The COVID-19 pandemic has demonstrated that a new and unforeseen threat easily outmatched political-administrative systems currently in place. Our commentary on the Italian case contributes to the call for public administration scholars to incorporate crisis management into the main research agendas of the field. We focus on regulatory capacity that is needed to tackle the effects of COVID-19. Under crisis conditions of radical urgency and uncertainty, the Italian regulatory policy has been based on temporary, fast-track procedures. The latter have been regularly applied when Italian governments confront with natural disasters and prompt action is ensured by a repertoire of extraordinary measures running in parallel to burdensome ordinary procedures. We discuss the implications of this “two-track” approach for governance capacity and legitimacy. We also extrapolate existing trends and engage with projection of future developments.

According to classical literature on delegation in the regulatory state, independent regulators are established to enhance the credibility of regulatory policies. In that regard, anti-corruption agencies (ACAs) are peculiar not only because they deal with extremely salient issues, but also because they receive delegated competencies from the government as the "principal" while, at the same time, the government is their regulatory target. How do governments manage regulatory reforms to strike a balance between gaining credibility as "principals" and possibly losing credibility as targets? Drawing from insights on historical institutionalism, this article undertakes a qualitative longitudinal analysis of organizational change regarding ACAs in Italy, where these kinds of agencies are particularly relevant to political leaders. The findings shed light on delegation as a dynamic process for which multiple factors intersect over time.

Using a process sequencing approach, this article shows how Italy's response to an earlier fiscal crisis has shaped the response to the current one in two public sector areas that are especially susceptible to fiscal constraints: the budget process and personnel policies. Substantively, it shows the extent to which Italian policymakers have used the repertoire of solutions of the past and the pressures of the current crisis to freeze the expenditure of the public sector. Previous New Public Management‐inspired reforms have been sidelined but not completely extinguished.

The vulnerability of the four south European countries (Greece, Italy, Portugal and Spain) to the global financial turmoil makes the analysis of their responses to the fiscal crisis particularly interesting for the assessment of the implications of fiscal austerity for public management. Drawing on the historical institutionalist approach, our analysis reveals a picture of variation in the impact of crisis on patterns of public management across south European countries. However, it also shows uniformity in the strategies of retrenchment as in all the four countries under examination governments failed to connect cutback management to ambitious administrative modernization programmes

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