About the Book

The opportunity

Ukraine's reconstruction and its path to EU membership are arriving together, and both reward regions that can plan, fund, and deliver across municipal lines. The institutions that do this work are only beginning to exist, and the clock is set from outside: EU funding moves on fixed cycles and deadlines, and the bodies meant to absorb it must be ready before it arrives.

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Metropolitan cooperation does two things at once:

• it helps neighboring communities tackle shared problems: water, transport, energy, planning;

• it gives the national government a real partner to deliver reconstruction through.

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The recovery money and the EU deadlines are coming. The regional structures to absorb them are not yet built, and America spent seventy years learning how.

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The argument in three parts

The book diagnoses the American model, filters it through Ukraine's metropolitan terrain, and rebuilds it for Ukraine.

• Part I: The American Experience. What a council of governments is and how it works: its law, its board, its funding. Part I closes with the Key Findings, what the American record showed.

• Part II: Ukraine's Metros, and What Transfers. What the ground is in Ukraine, what its metropolitan areas can do and when, and which American lessons make the crossing. Here the Key Requirements, what a metropolitan area has to have in place, are read against the Key Findings.

• Part III: What Ukraine Can Build. The same three dimensions rebuilt for Ukraine: enabling law, board structures, funding. The Conclusion says what I would do, and why voluntary cooperation is where Ukraine should begin.

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Law, boards, funding: three dimensions down the American record, and the same three back for Ukraine. The full contents are on the Chapters page.

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The evidence

For seventy years the United States has coordinated its metropolitan regions through councils of governments. Several hundred stand today, and I look closely at 100 of them. In the eleven councils whose budgets allow the comparison, a small local contribution reaches well past its size: each dollar of members' dues sat in a budget about eleven times larger.

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Ukraine has 72 metropolitan areas, and 51 are under Ukrainian control. In four of the 51, hromadas (Ukraine's basic units of local government) have organized: Kyiv and Lviv with a body, Ivano-Frankivsk and Kryvyi Rih with a memorandum. None of them waited for a national law to require it. Together the 51 were home to 18.7 million people in 2015, before the full-scale invasion.

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Written pro bono, with no government or donor affiliation.