Volodymyr Dubrovskiy, Senior Economist, CASE Ukraine
Mykhailo Wynnyckyj, Associate Professor of the Kyiv-Mohyla Academy (NAUKMA)
On 14 April 2022, CASE Ukraine think tank held a discussion on How Our Victory Is Going to Change Our Institutions? It featured Mykhailo Wynnyckyj, Associate Professor of the Kyiv-Mohyla Academy and Volodymyr Dubrovskiy, Senior Economist of CASE Ukraine. The event was moderated by CASE Ukraine Director Dmytro Boyarchuk.
Keynote points of the discussion and abridged expositions of speaker reports are published below.
Keynote points:
Ukraine is winning against the powerful enemy because the society organizes into small groups refusing a traditional hierarchy. The secret of success is in teamwork.
All the reforms related to law-abidance must be implemented only in the top-to-bottom manner. That is, the elites will have to first set the example of law-abidance and commitment to society interests, patriotism, renunciation of corrupt practices etc. Only then will they promote the values down the line.
The reforms are aimed at replacing individuals holding certain positions, and selection principles have to be designed promptly. The reforms requiring changes in public behaviour should be implemented in a phased way to allow the public time to adjust.
It is necessary to look for institutional formats requiring consensus and agreements with more than one decisions-maker.
The judiciary reform should top the agenda.
We need an actually group leader, which is the civic society that is quite successful in cooperating between itself.
If laws are to work, they must be based on, and comply with, social practices.
Transcript of discussion (for the full video of discussion please follow the link – Ukrainian version)
– The end of the war will open a rather short-lived window of opportunity for change. What will we have to do? How the not quite performing institutions will have to be changed?
Mykhailo Wynnyckyj
All the reforms and the institutional building after the two last revolutions operated within the post-soviet transformation paradigm. Our thinking paradigm has been to somehow join the civilised world and overcome the historic heritage that has supposedly been dragging us away from the West. We were talking about the need for modernisation and the fight against corruption, about establishing various institutions, an open-access society and so on. We have to as if catch up with the West and overcome the historic heritage we had.
We are in a completely different paradigm now. We have single-handedly won the first part of this war against the bigger, more powerful, better equipped and purportedly better organised enemy. This begs a legitimate question of Why so? Where is the secret?
We are self-organising into small groups dismissing the hierarchy traditional for the Western (not just the Western but also for the industrial) world. We frequently call this a Ukrainian anarchism but this is the anarchism with temporary leaders. A company commander, a volunteer, a militia commander on the Maidan are all temporary leaders called heterarchy in sociology.
I am convinced the institutional reform after this war must not be a copycat of institutional rules of the West. We have to accept what is appropriate for us. And for us, an institutional form of collegiality, not hierarchy is appropriate.
We tend to often criticise this by saying collegiality is one hand washing the other when no one is responsible. Yet in the current circumstances we have been able to prove it is the collegiality –by the way, some U.S. generals write about it – that holds the key for success.
Now we are demonstrating that the industrial age has gone down in history and the Ukrainians, strange as it may seem, are winning because they have found, felt for new social constructs that appear to be astonishingly efficient. In the peaceful time, it shall be necessary to transform these social constructs into right institutional forms of collegial decisions-making, not the hierarchical one traditionally prescribed in the public administration and business management.
Volodymyr Dubrovskiy
The time is high now for a transition towards post-industrial organisation. Ukraine has been a ‘lame camel’ in the sense of hierarchic institutions; now it can truly become one of the leaders instead.
It is rather important here to get rid of the problems that have really been – and still are – blockading the transition towards open-access, non-patronal society. Specifically, it is necessary to overcome the harmful phenomena that have been the spanner in the works of our economy. We used to have, and still have, several layers, the uppermost being about industrial transformation and another one with individuals still living in the old, pre-industrial paradigm. One has to understand all these people will remain in Ukraine – they all are Ukrainians making their contribution to our victory. I see a component that will work nicely: the unity unheard of for our society.
We have always shown very little respect to our leaders, institutions, the President, the Verkhovna Rada, the Cabinet of Ministers. Now, owing to the war and the fact our President is behaving rather differently from what he was before, there is a great trust in him; he has huge capital. This could be best used to shape our society and make lots of good things happen.
However, the past mistakes should not be repeated. All the reforms related to law-abidance must be implemented exclusively in the top-to-bottom manner. That is, the elites will have to first set the example of law-abidance and commitment to society interests, patriotism, renunciation of corrupt practices etc. Only then will they promote the values, each time further down the line. ‘Start with yourself’ is a demagogy that does not work.
