Lviv Participatory Budget — Ukraine's Highest-Turnout Municipal Co-Budgeting Experiment, Suspended by War

Lviv introduced participatory budgeting (PB) in June 2016, one of at least 154 Ukrainian communities to adopt it between 2015 and 2019. Residents submit costed projects in two size bands and two categories — education/health and other — and vote for two weeks each November on a municipal e-platform. The turnout series is well corroborated across six annual cycles: 21,215 voters in 2016 rising to 72,061 (2017), 68,285 (2018), 103,825 (2019) and 145,573 in the final 2021 cycle, with over 99% of 2021 votes cast online. The 2021 cycle drew 254 proposals requesting UAH 259m and funded 101 winning projects worth UAH 77.8m.

An independent 2019 evaluation (Khutkyy & Avramchenko, funded by Open Society Foundations, based on data from 141 local governments and 9 case studies) ranked Lviv the highest-turnout city of its population class, at 9.9% of residents voting in the 2017 cycle — well ahead of Kyiv (4.5%) or Odesa (2.8%). The same evaluation, however, found no statistically significant relationship nationally between turnout and PB funding share or completion rate, an honest negative finding. Delivery data from the platform show 64 of 67 first-cycle projects completed, and completion rates around 88–95% for the first three cycles.

The programme was suspended when Russia's full-scale invasion began. Lviv's executive committee cancelled the 2022 call under martial law, and no new cycle has run since. Transparency International Ukraine's November 2024 review of 100 cities found that only 8 continued participatory budgeting in 2023–24, and that Lviv had stopped financing PB projects altogether; the city's own platform shows just 18 of the 101 projects funded in the final 2021 vote completed, with 83 still 'in implementation' as of mid-2026, four-plus years on. Gender participation was notably balanced (59% of 2021 project authors were women), while participation by people under 25 was minimal (2%) and no data exists on income, disability or displaced-persons participation.

This is best catalogued as a strong pre-war participation benchmark with an honest continuity failure: excellent, cross-validated turnout and spending data, no outcome evaluation of what the funded projects achieved, and a large unfinished backlog now stalled by war.

Read the full analysis: https://lviv.pb.org.ua/statistics