What makes anti-corruption work in Ukraine effective and lasting?

There are no universal laws in anti-corruption and no set of ‘holy grail’ interventions that inevitably produce change. Anti-corruption is less of a science, more of an art: navigating uncertainty with judgement, creativity, experimentation, and learning. The core practical question is simple: will this intervention fit and stick in this context?

That implementation question is critical for Ukraine as its anti-corruption reforms enter a new phase. The 2013–2014 Euromaidan revolution ushered in an era of institution building. The task now is to make those reforms bite: to embed them in more politically sensitive areas of government and anchor new expectations about integrity in public life.

At U4, we have explored the evidence base to understand what recent academic analysis says about the conditions that help interventions fit and stick in Ukraine. We found eleven recent studies that offer clues, and we supplemented their insights with findings from the broader U4 research portfolio on Ukraine. This emerging evidence base offers no hard rules, but suggests that practitioners should pay closer attention political and organisational incentives, participation dynamics, international involvement, and social norms when designing interventions.

Micro-political incentives matter

The review confirms how politics reshapes reforms as implementation progresses in Ukraine. But as much of the discussion in Ukraine has focused on big picture politics, such as the role of international pressure and how vested interests may spoil reform, practitioners may be less conscious of some of the micro-political dynamics at play during implementation processes.

Indeed, the evidence demonstrates it is important to break down the assumption that just because people are increasingly intolerant of corruption in Ukraine, integrity reforms are naturally politically attractive. A more nuanced picture emerges from the evidence base on the kind of incentives that political leaders, mayors, and senior officials face.

Studies suggest that anti-corruption reforms may endure if reforms produce visible results that can be evaluated by political leaders and people. Nizhnikau’s (2022) study of Prozorro explains why this public procurement transparency reform endured while many others in Ukraine faced resistance. The research contends that Prozorro's early, visible results reduced the uncertainty facing public officials and non-state stakeholders and secured a co-productive coalition that continuously fine-tuned the platform. Early successes helped build trust, reduce doubts, and strengthen support for the new approach, which secured its longer-term sustainability and allowed its expansion to other areas.

Another study indicates this importance of visibility and being able to demonstrate efficacy. Pop-Eleches and Robertson (2024) analysed the rollout of the new patrol police across Ukrainian localities after Euromaidan – a reform that was in part about boosting integrity of the force. Citizens noticed the visible manifestations of change – new officers, uniforms, and vehicles – and perceptions of police integrity improved. The authors hypothesise that reforms that are more visible to the public may generate more support and electoral benefits, although that relationship is not straightforward.

A potential design lesson emerges around more conscious thinking about how to sustain support beyond institutional creation to the period in which a reform proves itself: helping it to generate results, solve implementation problems, build alliances, and communicate its value.

At the same time, it may be important to avoid channelling funding only to ‘shiny’ interventions, as this can distort anti-corruption choices. In U4's research on anti-corruption in local self-government in Ukraine, we found that authorities prioritised tools observable to external observers, such as transparency measures and citizen engagement. Inward-oriented anti-corruption tools and measures, such as audit and risk management, tend to be neglected even though they may be just as important.

Organisational incentives matter

We should avoid the assumption that people tasked with carrying out reforms pursue all tasks equally. Implementation involves ministries, departments, state bodies, local authorities, and associations. The evidence indicates that organisational benefits matter.

Whether the reform carries material benefits for the implementing institution may be one condition worth designing for. Deininger, Ali and Neyter (2023) show that the impact of the state-owned electronic auction system Prozorro.Sale depended not simply on digitisation, but on who had a material interest in making the auctions work well. Before 2021, the StateGeoCadastre (land governance and cadastral administration) organised agricultural land lease auctions but did not benefit financially from securing higher rents. The reform shifted responsibility to local councils, which both ran the auctions and retained the resulting revenues. This alignment of organisational responsibility with a direct financial payoff created stronger incentives to maximise competition and returns.

We have known for a long time that public organisations and political leaders have strong incentives to protect activities that contribute to their core budgets and sustainability. A lesson to take is that implementation design should ask what does this organisation gain or lose if the reform succeeds? That might involve revenue, budget, authority, workload, discretion, reputation, professional status, and organisational survival.

Participation can drive implementation, but requires architecture

Participatory approaches have been a key principle of reforms in Ukraine and the evidence indicates that these can animate trust in government. Arends, Brik, Herrmann and Roesel (2023) find that the decentralisation process in Ukraine increased trust in local government and attribute this specifically to the participatory process of communities constructing new institutions, rather than fiscal devolution itself.

Participation can also help produce political will for implementation. Grimes, Huss and Keudel (2023) examined six Ukrainian localities that sustained governance reforms between 2014 and 2021 and found that durable reform was driven less by formal mandates than by strong relationships between local authorities, civil society, and business. Regular communication, shared narratives, and multi-stakeholder coalitions created networks that reduced the power gap between government and society, allowing knowledge, information, and civic demands to shape decision-making.

This suggests that participation can be an important ingredient to effective implementation and should therefore be an ongoing design principle. But the evidence also suggests that practitioners should not assume that participation just happens. Enhanced participation requires the right architecture and social mechanisms. A study by Khutkyy and Avramchenko (2019) evaluated participatory budgeting across the 154 Ukrainian communities that adopted it between 2015 and 2019. It found that relational mechanisms matter for effectiveness – how exchanges are facilitated and trust built between actors. The authors found participatory budgeting worked where pre-existing civic activism met genuine willingness on the part of local authorities to engage. What appears to matter is whether people experience real agency and reciprocity: they participate and see institutions respond. The conditioning mechanism is about sustaining relationships, not simply institutional design.

