Why Cities Are Failing the EU Transparency Test

We tend to think of EU integration as something happening in Kyiv ministries or Brussels corridors. In reality, it lives in your smartphone — when you try to find a bomb shelter or track how humanitarian aid was distributed. Local governments make 70% of the decisions that implement European law. But are our cities ready for that responsibility? Over the past year, the Transparent Cities program assessed how well Ukrainian municipalities align with European governance standards. The verdict is sobering: we are still dealing in piecemeal solutions, not systems.

Analyzing the first three key areas of municipal governance, we found the same problems recurring across cities and regions.

Local governments are not ready for European transparency standards — and security concerns alone do not explain it. Large and small regional centers, frontline and rear cities, politically stable and unstable administrations alike can maintain basic openness, keep services running, and even launch new digital tools. Outcomes are determined not so much by resources or circumstances as by governance priorities and values. 

Over the past year, under the European City Index, the Transparent Cities team assessed how ready Ukrainian municipalities are for EU integration across three practical dimensions: openness, public engagement, and e-services. The analysis went beyond formal disclosure — it examined the actual user experience: whether a resident can quickly find needed information, understand how the city council works, access a service, influence a decision, or get help in a crisis.

The digital maze: Why dozens of services still fail users

A city can have chatbots, maps, dashboards, and mobile apps — and still give residents no clear way in. That is why our research checks for the single point of entry principle: convenient, regularly updated thematic pages with complete information and working links. This reflects the European approach of user-centricity, where services are built around the resident, not the institution.

In practice, city council websites do the opposite: information is scattered across news sections, department pages, and outdated links, and the search function rarely helps. Last autumn, we tested 11 large cities across nine topics — from council rules and meeting access to humanitarian aid, eRestoration, information for internally displaced persons, and defenders. Only Kyiv fully met the single point of entry standard. Lviv came close: dedicated pages exist for all topics except humanitarian aid. 

We found the same picture across a broader sample. Only 18 of the 50 largest cities have a dedicated section or website with working links to at least seven current e-services. Just six of fifty largest cities — Kyiv, Kharkiv, Odesa, Dnipro, Kryvyi Rih, and Kremenchuk — have comprehensive mobile apps updated in 2025 that provide access to all municipal digital services.

The causes vary: shifted priorities toward security, political instability, staff turnover, and parallel donor-funded projects with no coordinating framework.

Not every mayor actually talks to residents

Another warning sign is how mayors report to their communities. By law, a city’s top official must meet with residents twice a year, look them in the eye, and honestly account for what has been done. In practice, this obligation is routinely reduced to a formality — dense slide decks, departmental wrap-ups, polished promotional videos, or scripted live streams.

Our check of 100 of the largest communities was stark: one in five mayors simply ignored the obligation to report to residents for 2024. In many other cities, reporting consisted only of a text posted on the website — no public meeting, no opportunity for questions. A genuine dialogue took place in fewer than one in four cases. Even a legal requirement is not always enough to move city councils.

Among the 20 regional centers, only Lviv and Khmelnytskyi held open public meetings, presented budget execution reports for the prior year, and explained where community tax revenues went in 2025. 

Five years of full-scale war — and still no clear picture on humanitarian aid

Across several cities studied, we found persistent gaps in areas that became critical after the full-scale invasion and should have been systematized by now: humanitarian aid, compensation for damaged property, services and information for IDPs and defenders, social services, shelter locations, healthcare, and energy consumption data. These are the areas where cities show the least structured, least consistent approaches.

Humanitarian aid is the starkest example. Only 3 of the 50 largest cities — Mykolaiv, Chernivtsi, and Shostka — publish the full range of required information on aid flows and distribution. Meanwhile, 20 cities publish none of the requested categories: no thematic page, no reports, no distribution criteria, no list of recipients.

This problem is solvable. Mykolaiv, Chernivtsi, and Shostka have each built dedicated pages with key information on humanitarian aid — eligibility rules, priority groups, and reporting. Even in wartime, cities can create clear, structured communication when they treat it as a governance priority.

Across all our research, one pattern holds: city governments that think strategically — with baseline policies, programs, and a coherent development logic — are better positioned to survive crises, build new ecosystems, and sustain what they have created. 

When initiatives are treated as standalone projects, sometimes as a favor to international partners, the system quickly loses coherence, frustrating residents and officials alike.

In one regional center, international partners helped fund an app intended to consolidate the city’s digital services. The city never integrated it into its own management infrastructure, and after a few years of developer support, the project effectively shut down.

Separately, a local open data portal — also created with international support — has gradually lost functionality for lack of proper governance. Its most recent datasets date from 2023. The resource formally exists but no longer serves as a source of current information for residents, businesses, or researchers.

The result: cities accumulate tools but never build a system.

What needs to change 

The question local governments must ask is not whether communities will integrate into the EU, but how ready a given city is to start now. The coming years are the critical window for that preparation.

Our research shows that most problems stem not from a lack of technology or resources, but from the absence of a systematic approach to resident communication and to organizing information and services. 

The European approach to governance is grounded in the principles of good governance, codified in the Council of Europe’s 12 Principles — benchmarks for building transparent, effective, and accountable public institutions that serve citizens. They cover everything from fair elections and the rule of law to transparency, accountability, ethics, and sustainable development.

Cities need to start with the foundations: restructure official websites, create dedicated thematic pages for key topics, build a complete publication cycle for council activity, strengthen digital tools for social services and vulnerable groups, and make the site’s search function an actual navigation tool rather than a decorative feature.

Genuine public engagement requires local authorities to go out and speak with their taxpayers — to report, explain, and build mature, accountable relationships. The principle is simple: go where your audience is. If you actually want to reach people and be accountable to your community, follow your audience rather than waiting for residents to monitor city council websites around the clock. Developing social media channels, using engagement tools, working with local media, and proactively going to people — this is demanding, constant work. The payoff is visibility, respect for the council’s representatives, and a calmer public environment. 

We have already developed recommendations and self-assessment tools that let local authorities see themselves through a resident’s eyes. That matters, because change in this area does not begin with large budgets — it begins with recognizing the problem and being willing to rethink how you work.

EU integration is not about hanging an EU flag on city hall. It is about cities where authorities speak not only about their successes but also about their problems — and begin building spaces that genuinely work for people. A city is truly ready for European transparency standards when its resident can find needed information, access assistance, or check how community funds were spent in two taps on a smartphone. Trust is built from transparent digital tools and honest dialogue — and without trust, no community can thrive. Especially in wartime.

This material is made possible with the support of the MATRA Programme of the Embassy of the Kingdom of the Netherlands in Ukraine, and with the financial support of Sweden within the framework of the program on institutional development of Transparency International Ukraine.

Content reflects the views of the author(s) and does not necessarily correspond with the position of the Embassy of the Kingdom of the Netherlands in Ukraine or the Government of Sweden.