CBEES Advanced Seminar with Valentyna Romanova, Research Fellow at the Institute of Developing Economies—Japan External Trade Organization.

Speaker: Valentyna Romanova, Research Fellow at the Institute of Developing Economies—Japan External Trade Organization.

Discussant: Olena Podolian, Postdoctoral Researcher at the Centre for Baltic and East European Studies, Södertörn University.

Abstract: It is puzzling that Japan is the fifth largest global public donor that actively supports Ukraine's recovery on a government-to-government basis, but struggles to leverage the mechanism of city-to-city partnerships to benefit Ukraine’s reconstruction. To explain this puzzle, I explored the experiences of the relevant Japanese sub-national governments to explain what limits and enables their input in Ukraine’s bottom-up recovery via the mechanism under study. My exploratory research is qualitative. It is based on literature review on city-to-city partnerships across the globe, the analysis of policy documents on Japan's development cooperation, and - most importantly - fieldwork in Japan, namely - interviews with the relevant Japanese stakeholders. I find that although the lack of allocations in central and regional/local budgets severely limits Japan’s ability to engage in aid-related city-to-city cooperation with Ukraine, some Japanese sub-national authorities cooperate with their Ukrainian peers to contribute to their recovery. My research findings suggest that this variation results from distinct configurations of Japanese stakeholders - sub-national governments, central agencies, businesses, or local constituencies - who take the lead in cooperating with Ukrainian peers. Based on my findings, I make some policy suggestions.

Valentyna Romanova earned PhD in Political Science from the University of “Kyiv-Mohyla academy” (Ukraine). Also, she was Chevening Scholar and Marie Curie Fellow at the University of Edinburgh (UK). She lives in Tokyo and is a Research Fellow at the Institute of Developing Economies—Japan External Trade Organization. Her main research interests are sub-state politics and foreign engagement in Ukraine’s recovery. Romanova authored a book on Ukraine’s decentralization and multilevel elections (ibidem-Verlag / Columbia University Press), co-edited a volume on Ukraine’s local governance reform (ibidem-Verlag / Columbia University Press), and co-edited seven special issues on regional elections in Regional and Federal Studies. She has published in, among other peer-reviewed outlets, Post-Soviet Affairs, Perspectives on European Politics and Society, Politics, Survival, The Ideology and Politics Journal, Politychni doslidzhennya, Demokratizatsiya, Kyiv Mohyla Law and Politics Journal, and Zeitschrift für Politik.