In July 2025, hundreds of people filed through exhibition spaces in the cities of Dnipro and Cherkasy, moving slowly past a series of panels and interactive installations. It looks, at first glance, like any other exhibition – considered design, careful lighting, a crowd shuffling quietly from panel to panel. Some have brought their children.

What is on the walls, however, is not only art. It is evidence.

Each panel tells the story of a real corruption case, investigated and documented by a regional Ukrainian media outlet, ten investigations in total, selected through a national competition for the most consequential investigative reporting of the year. The cases are local. The officials named are from places the audience recognises. The money that went missing was theirs.

After the exhibition, people stayed. A discussion began; not with national experts flown in from Kyiv, but with local journalists and civic figures who know the specific contours of corruption in Dnipro and Cherkasy and their respective oblasts. People asked questions. People heard – some of them for the first time – what actually happened to a public contract, a municipal budget line, a planning decision that they had always found suspicious.

This is not what most donors picture when they fund anti-corruption work in Ukraine. There are no prosecutors here, no legislation, no institutional reform. There is just a room full of people, looking at the truth about their own city, in a space that feels safe enough to talk about it.

Scenes like this are playing out across Ukraine. Yet they remain almost entirely invisible to the institutions and donors charged with supporting the country’s anti-corruption reforms.

Culture is the foundation of civil society

Ukraine’s National Anti-Corruption Strategy calls for building a culture of anti-corruption, for making intolerance of corruption a prevailing attitude in society. Yet the strategy says nothing about how cultural institutions might help achieve it, even as theatres, libraries, museums, and community centres across the country are already doing exactly that.

Ukraine has built an impressive set of anti-corruption institutions over the past decade, including specialised prosecutors, anti-corruption courts, asset declaration systems, digitalised procurement, and more. But legal and institutional reform only goes so far.

Anti-corruption interventions require new forms of social behaviour. Nurturing these requires sustained community engagement, trust-building, and the slow work of shifting what people expect from their communities and the state. Cultural spaces are uniquely placed to do this work.

Across the country, theatres, museums, libraries, art residencies, and many other cultural spaces, are helping to rebuild the civic foundations that anti-corruption reform depends on. They bring together people across social divides, create spaces where trust between citizens and institutions can develop, and give communities the room to practise democratic values.

Our research for the U4 Anti-Corruption Resource Centre found an extensive network of cultural initiatives engaged in exactly this kind of work in Ukraine. The Worldwide Ukrainian Play Readings initiative has generated over 580 events across more than 150 theatres in 35 countries. Community libraries in over ten municipalities are hosting participatory budgeting sessions and civic dialogues. Museums are building civic memory and democratic programming. Art platforms, NGOs, and several in the country.community cultural hubs are working in some of the most marginalised communities in the country.

Cultural spaces offer a different approach

Ukraine’s anti-corruption civil society remains vital despite recent setbacks. Monitoring organisations, investigative journalists, legal advocates, and watchdogs have all been essential to the progress of reforms. But there are some aspects of anti-corruption work to which these groups are not best placed to contribute.

Cultural spaces reach people and places that formal civil society often does not. Because they are perceived as neutral and non-hierarchical, they lower the barriers to participation. A library or community centre carries different associations than an NGO office. People come voluntarily, across generational and social lines, and over time. Enabling such sustained, repeated engagement is precisely what allows new civic habits to form.

In Ukraine, that distinction matters enormously. Decades of weak and corrupt governance gave citizens good reason to work around the state rather than through it. If people have always relied on informal networks as the key to survival, simply expecting them to stop will not be an effective strategy. It also misunderstands how social and behavioural norms actually shift. They take time, repeated encounters, and trust; all things that cultural spaces are built to provide.

Anti-corruption as an act of self-determination

There is an added dimension in Ukraine’s current context. The country is going through an intense process of national self-determination, driven in part by the need to assert a distinct civic identity against decades of Russian cultural and political repression. For many Ukrainians, reclaiming cultural heritage and building accountable public institutions are not separate, but part of the same project.

Cultural practitioners we interviewed described their work in exactly these terms. Overcoming corruption, they argued, means not only reforming institutions but helping citizens reconnect with a sense of civic agency that generations of authoritarian rule had eroded. Framing integrity as self-determination rather than compliance resonates in ways that conventional anti-corruption messaging often does not.

Donors must support this body of anti-corruption work

Donors we spoke to acknowledged that cultural programming contributes to social cohesion and trust but tended to view it as separate from governance work. We think that this distinction is mistaken. The social foundations of anti-corruption – civic trust, shared norms, public expectations of accountability – are not just soft preconditions. They are the foundation, and cultural spaces are one of the most effective places to build them.

There are encouraging signs of change. The EU Anti-Corruption Initiative has recently supported cultural projects that address or examine corruption. But this remains the exception. Most major donors have yet to develop funding frameworks that take cultural programming seriously as part of a long-term anti-corruption strategy.

Ukraine has not lacked for anti-corruption ambition and innovation. What it needs now is for donors to recognise this wherever it appears, not only in the institutions already funded.