The political economy of public procurement in Ukraine

Abstract

This article links Ukraine’s response to Russia’s unprovoked invasion in February 2022 to institutional reforms in the decade before the current war. After the Revolution of Dignity in 2014, Ukrainian civil society, business, and government jointly established an institutional framework to monitor public procurement. The problem of devising institutions to monitor behavior on an ongoing basis is not generally solved through constitutional reforms and revolutions. Public procurement reforms contributed to a culture of coproduction of monitoring that has persisted even when pressure was exerted on open government after Russia’s full-scale invasion. The reforms implemented after the Revolution of Dignity created a robust institutional framework to scale up institutions to monitor public procurement during Ukraine’s ongoing reconstruction effort.