Daria Tkachuk
Title: COMMONS UNDER PRESSURE: COMMONS-BASED GOVERNANCE AND THE BARRIERS OF PARTICIPATORY RECONSTRUCTION IN WARTIME DNIPRO
Supervisor: Prof. Dr. Vasilis Kostakis
Opponent: Dr. Christos Giotitsas
Defense: 8 June 2026
Abstract: Commons-based governance assumes institutional conditions that post-conflict cities cannot take for granted, such as civic trust, legal recognition, permeable governance boundaries. This thesis asks how commons-based governance navigates barriers to participatory reconstruction in a city rebuilding under active conflict. It argues that the principal barrier in Dnipro, Ukraine is relational and not technical: trust in formal institutions has eroded but the civic networks that operate in its place remain unrecognised. The concept of pre-distribution, developed by Pazaitis and Drechsler (2021), is applied as a diagnostic lens for understanding what commons governance requires in this context. The argument develops through three methodological layers: comparative case study analysis of Kathmandu and Barcelona; a mixed questionnaire analysed through Causal Layered Analysis across 37 residents, IDPs, volunteers, and NGO representatives; and a Near-Future Landscape scenario as interpretive synthesis. A consistent paradox emerges: normative commitment to participatory reconstruction is broadly shared, but confidence in its institutional realisation is very low. Commons-based reconstruction in Dnipro depends less on designing new governance frameworks than on first establishing the institutional credibility and civic recognition that would make such frameworks legitimate, which reframes the governance problem from design to relationship.
Keywords: Commons-based governance, Participatory reconstruction, Community resilience, Causal Layered Analysis, Futures Studies, Post-war urbanism, Dnipro, Partner State, Internally displaced persons.
