The United Nations Development Programme has been active and present in eastern Ukraine for the past decade, prior to the conflict, with a focus on community development, civil society development, and environmental protection. Work on addressing the specific conflict-related development challenges built on this earlier engagement, established partnerships, started in 2015 through the United Nations Recovery and Peacebuilding Programme (UN RPP).

The UN Recovery and Peacebuilding Programme is a multi-donor funded framework programme formulated and led by the UNDP in collaboration with the Government of Ukraine and in cooperation with a number of partnering UN agencies (UN Women, FAO, UNFPA).

The brief is based mostly on practices and experiences of UNDP Ukraine’s work via UN RPP. Social cohesion refers to the state of a society’s convergence, or the “common bonds” that unify different people and groups that share space or territory . It reflects the quality of relationships between individuals and groups in a society (horizontal aspect) and also between people and the institutions that serve them (vertical aspect).