Concepts and Conflicts of Ownership in Privatization: Communal Self-Government and Communal Property in Eastern Europe since 1990

In this funding phase, research on Poland will continue using newly accessible archival material and will be analytically elevated through a comparative perspective with Ukraine. In Poland, in addition to three case studies—Gdańsk, Warsaw-Wola, and Starachowice—the project will focus on archival records from the Ministry for the Transformation of Property, which are now accessible for the first time. These records are expected to provide deeper insights into the interplay between political privatisation strategies and local self-government, offering a valuable basis for national and local-level comparisons.

A key aspect of the comparative analysis is the study of property conflicts in post-Soviet Ukraine. Unlike in Poland, the relative weakness of state and local institutions in Ukraine facilitated insider privatisation, with property relations being transformed under the challenging conditions of long-term economic instability. Research conducted by the Ukrainian project partner on the central Ukrainian city of Kryvyi Rih indicates strong ties between the municipal administration and the management of privatised enterprises. This situation significantly restricted the ability of public institutions to strategically control or shape private ownership. Preliminary findings suggest that unclear ownership structures and ambiguous responsibilities have severely hindered efforts to develop industrial expertise in a sustainable manner in both Poland and Ukraine.

Through these case studies, the subproject extends the central questions of the Collaborative Research Centre on property as a fundamental social institution by incorporating a comparative perspective on the social and political dynamics of structural property change during a period of profound historical upheaval. It focuses particularly on the socio-economic, political, and discursive limitations of private property in these transformations. In doing so, it establishes a critical foundation for the systematic study of ‘varieties of property regimes’. Poland and Ukraine, as paradigmatic and empirically rich cases representing an East-Central European and a post-Soviet transformation trajectory, respectively, provide an ideal framework for developing a comparative analytical approach to property regimes.