SHAPOVAL N. Municipal reform in Modern Ukraine: constitutional and legal analysis

The local government is a relatively new constitutional and legal institution, the development of which in Ukraine’s history has been largely intermittent; therefore, accumulating national experience as well as elements of international experience to construct an efficient and viable model of local self-government in Ukraine is an urgent scientific, theoretical and practical task. The thesis deals with the study of both national and international experience in local government reforming, which is conditioned both by Ukraine’s heading for European integration and the need to overcome the remaining elements of the Soviet political and legal heritage constructed on the basis of an arbitrary combination of the elements of community and state concepts in the organization of municipal authorities. Pursuing a comprehensive analysis of the municipal reform as a legal phenomenon within the paradigm of systemic reforming the public power in Ukraine, the author has made an attempt to reveal the nature of the municipal reform as a subject of research in legal science and to identify the main methodological foundations of this activity, to clarify the theoretical and historical patterns of municipal reforming in the context of local government development in Ukraine and to identify key constitutional and legal problems as well as prospects for a municipal reform in modern Ukraine. As a result, for the first time in the constitutional-legal science, the author defines the municipal reform as a kind of the legal reform provided by authorized public entities in close cooperation with local territorial collectives (communities) and civil society institutions, based on a clearly defined concept (program, strategy) of changes, accompanied by the mandatory adoption of a number of legal regulations of conceptually-projective nature, and which shall result in changing the basic principles of developing and functioning of local government as an institution in whole or its institutional, organizational, regulatory or financial-economic foundations. The author highlights the features of the municipal reform as a kind of the legal reform, proves that the municipal reform can be implemented in constitutional, legislative and combined (with the combination of constitutional and legislative changes) forms, as well as distinguishes the following municipal reforms in the territory of Ukraine which chronologically covered the late eighteenth – early twentieth centuries: 1) urban reform in sub-Russian Ukraine in 1785; 2) rural, provincial and urban reforms in sub-Russian Ukraine of the 1860–1890s and municipal reforms of the 1860s and 1890s in Austria-Hungary, which included Halychyna and Bukovyna; 3) Stolypin municipal reform in sub-Russian Ukraine in the early twentieth century.; 4) local government reforms in the period of the Ukrainian Central Council, Hetmanate and Directory (1917–1920).