Institutional change in the eastern neighbourhood: environmental protection and migration policy in Ukraine

Abstract

This article studies the EU policies to induce institutional change in Ukraine’s migration and environment protection sectors. It seeks to bring together external dimension with specificities of local context and highlight how the external policies may result in successful and sustainable outcomes. The external policies that provide flexibility in designing and implementation, include and empower non-state and state actors facilitate institutional change and its sustainability. It prevents institutional monocropping, emergence of a single gatekeeper and provides local legitimization of the policies.

Keywords:

• Europeanization
• Ukraine
• institutional change
• migration
• environment

Acknowledgements

The author would like to thank the Uppsala Centre for Russian and Eurasian Studies for hosting a visiting fellowship and Archimedes Foundation, Tallinn for financing this research visit. The author is grateful for their invaluable help, insightful comments and criticism from Sofie Bedford, Stefan Hedlund, Viacheslav Morozov, Leonid Polishchuk and Milada Vachudova as well as the editors of JSEEBSS and the anonymous reviewers for their constructive comments.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.