Organizational and managerial mechanisms of local self-government bodies in ensuring sustainable regional development

Abstract

The article substantiates the organizational and managerial mechanisms of local self-government bodies in ensuring sustainable regional development in the context of decentralization, martial law, post-war recovery and Ukraine’s European integration transformations. The relevance of the topic is determined by the fact that territorial communities have become the basic level for the implementation of public services, local infrastructure policy, social support, security response, and preparation of recovery projects. At the same time, wartime fiscal centralization, unequal resource capacity of communities, infrastructure destruction, demographic losses, and the growing demand for transparent public investment management require a revision of local governance tools. The article clarifies the essence of the organizational and managerial mechanism as an integrated system of institutional norms, management procedures, resource levers, digital tools, partnership interactions, and monitoring mechanisms that align community strategies with state regional policy priorities and the Sustainable Development Goals. A retrospective comparative analysis of the evolution of local self-government activities in Ukraine is carried out, covering the pre-reform centralized period, the stage of financial and administrative decentralization, the formation of the new territorial basis of communities, wartime adaptation, and the programmed recovery stage of 2025–2027. The toolkit of organizational and managerial mechanisms is defined: strategic planning, program-target budgeting, project management, inter-municipal cooperation, digital recovery management, public participation, transparency, performance monitoring, risk management, and institutional capacity building. It is proven that sustainable regional development depends on the ability of local self-government bodies to combine security, economic, social, environmental, and institutional priorities within a single management cycle. Keywords: local self-government bodies, sustainable regional development, territorial community, decentralization, organizational and managerial mechanism, strategic planning, local budgets, recovery, digitalization, transparency.