Nearly all of Ukraine's largest cities have already laid the groundwork for public investment management — they have set up the relevant bodies and adopted the priority documents. Yet only three communities have gathered the key information on this topic into a single section of their website, giving residents and potential investors a way to track investment priorities. These are the findings of an analysis by the Transparent Cities program.

It has now been more than a year since the reform of public investment management (PIM) was officially launched. For communities, this has been a period of adjustment and of mastering the new rules: they have been setting up new advisory bodies and building a base of documents for strategic planning — public investment projects among them. 

The program's analysts examined how the 50 largest cities in Ukraine present their work within the public investment management system on their official websites. In particular, they checked whether municipalities publish the key PIM-related documents on their own sites — an obligation set out in the Laws of Ukraine on Access to Public Information and on Local Self-Government.

Under these rules, a municipality's website must publish the decisions establishing two key advisory bodies, the decisions approving their membership, and the minutes of their meetings: the local investment council (the Council) and the public investment allocation commission (the Commission). The Medium-Term Plan of Priority Public Investments (MTP) and the community's Unified Project Portfolio (UPP) are also subject to mandatory publication.

European approaches, for their part, call for cities' digital resources to be convenient and easy for users to understand. Beyond the community's profile on the DREAM portal, all information about the PIM cycle should be gathered in a single dedicated section on the local council's official website — a “single entry point.” A resident should not have to look for the decision establishing the Council in one place, the Commission's minutes in another, and the MTP or UPP in the archives of the executive committee's general decisions.

What did the analysis of 50 city council websites show? 

The analysts found that 29 of the 50 cities studied had created dedicated sections on public investment management. How fully these sections are filled out, however, varies considerably. Some communities confined themselves to publishing just a few basic documents, while others posted a much broader range of materials, making it easier to follow how investment decisions are made.

In this section, 18 cities published a link to the Medium-Term Plan and 16 to the Unified Project Portfolio. The situation with documentation for the advisory bodies is worse: 13 communities added the full package of documents (the establishing decision, the decision approving membership, and the minutes) for the local Council, and only 5 did so for the Commission. 

The territorial community development strategy — the document from which the entire cycle of implementing public finance management reform at the local level should begin — was properly published by only one city: Oleksandriia. It has a dedicated section devoted to investment policy in general: alongside the requested public investment management documents, it hosts the city's current investment passport and its Program for the Development of Investment Activity.

The most fully developed dedicated pages belonged to 8 of the 29 municipalities studied.Of these, only 3 city councils — Mukachevo, Odesa, and Sumy — posted every requested document in their public investment sections. This means the decisions establishing the Council and the Commission and approving their membership, the minutes of both bodies, the Medium-Term Plans of Priority Public Investments, and the communities' Unified Project Portfolios. That said, the Sumy City Council's page has minutes of the advisory bodies only for 2026. The other 5 cities with strong approaches — Drohobych, Zaporizhzhia, Kyiv, Nizhyn, and Rivne — published a substantial body of materials but still left occasional gaps, most often in the reporting on the Commission's meetings.

The capital's portal publishes the key decisions that have been adopted, and its Medium-Term Plans of Priority Public Investments and Unified Project Portfolio are available to view. However, while the Council's minutes are present and regularly added, the minutes of the Commission's meetings are missing. 

The experts single out the pages of Drohobych, Kovel, and Chornomorsk for convenient navigation and a logical structure for arranging documents. Even so, these cities would still do well to round out their sections with the documents that are missing. 

The analysis also revealed a number of problematic approaches. In another eight cities, the councils published documents on a dedicated public investment page in a highly fragmented way. In Horishni Plavni and Dnipro, only the minutes of both advisory bodies are available; Boryspil and Okhtyrka published only the Unified Project Portfolio; and in Smila and Sheptytskyi the relevant pages contain only the community's Medium-Term Plan of Priority Public Investments. On Poltava's dedicated page, the analysts found a list of the public investment projects included in the community's UPP, along with the minutes of a Council meeting. A separate section of the Shostka City Council with the less-than-obvious title “Public Investment Projects (Projects of Public Investments)” is of little use, since it contains only the Commission's minutes.

