Next year, Ukraine is to enter the next stage of European integration – a much more complicated one from the political, regulatory, and technical point of view (compared to the Association Agreement) – and the success of accession negotiations will depend not only on the skills of the negotiating team (without diminishing the importance of this juncture in the accession process), but primarily on the ability of the government to create and maintain an effective domestic institutional negotiating structure, i.e., special institutions and a system of coordination of the government bodies in charge of the EU accession negotiations that are supposed to form and defend Ukraine’s negotiation positions.
This study represents the authors’ attempt to:
- thoroughly study the experience of other EU candidate countries, both former (countries that did enter the EU) and current ones (countries that are at different stages of the accession process), systematize and identify both the key factors of and “red lines” in negotiations with the EU, etc.;
- provide a critical appraisal of the process of setting the institutional structure of negotiations in Ukraine, which began in the summer of 2024;
- provide recommendations on steps to be taken to build a sustainable and effective institutional framework for negotiations as part of broader public administration reform.
The full version in Ukrainian and English, as well as a concise policy brief, are available for download.