Another point: should we expedite the reforms or go step by step? Actually, it should go both ways depending of their focus: if it is about changing individuals holding certain positions and selection principles (e.g., to replace directors with normal managers or oligarchic businesses with competitive ones), then the reforms have to be expedient.
Same goes about the rebooting of various government institutions: those that have been rebooted are operational while the rest struggle to work.
The reforms requiring changes in public behaviour (e.g., a pension system and social welfare reform) have to be implemented in a phased way to allow the public time to adjust.
There is a lot of discussion around the fight against corruption; there is a simple approach to it: throw all the criminals behind the bars and that’s about it. The reality though is this crime is not like a murder or a residential burglary; corrupt acts involve individual citizens and the majority of civil servants. Therefore, a crafty strategy to fight corruption can be suggested here: to offer amnesty to anyone who can be incriminated in corrupt activities but only after the main sources of corruption are eliminated.
We can tell the corrupt officials: if you sit tight and not resist the reforms, which are leaving you without corrupt income sources then you will be able, at least, to save your wealth, get an amnesty and a new lease of life. Meanwhile, those who will still continue corrupt activities after this (a few percent of them) will feel the inevitability of punishment. If there will be some actively resisting, they will become priority targets for anti-corruption investigations.
Third point: oligarchs. We have been used to hate oligarchs for them being traitors and rather unlikeable personas. However, oligarchs are more than just five or seven individuals; they make a whole oligarchic class comprising everyone benefitting from the limited access. Punishing and dispossessing them would be a bad idea.
There is a balanced and wise alternative though: they may also exist in the market economy. Maybe, their lives will not be as rich but their business will still be capitalised in absolute values as it happened after the Orange Revolution. They will have high Forbes ratings, even recognition in the West but under one condition: they will have to play by the rules. All of them have expressed at different times their readiness to play by the rules – provided the rest will be ready. Here an arbiter will be necessary to warrant the rest will stick to their word.
That way we will get rid of not oligarchs themselves but of the problem of oligarchy as such when the oligarchs will turn into your regular big business owners who will compete on the market without any help from the government but only with their talent and accumulated capital capitalising on already amassed corporate practices and culture of doing business. And the last but not the least aspect: the reforms must be supported with a large-scale, well-conceived educational effort comprising the nurturing of certain public-wide practices. If the reforms are limited to Іegislative domain, they will remain hanged. Actually, we at CASE-Ukraine have been working on the education vector for quite some time already and we invite you to join the effort to have it also work at other levels like water drops carve the stone.
Mykhailo Wynnyckyj
We need to step away from the concept of a hierarchy that dictates the need to control individuals working at its various levels. In our societal cultural circumstances this will not be efficient. A leap forward – a possibility of a post-war leap forward – suggests there will be no heads in NABU, NACP, SACP etc. These will be collegiate bodies whose chair is an officer with a simple responsibility for overseeing meetings. And the decisions will be made collectively. It is important for us not to lose the chance we are going to have after the war to stop the dependence on a good president today and the risk of a bad one tomorrow. The matter is not with the president but rather with how decisions will be made in this country in the faraway future. We have demonstrated our so-called anarchism, the so-called no-leader groups (the sociologists call them heterarchy, or changeable hierarchy), the temporary leaders of certain projects go further every time but the decisions are made collectively. These structures, which are exceptionally efficient, cannot operate whenever the thinking paradigm defines someone good and another one bad, the good one having to control the bad one. The control of the bad by the good is obviously necessary but this is a call from the past. We need to think about how we are going to structure our government authorities – and not just them but also businesses. A business arranged around teams is much more efficient than the one created by the hierarchy. The proof of concept can be seen in both Ukrainian and western IT companies. It has been nicely described in the book The Rise of the Creative Class, which is about another way of managing, establishing business or seeing it operate. Decisions made unilaterally by someone is the thing of the past. It is necessary to look for institutional forms that require a consensus, agreements and more than one person to make decisions. We are frequently asked by our Western colleagues how has Ukraine come to be so efficient on the battlefield. Let us stop digging in our negatives: how corrupt and bad, inefficient and non-productive we are. Let us have a look of our success stories instead. Our success story is about days on the battlefield. We threw back the Europe’s biggest army. How did we do it? We did it in small teams without any clear hierarchy, the teams of individuals convinced it was the right way of doing it who would use right military equipment to destroy the enemy. Them just working in teams without any big boss over them.
– Which reform should we start with?