In three cities, the analysts found that information about public investment management is scattered across different sections of the site — an approach that is not user-friendly. On Kropyvnytskyi's PIM page, the only documents added are the Commission's minutes and the community's MTP in the form of a presentation slide, while the community's Investment Activity section has separate pages for the UPP and the MTP. Lutsk likewise has a dedicated public investment page, but the city council did not add links there to the minutes of the two advisory bodies; the Commission's minutes can instead be found in the budget section. Uzhhorod is in a similar position: the Commission's minutes sit on the public investment page within the budget section, while the “Investment Portfolio” page publishes the UPP, the MTP, and the Council's minutes.

The program's experts also noted that only 6 of the 29 cities — Zaporizhzhia, Kamianske, Rivne, Chernivtsi, Chornomorsk, and Oleksandriia — published a link to the community's account in the DREAM ecosystem on their dedicated page. Other cities chose to publish this link separately, sometimes on the main page of the council's web portal, outside the public investment section. 

The analysts found pages adjacent to public investment in another 4 communities, where the information is dispersed among different sections of the website. Kolomyia and Cherkasy, for example, cover only individual components of public investment, while in Brovary and Stryi the elements are folded into broader thematic sections. None of these cities, however, has a dedicated page that presents the public investment management system as a whole. 

Of the 50 municipalities studied, 49 published decisions establishing the Council and the Commission on their official websites, or reported on these bodies' activities. Yet councils often take an unsystematic approach to publishing this information: some do not prioritize it at all and leave it within the general mass of all council decisions, while others scatter it across various pages and sections. This can make it hard for residents to find these decisions or to track the changes made to them.

Izmail turned out to be the only city on whose council website the analysts could find neither a dedicated section or page on public investment nor any information that an investment Council or a public investment allocation Commission exists in the city.The community has its own account on the DREAM portal with an active Unified Project Portfolio, so a local investment council and a commission for the allocation of investment projects must indeed exist. 

Izmail's central problem is that executive committee and city council decisions are stored only on an archival Google Drive, with the local authority adding a fresh hyperlink each time to a separate folder holding a package of adopted decisions. This approach makes it impossible to search conveniently for documents either on the municipality's website or even on the archival drive itself — since the council does not publish a general link to it. On top of this, the site carries no news items about the work of the local investment council and the public investment allocation commission. Such posts could serve as additional confirmation that these bodies are working and bring greater openness to the public investment management process. 

What do cities forget? The program's recommendations

The analysis showed that most communities were selective about exactly what to publish in their public investment section. Although nearly every city council has set up a local investment council and a public investment allocation commission, the dedicated sections often carried information on only one of the two advisory bodies. The Kamianske City Council, for instance, filled its “Public Investments” page with documents on the Council's work, yet information about the Commission is not presented at all.

Setting up public investment management bodies without openly covering their work makes it harder to analyze investment activity, erodes trust in local government, and does nothing to advance transparency in the use of public funds. Although half of the cities have created a “single entry point” on this topic, only three municipalities published the key documents there. For the rest, the information is incomplete, scattered, or missing altogether. 

To establish a transparent public investment management process, the Transparent Cities program recommends that communities create a single, dedicated public investment section on the city council's official website. As a priority, this section should include:

• A link to the current, approved territorial community development strategy.
• The decisions establishing the local investment council and approving its membership, together with all of the Council's minutes.
• The decisions establishing the local public investment allocation commission and approving its membership, together with all of the Commission's minutes.
• The current Medium-Term Plan of Priority Public Investments, the community's Unified Project Portfolio, and other supporting materials (for example, a consolidated list of UPP projects) in document form.
• A direct link to the community's profile in the DREAM ecosystem.
• Links to the key legal acts that form the basis of the public investment management reform (resolutions of the Cabinet of Ministers of Ukraine, the Budget Code of Ukraine, and Laws of Ukraine), which can be consulted on the DREAM portal.

It is also worth structuring the information in this section by breaking it into thematic elements — for example, creating a “local investment council” subsection that publishes the decision establishing the council, the decision approving its membership, and its minutes — and publishing every decision, set of minutes, and supporting material as a separate document at a working link.

Every decision a community makes today — approving the MTP, forming the UPP, publishing the minutes — is not reporting for reporting's sake. It is a concrete step toward securing funding for your project, your school, your road, your water utility. Ensuring the greatest possible openness at every stage is a mark of a community's transparency.

This material is funded by Norway. Its content is the sole responsibility of Transparency International Ukraine and does not necessarily reflect the views of the Norwegian Government.