A DIFFERENTIATED APPROACH TO SUSTAINABLE DEVELOPMENT AND POST-CONFLICT RECOVERY OF UKRAINE’S RURAL TERRITORIES
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.32689/2523-4536/82-1Keywords:
rural territories, resilience, post-conflict recovery, innovation ecosystem, quadruple helix, craft production, intellectual potential, capacity index, territorial differentiationAbstract
The article synthesises contributions to the recovery of Ukraine’s rural territories and proposes an integral model for ensuring their sustainable development and post-conflict recovery on an innovation-driven basis. The definition of "rural territory" is refined through a resilience attribute. Drawing on pre-war rural population, employment and wage dynamics and quantitative war-loss assessments, the study demonstrates that post-conflict recovery cannot be a simple return to the pre-war baseline. International experience of agrarian post-conflict recovery is systematised, risk domains of rural territorial transformation are identified, and differentiation of recovery policy across four territorial types is substantiated. An innovative-response model is proposed (digital, cooperative-institutional, ecological-circular and entrepreneurial-craft contours), with the entrepreneurial-craft contour substantiated as a low-threshold channel for employment recovery. Based on regional disparities in science funding and patent activity, the model is supplemented with an intellectual-capital component; a significant lag of Ukraine’s agricultural innovation activity relative to the EU is revealed. The institutional mechanism is described through the quadruple-helix principle, the LEADER/CLLD approach and phased implementation supported by blended finance, including verified instruments for small producers (ARISE, the guarantee fund, the "5-7-9%" programme). Recovery effectiveness is proposed to be measured through an integral rural territory capacity index (I_СТ).
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