DYNAMICS OF DEVELOPMENT OF TERRITORIAL COMMUNITIES IN UKRAINE
Authors: Petrakovska Olha , Trehub Mykola 
Published: May 2024

Due to the rapid changes in the political, social, economic, demographic and legal aspects of the development of Ukraine, the vectorization of the further development of the territorial communities remains an important issue. Based on the available retrospective materials of the decentralization process in Ukraine, the purpose of the article is to systematize the available information on the dynamics of the development of territorial communities and the formation of problematic issues regarding the vision of the further development of communities.
The modern legislation provided the support to communities that would be formed according to perspective plans for the formation of community territories, but in fact the law allowed communities to unite independently of the approved perspective plans, and in practice perspective plans often reflected already united communities.
It is important that the administrative reform and the transition from individual settlements to the territorial communities took place quite dynamically and already at the first stage of the decentralization process it was possible to achieve significant successes.
The overall result of the completion of the decentralization process was a new system of administrative-territorial organization at the basic level and sub-regional (district) levels. In 2020, there were 1,470 territorial communities instead of 11,250, and 136 districts instead of 490. Thus, as a result of the administrative reform, the number of communities decreased by 7.6 times and the number of districts by 3.6. There were 410 urban (including the city of Kyiv), 433 villages and 627 rural communities united in the territorial communities and included 443 cities, 1,960 villages and 26,261 villages. Similar statistics was provided for January 2022, before the start of the full-scale invasion.
All components of decentralization process made it possible to talk about an important and well-founded name change: from an administrative-territorial unit, which is as impersonal as possible, to a territorial community, which has a clear connection to a certain area and citizens, who are the basis of further development. The analyzed materials and the determined dynamics of the development of the territorial communities can approve the correctness of the decentralization reforms. The permanent growth, which is confirmed in practice by increased revenues to community budgets, as well as positive demographic dynamics (in the period before the full-scale Russian invasion) are perfect indicators for decentralization process evaluation. Thus, differences in the size and number of territorial communities, demographic situation and resource provision continue to exist between regions.
To make correct decisions, the process of further formation of capable communities needs to be reconsidered, which would take into account the peculiarities of the functioning of the territorial communities during the martial law. In this vector, it is worth considering the specifics of the communities that are currently located in the territory temporarily not under the control of Ukraine, which were under occupation for a certain time and are now de-occupied, as well as territorial communities that are in the zone of active hostilities. It is obvious that the directions of their development, taking into account the social, economic, spatial and resource components, will be different. In this process, new tasks regarding their reformatting and changing the boundaries may also appear, and therefore the general criterion indicators should be reviewed and clarified based on the above components.