WAR, DEINSTITUTIONALISATION, EUROPEAN INTEGRATION: MULTIFACTOR PRESSURE ON THE CHILD SOCIAL PROTECTION SYSTEM IN UKRAINE

Abstract

War is the primary factor of direct pressure on the child social protection system in Ukraine, whereas the unfinished deinstitutionalisation reform and the European integration trajectory are processes whose course is reshaped by the war and converges at the level of territorial communities. The article argues that these three factors are not symmetric: war reshapes the pace and content of the other two, while existing policy frameworks still treat them as separate agendas. The empirical analysis draws on five secondary data sources: UNICEF TransMonEE Regional Database (residential care, alternative care, and adoption indi cators for 2024); IOM Displacement Tracking Matrix Ukraine (Round 20, April 2025, and the full time series from February 2022 to March 2026 covering 46 measurement rounds); Eurostat EU-SILC and ESSPROS databases (child poverty and family/children social protection expenditure); BOOST Ukraine public expenditure database by the World Bank and the Ministry of Finance (revenues of state and local budgets, 2018—2025); and the UNICEF ECARO mapping of national child rights indicator sets (2026). The analytical strategy combines indirect cross-country benchmarking, intra-country regional comparison, and time series decomposition into pre-war, active-war, and late-war phases. Findings reveal three structural tensions. First, despite the deinstitutionalisation reform launched in 2017, Ukraine ranks second in the region by the rate of children in formal alternative care (2 001 per 100 000), with 42 988 children in residential institutions in 2024 and only 57% of children in alternative care placed in family-based settings — in contrast to the officially reported 93.5%, which applies only to a narrower category of orphaned and deprived children. Second, internal displacement is not stabilising: after a temporary decrease in 2024, the number of de-facto present IDPs grew again to 3.86 million by March 2026, with five receiving oblasts absorbing 52% of the total. The estimated number of displaced children (771—887 thousand) is lower than the official Ministry of Social Policy registry figure of 906 thousand, which suggests systematic overestimation in the registration data. Third, the share of local budgets in total public revenues fell from 44.2% in 2018 to 17.7% in 2025, creating a de facto fiscal recentralisation that weakens the capacity of frontline and receiving communities to deliver social services for children. The article proposes a four-dimensional framework for assessing community capacity in child social protection — personnel, financial, organisational, and service dimensions — grounded in the UNICEF child protection systems strengthening approach and in the local capacity concept from comparative decentralisation studies. The framework operationalises the concept of capacity in a way that accommodates the parallel pressures of war, deinstitutionalisation, and European integration, and integrates Ukraine’s position within European benchmarks.

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