Local governance in the context of war-related crises in Ukraine: implications for "social-ecological urbanism"

A joint view of ecological and social systems as closely interlinked has been popularized in the sustainability science for studying local resilience since the 1990s (Berkes & Folke 1998; Berkes et al. 2002). In recent years, a similar framework encased in the notion of “social-ecological urbanism” (SEU) has been utilized by scholars to incorporate resilience thinking in the context of spatial planning and design (Barthel et al. 2013; Pont et al. 2022; Colding et al. 2022). The spatial notion of resilience has been extended not only into an urban (Krueger et al. 2022) but also into a territorial dimension, reflecting on cities as complex and multi-level entities driven by constantly changing and evolving flows and relations (Schröder 2022). However, the existing tools proposed for measuring urban or territorial resilience (Patel & Nosal 2016; UN-Habitat 2018; ARUP 2014) are often criticized for failing to embrace the complexity of contemporary urbanisation phenomenon and linked changing geographies and governance arrangements (Galderisi et al. 2020). This criticism is particularly related to the need to expand the biophysical origin of resilience to include the socio-economic and institutional aspects of post-disaster recovery. These include the specific constellations of power relations (Long 2021; Vale 2014) and context-specific factors defined by the origin of disaster, differentiating between unexpected events, such as natural disaster, and contentious and unwanted, such as social upheaval or war (Allen et al. 2020). The presentation addresses the context of war-related crises in Ukraine viewed as a complex security, socio-economic, and environmental disaster. It derives from the consensus in the literature concerning the positive role of decentralised local governance and collectivity in addressing the early stage of the war-related crises in Ukraine (Romanova & Umland 2024; Keudel & Huss 2024; OECD 2022). It aims to further explore the role of local governance and decision-making in generating regulations for post-disaster recovery and spatial planning and to discuss their implications for the debate on operationalising urban and territorial resilience.