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Natalia Izosimova's speech on the debate: "Decentralization will increase competitiveness of the region"
Ladies and gentlemen, dear speakers, good afternoon!
Thank you very much for accepting our invitation to participate in today’s debate. This event is organized by the Foundation for Effective Governance in partnership with Britain-based Intelligence Squared.
Our motion today is decentralization of authorities. For many years, it remains one of the most complicated and widely discussed subjects in Ukraine.
A little more than a year ago, the Foundation for Effective Governance initiated its regional economic development project. After systemic and deep diagnostics of Ukrainian regions, we selected two: the city of Lviv and the region of Donetsk. The project objective is to develop a long-term strategy of economic development for these regions and a mechanism of its implementation. Because the project is carried out in close cooperation with local governments and business circles, we were able to realize very soon and clear that many of the problems – or to be more exact, the tasks set before the regions – cannot be solved in any single region. There has to be a harmonic approach: a region should be a part of the nationwide system to their mutual advantage, so that both a region and a country would benefit rather than suffer from this union.
Everyone knows that the current distribution of authorities between the Center and the regions in Ukraine is far from being optimal. Then what is an optimal model?
Decentralization is one of the ways to coordinate relations between the Center and the regions. But will administrative and fiscal decentralization increase competitiveness of the regions? The results of world practices in decentralization are controversial. A balance between the authorities and responsibilities and a possibility to manage financial resources at the local level will let local governments develop their regions more effectively, while their voters will be able to place higher demands on the locally elected politicians. On the other hand, there are numerous examples of corruption, irresponsibility and unprofessionalism of local public servants. Sometimes they manage to abuse the power they already enjoy. Is it reasonable to delegate additional resources and power authority to the locals without introducing effective control mechanisms first? Won’t it change the situation for the worse? And what about deprived areas? – Independent local financial bodies simply cannot function there.
Einstein said: “We can't solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them.” We need entirely new ideas and new approaches to decision making, which will let us carefully contemplate the risks and at the same time make exact forecasts of the situation.
Today we are looking forward to interesting and persuasive arguments in favor of one or another viewpoint, all the more so because we have remarkable panelists here. Their presentations will help us to form our own opinions of the problem, which we will share during the poll at the end of the debate.
We are certain that today’s debate will not only be informative and constructive, but also interesting and entertaining.
Now I would like to give the floor to debate moderator and journalist Zurab Alasania
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