The Verhovna Rada Committee of State building and local government meeting took place on October, 14, 2009. The representatives of Swiss Agency for development and Cooperation SDC, The Swiss-Ukrainian Decentralization Support to Ukraine Project DESPRO, UN Development Programme (UNDP) and others took part in the meeting.

Manuel Etter, the director of SDC in Ukraine, emphasized the individual approach for decentralization support processes in Ukraine: “When we talk about support to decentralization of the public sector in Ukraine, we do not copy unthinkingly the Swiss model, but we adapt to Ukrainian realities – its geographical, historical, mental characteristics”.

Decentralization Support to Ukraine Project DESPRO was represented during the meeting. Oksana Garnets, the Senior Project Coordinator, besides the main objectives of the project, informed the participants of the meeting about arranging the dialog between two regions – Vinnytsya Oblast and the Autonomous Republic of Crimea. The cooperation in the form of exchange visits enables its participants to build strong working relations, familiarize with the progress and results of communities’ projects implementation, and also to assess status, possibilities and perspectives of providing the water-supply services on concrete examples.

As a result the Members of Parliament and the representatives of international organizations met in one – the unadapted legislation and vagueness with the issue of administrative-territorial reform breaks the process of decentralization in Ukraine.