Civil society groups are not monolithic in Ukraine. They are social organisations with their own history and perspectives. Khambekova, Los and Huss (2021) asked 242 regional Ukrainian anti-corruption

Organisations that understood corruption as a systemic and collective-action problem were more likely to cooperate with authorities, build coalitions, and use advocacy – and they reported faster results. Those that understood corruption primarily as an individual moral failure tended towards ‘shame and blame’, an approach they rated as less effective.

Embracing the natural diversity of civil society – both good and bad – has implications for CSO funding strategies. Funders should examine what theory of the corruption problem an organisation is actually working with, what relationships it possesses, and what behaviour its funding model encourages. Funding structures can inadvertently reward visibility, confrontation, and easily measurable outputs even where coalition-building, negotiation, or specialist engagement might be more effective.

International leverage can open the door – but implementation requires embedded support

Reviewing a set of articles that considers international involvement offers useful insights. Králiková (2022) examines the 2014–2017 implementation of the asset declaration system and concludes that the international community, though bankrolling much of it, could do little to smoothen implementation. She found deliberate spoiling tactics throughout by local political actors.

Conditionality may change the formal incentive to adopt reform without necessarily changing the incentives of the actors responsible for implementing it. Zaloznaya and Reisinger (2020) found that international anti-corruption norms have been routinely reshaped by domestic political actors.

But international influence in Ukraine operates at different levels and can become more durable when it is built into reform processes and institutions. U4 research examined the effectiveness of the use of Integrity Councils that combine international and domestic expertise to vet candidates for key judicial and anti-corruption roles. This model was pioneered for the HACC's judicial selection and has since extended to other bodies. Overall, the research points to these councils as an effective and innovative approach with transferable potential.

Collective expectations and social norms matter

The evidence reaffirms that reforms do not overlay neutral turf. Tools and institutions may be animated or blunted by social contexts, a finding that suggests we need to be more conscious of the social nature of where anti-corruption takes places.

The Králiková study of the asset declaration system found that implementation confronted ingrained practices with deep roots. It concludes that technocratic reforms alone are unlikely to succeed if they overlook local social norms. These can be understood as collective expectations about appropriate behaviour that can even trump individual attitudes or beliefs.

The evidence suggests that collective expectations should be taken more seriously in Ukraine because they may blunt those common anti-corruption approaches, such as education or awareness raising. Borcan, Grabher-Meyer, Heger and Patel’s (2023) experiment with Ukrainian law students found that integrity training improved attitudes, but actual behaviour in an incentivised bribery game changed only when participants knew that the people they were interacting with had also been trained. This finding on the importance of collective expectations is reinforced by Denisova-Schmidt, Huber and Prytula’s 2015 study with Ukrainian students. They found telling students how widespread corruption was made previously unexposed students more tolerant of it, the ‘everyone does it, so why shouldn’t I’ effect.

One design implication is to not design interventions as if corruption is simply an individual ethics problem. Training an individual procurement officer may accomplish little; changing the perceived norm within an entire procurement team or professional community may matter much more.

Shifting collective expectations faces a particular headwind in Ukraine: perceptions of corruption are stubborn and often disconnected from personal experience. In a representative survey of more than 7,000 Ukrainians, Gorodnichenko et al. (2026) find that while most people see corruption as widespread, far fewer encounter it directly. Providing information about successful prosecutions increased confidence in the government’s willingness to fight corruption but did little to change overall perceptions or civic behaviour. The implication is that better information can strengthen institutional credibility but is unlikely on its own to shift deeply rooted views of corruption.

Practitioners should therefore be conscious that corruption has a perception problem in Ukraine that may blunt the effectiveness of interventions. Repeated messages that corruption is ubiquitous can reinforce expectations that corrupt behaviour is normal. Communications should distinguish between exposing problems, demonstrating enforcement, and showing that compliant behaviour is becoming normal.

In general, a more social norms approach to anti-corruption could help condition the effectiveness of tools. U4 has recommended that a focus on supporting ways to incentivise more collective approaches to anti-corruption could be a missing link in Ukraine’s policy framework.

What may matter for designing effective policies in Ukraine

The review confirms that anti-corruption measures do not operate independently of their political, organisational, and social setting. Asking not ‘does this intervention work?’ to but rather ‘under what conditions will it work here?’ will be an important aspect of policy design for Ukraine.

Emerging lessons

• Treat implementation as a political and organisational process, not simply a technical one. Reforms are carried by people and organisations whose incentives, resources, authority, and reputational interests shape what happens in practice.
• Design for the period after formal adoption. Reforms endure when they generate visible results, solve implementation problems, and build supportive coalitions.
• Build participation rather than simply requiring it. Effective participation depends on relationships, reciprocity, trust, and genuine responsiveness between authorities, civil society, business, and citizens.
• Use international leverage differently at different stages. External pressure can help secure reform adoption, but implementation requires more embedded forms of support that influence incentives and become rooted in domestic institutions and processes.
• Design interventions around collective behaviour as well as individual behaviour. Training, awareness raising, and communication may have limited effects where prevailing expectations continue to normalise corruption; changing what groups believe others will do can be as important as changing individual attitudes.

U4 research has shown that practitioners tend not to think through how activities lead to expected outcomes. Practitioners should make assumptions about incentives, relationships, organisational interests, and social norms explicit in theories of change, test whether those conditions are present, and adapt interventions as implementation unfolds.

This piece has tried to demonstrate that there is value in studying the effects of interventions. Important gaps continue to remain. As Ukraine embarks on further reform, more systemic learning should be an important principle. That learning should help establish not only whether something worked, but for why and under what conditions.