Civil-Military Innovation Ecosystems and the Wartime Institutional Resilience Framework: Evidence from Ukraine

Abstract This study develops the Wartime Institutional Resilience Framework (WIRF) to explain how regional governance systems preserve and reconfigure essential functionality under prolonged defensive-war pressure. WIR is conceptualized as a territorially differentiated, system-level outcome shaped by historically accumulated regional capacities, adaptive governance, and evolving Civil–Military Innovation Ecosystems (CMIEs). The framework is operationalized through a first-generation Wartime Institutional Resilience Index (WIR-I) for 24 Ukrainian oblasts over 2022–2025, covering fiscal continuity, administrative functionality, digital capacity, entrepreneurial adaptation, and formal labor-market resilience, while conflict severity is measured separately as external selection pressure. The findings reveal substantial regional heterogeneity. Fiscal continuity and digital capacity indicate the strongest and most robust positive associations with broader wartime functionality, while administrative functionality and entrepreneurial adaptation are more context-dependent, and formal labor-market resilience is not statistically supported. Conflict severity is negatively associated with WIR-I in pooled models. The study contributes an evolutionary perspective on wartime resilience by linking path dependence, regional innovation systems, adaptive governance, and civil–military relational networks within a common meso-level framework.