This Anti-Corruption Helpdesk brief was produced in response to a query from a U4 Partner Agency. The U4 Helpdesk is operated by Transparency International in collaboration with the U4 Anti-Corruption Resource Centre based at the Chr. Michelsen Institute.
Query
What is the state of empirical evidence on anti-corruption interventions and reforms in Ukraine since 2005, and what conclusions can be drawn on conditions that enable or hinder success?
Summary
Empirical evidence on anti-corruption reform in Ukraine is thinner than the wider literature suggests but offers several consistent lessons. The strongest evidence indicates that reforms work when they reduce discretion, align incentives and embed transparency and accountability into institutional design. Decentralisation and police reform show that participatory and visible institutional change can improve public trust, while awareness raising in isolation can have limited or counterproductive effects. External conditionality has been important for reform adoption, but sustained implementation depends on domestic pressure, institutional safeguards and continued international involvement. Major evidence gaps remain, particularly on enforcement, political finance and reforms undertaken since the full-scale Russian invasion.
Main points
- Ukraine has produced a modest body of empirical evidence on the of anti-corruption reforms, concentrated mainly on the 2014-2022 period and in two intervention areas above all others: public procurement and decentralisation. Fewer than 20 studies meet a robust empirical bar; the wider literature is chiefly descriptive.
- The strongest evidence concerns e procurement and e-auctions. Effects on prices, speed and revenue in public contracting and the sale of public assets are real but depend on reforms to the design that account for vested interests. For example, the mandatory shift of land lease auctions to Prozorro.Sale raised revenue by around 175%, whereas an earlier electronic pilot project run by the state geocadastre, which simultaneously monopolised cadastral surveying, organised the auctions and could disqualify bidders at short notice, produced prices 12–19% lower than offline auctions. Digitisation appears to reduce rent-seeking behaviour only where this reduces discretion on the part of officials with vested interests in the outcomes.
- Decentralisation reforms between 2015 and 2020 increased trust in local government through the participatory process of fostering a stronger sense of local community and stake in government, not fiscal devolution alone, with effects persisting four to five years and underpinning wartime community resilience. However, effects did not spill over into heightened trust in national institutions.
- Police reform indicates why political will can be scarce: abolishing the old traffic police and replacing it with a newly recruited, vetted and better paid patrol force durably improved perceptions of police integrity but produced no electoral return for reformers and only brief spillover to national institutions. Citizens only credit reforms they can observe, and that credit decays fast.
- Awareness raising and integrity training deliver limited or mixed effects. Publicising the scale of corruption can normalise it among audiences with no prior personal experience of corrupt practices, while anti corruption training changes behaviour only when participants know their peers were trained too. Social norms and expectations regarding the behaviour of others, rather than individual integrity or conviction, appear to constitute the operative mechanism.
- The most consistent enabling conditions operate at different stages of the reform process. EU and IMF conditionality, especially combined with civil society pressure (the “sandwich” strategy of complementary top-down and bottom-up approaches), is the strongest driver of formal adoption, but is consistently weaker at securing meaningful delivery once reforms are adopted. Delivery and durability depend more on international involvement in appointments to independent institutions and on transparency-by-design, which protect institutions from capture and embed accountability into implementation itself.
- The main hindering conditions are elite resistance, ranging from capture of some institutions to sustained attempts to limit the independence of others (NACP, NABU, SAPO and HACC), judicial capture, the persistent gap between legislative adoption and implementation, and, since 2022, the use of direct contracting, data classification and concentration of power.
- Critical gaps remain across both intervention areas and time periods. Enforcement and sanctions (NABU, SAPO and HACC performance), political party finance, whistleblower protection, e-declarations, digital public services and the DoZorro civic monitoring mechanism all lack rigorous counterfactual evaluation. The 2005–2014 period remains understudied, reflecting both data scarcity and a comparatively inactive reform period; the post-2022 period is the least empirically studied of the three, since research has not yet caught up due to wartime conditions.
Contents
- Introduction
- Background: Ukraine’s anti-corruption reform trajectory
- What does the empirical evidence say? Findings by intervention type
- Conditions enabling and hindering anti-corruption reform success
- Evidence gaps and directions for further research
- Annex: Empirical studies by intervention type, period and confidence
- References
Authors
Vlora Rechica
Reviewers
Jamie Bergin (TI)
Matthew Jenkins (TI)
Oleksandra Kovalenko (TI)
David Jackson (U4)
Date
28/08/2026
