Within the framework of the project “Development of recommendations for the formation of effective local policies through the measurement of community cohesion”, implemented by the NGO “Institute of Civil Society” with the support of the International Renaissance Foundation, a briefing “Recommendations for the formation of effective local policies based on the measurement of community cohesion” was held at Ukraine Crisis Media Center.
Anatoliy Tkachuk, chief consultant of the project, expert on local self-government, decentralization and regional development, noted that this work is a continuation of the ideology of building cohesion in Ukrainian society, starting with the family and ending with the entire community.
“Today, the issue of cohesion has reached a new level,” he said. “Ukraine has become a candidate for membership in the European Union, and Article 174 of the Treaty on its functioning explicitly states that the policy of cohesion is a key policy of the association. Therefore, in Ukraine, the government, society, and communities need to understand what cohesion is, and to what extent our cohesion helps us survive or, on the contrary, hinders our development.”
Moving in this direction, the experts launched a project that involves conducting a series of studies in two different communities. The result was the preparation of a new document of methodological recommendations aimed at advising local governments on how to assess the cohesion of their own community and develop certain measures to improve it.
Yuriy Tretiak, Head of the Center for Cohesion and Regional Development at the Civil Society Institute, spoke about the importance of cohesion policy in the European Union. Back in 2008, Ukraine began to change its regional policy and adapt it to the European regional policy, which is called cohesion policy. As a result, today it has a fairly high level of readiness to become a member of the European Union, not in general, but in the context of regional policy. “Since the creation of the EU, with each wave of enlargement, socio-economic disparities have been growing not between countries, but between regions of different countries. In the late 50s and early 60s, there was an understanding that in order to achieve the best integration for all its new member states, there should be a serious investment policy that would allow for sufficiently fast sustainable economic and social growth. To this end, the Cohesion Policy was created. Its essence is to ensure that the benefits of integration into the European Union are as deep and powerful as possible in the accession countries. The EU makes sure that the level of development in the regions of all its member states is high enough and there are no sharp and large imbalances,” explained Yuriy Tretiak.
The results of the survey conducted in both communities were presented during the briefing. Commenting on the study in general, Anatoliy Tkachuk noted that such a cross-cutting study should be done by every community. It is simple and inexpensive, but quite useful, because in this way you can get a complete portrait of the community, which will form the local identity.
Source: UCMC
