Community-level energy resilience under high-intensity hazard and military conflict: Frontline experience from the Ukraine war

Community-level energy resilience is an increasing policy priority as climate change and geopolitical instability intensify hazards to local energy systems. While participatory governance is recognised as a pathway to strengthening local energy-system resilience, its role under high-intensity hazards remains empirically underexamined. This study investigates how participatory governance capacities (information and awareness, inclusiveness, social cohesion and collective action, trust-building, and resource mobilisation) and structural determinants, comprising hazard exposure (contact-line exposure) and structural vulnerability (municipal relocation and municipality size), shape community-level energy resilience under high-intensity hazard. Applying ordinary least squares and multilevel models, the study analyses survey data from 145 Ukrainian municipalities collected during Russia's full-scale invasion. Municipal relocation emerges as the most robust negative predictor. Participatory governance capacities show no statistically significant independent associations beyond structural determinants across the sample; however, these findings should be contextualised within the relatively high levels and restricted variation in participatory governance capacities observed. Interaction analysis provides a more nuanced understanding: municipal relocation significantly conditions the association between social cohesion and collective action and community-level energy resilience. This suggests that cohesion-oriented capacities may be sensitive to territorial and institutional disruption, as the contribution of local networks and collective action may become more difficult to sustain when relocation disrupts the relationships through which they operate. By conceptualising community-level energy resilience as a structurally bounded socio-technical system, the study provides energy policymakers and regional and local authorities with a theoretical and empirical basis for reinforcing resilience through differentiated, place-based support that prioritises structurally vulnerable communities, especially those affected by displacement.