East and South, such as Kharkiv, Mykolaiv, Zaporizhzhia, and communities around Kyiv. Drawing on interviews conducted in frontline and liberated areas between 2023 and 2025, as well as comparative literature on participatory governance, Yuliya Bidenko's fellowship project seeks to offer insights into building resilient, democratic communities in post-conflict settings, both in Ukraine and globally.