The Reform of Local Government in Italy and the Strengthening of the Territorial Resilience

The paper analyzes the recent Italian reform of local government to answer to the questions: what is the impact of metropolitanisation and intermunicipal cooperation on local economies and to contrast the inequalities? How does metropolitanisation take civil society into consideration? We focus on: 1) The peculiarities of metropolitan government in recent and ongoing reforms in Italy; 2) Public powers and competencies to realize policies for strengthening resilience in metropolitan areas. Scholars debate on indicators for spatial economic resilience and on “institutional capacity of the spatial economic system”, especially in terms of resource distribution, continuity of operational plans, political systems, public facilities. Local powers for strengthening resilience should be elaborated in the framework of the recent reforms of Metropolitan Areas government (Law 7 April 2014, no. 56). The implementation of resilience policies can need several, different and often alternative policies by new Metropolitan Cities and new “Wide Area” institutions, which arise from old District non-metropolitan institutions. We propose to study: a) local authorities involved in government and governance of metropolitan and wide areas, in juxtaposition with regional authorities; b) the reform of metropolitan “Statuti” (Statutes) and the accounting process in participatory democracy perspective; c) competencies and administrative proceedings for planning and realizing policies for strengthening resilience. We selected to test: 1) Local government of economics and, in particular, local competencies in EU State-Aids for cohesion and industrial crisis; 2) Local competencies in reorganizing regional welfare in a “capabilities approach”, contrasting the phenomenon of “resilience of welfare systems”; 3) The effects of both spending review and decentralization strengthening territorial asymmetries; 4) Local powers to limit the “state of exception” national Civil Service powers in crises; 5) Governance of local public service companies. We propose to identify the redistributive effect and the smoothing of gaps and inequalities in local areas as principal content of the strengthening of resilience of territorial policies. We propose to compare the reformed legal framework on local government in Germany, Italy and France.