Mykhailo Wynnyckyj
For firsts, the judiciary reform that is in the agenda. Secondly, the labour laws: they are overprotective towards the employees and clearly create huge issues for the employers. Actually, the issue is in the hierarchic thinking paradigm. It has been enshrined in the daily routine. Labour relations have to be horizontal, more equal. This will give more freedom to the employer.
Volodymyr Dubrovskiy
Ordinary businesses who are not monopolies on the labour market do not need labour laws at all. What is necessary is labour contracts and only them – and their defence in courts. That is, both the employee and the employer are protected by the contract when its terms and conditions can be easily and efficiently enforced via the judiciary. The only exclusion requiring real defence of either party is mono-cities, the heritage of the industrial age, where the employer enjoys market power to rule the employees who have nowhere to leave. It is there where some of the legislation must remain in force for situations when people cannot leave a mono-city for the lack of money they don’t have because of the underpaying employer.
– Who has to take the lead in the transformation process?
Volodymyr Dubrovskiy
We need to have an actual collective leader. The civil society is the leader: its members are rather successful in cooperating with one other, sometimes arguing, but most of the time working with Western partners, who will now have a huge impact. We have a greater need of an ‘interface’ between the Western partners with their (often outdated and conservative) approaches and the Ukrainian realities. We faced this after the Revolution of Dignity; at some points, like with ‘additional reforms’, it hindered the implementation of the most important of them. Speaking about personal leadership, we now have a President who has turned to be a true leader of the nation. This type of leadership works during the wartime because a specific enemy exists. One of his most successful personnel decisions was to delegate authority to fight the enemy to the military. However, as there is no guarantee other personnel decisions will be successful or that he will do other things just as well, we need to remain vigilant. A collective civic society should be the leader. The only thing that needs to be is a certain coordination centre to collectively decide on matters of strategic importance.
Mykhailo Wynnyckyj
There is no need to re-invent the bicycle. In 2015-2016, we had a fairly efficient structure, the Reform Council. Unfortunately, it worked for just two years and then lost its capacity. It had too many various priorities – 140 – to take. Later on, individual leaders tried to privatise it. Still the structure itself as it was at the beginning is, in my opinion, a step in the right direction that should be revisited now.
– How to overcome problems with law performance in Ukraine and loopholes in the mechanism of their enforcement?
Volodymyr Dubrovskiy
A non-performing law is a bad law. Why is it bad? Not because of some loopholes in it; rather because it is not based on social practices. Footpaths should be made where people have trodden them. Laws on combating corruption and business regulation are often written of the head of those who, rather than legitimising social practices and already established informal structures, attempt breaking these.
It is necessary to focus on things that really have to be ridden of, leaving everything else to the principle of footpath-making. Then there will be respect for the law and the vast majority will abide by the law. Those not in compliance can be punished. There will be few of them. That way, we will find ourselves in a completely different situation with the rule of law
– How serious a hurdle can the paternalism still proper for our society become?
Volodymyr Dubrovskiy
Paternalism, unfortunately, is characteristic of much of our society and there is no way for us to do something about it quickly. This is precisely one of the reforms that cannot be done quickly because it leads to a lot of stress and to the creation of various practices that are often more harmful than the phenomenon itself. It is necessary to enter into a “buy-off contract” with paternalists by which we, the creative and active part of the society will provide them with certain social guarantees – firm guarantees against complete impoverishment, not of income equalisation. They will, in return, provide a chance of unhindered development of us, the country and of our relations with the world. With proper communication this is real.
– How can academic integrity be insured in the education domain when the students are unwilling to write their papers themselves?
Mykhailo Wynnyckyj
The lack of academic integrity is about the lack of motivation to develop, to learn something, to invest in oneself – and about the intention to get a ‘certificate of proof’ from someone above. This is a paternalistic relationship, actually, two sides of the same coin.
Is the problem of academic integrity a thing at all? Obviously, yes. It is the problem of cheating that ranges from the second or third grade to doctors of sciences and, in particular, ministers. The current Education Minister has been accused a lot of plagiarism.
The problem is in us doing dishonest things because education is something we get not to improve something but only for the sake of a ‘certificate of proof’. One has to say good bye to the very idea of the ‘certificate of proof’ (diplomas, grades).
Building up the collegial format of decision-making will also lead one to an increased sense of responsibility for him/herself because it is people who are involved in the decision-making. They also feel some responsibility for what they are to adopt.
We are facing fundamental institutional changes, particularly, in the education domain. Probably, a significant reduction of the role of the state in education with greater decentralization and autonomy of institutions.