State rescaling and new metropolitan space in the age of austerity. Evidence from Italy

The Contours of State Retreat from Collaborative Environmental Governance under Austerity

“…Moreover, if the state is going to be an engaged and active partner in wider societal sustainability transitions [40][41][42], understanding how the austerity period has affected its abilities to engage in collaborative environmental governance appears salient. An existing literature has noted how the theory of 'state retreat' [26,[43][44][45] might offer a conceptual framing for understanding the consequences of austerity on environmental governance.…”

“…State retreat has been described as a multi-dimensional diminution of the state from (what is often considered) normative positionality, forms, and substance in collaborative governance, towards more basic forms and substance of engagement [48]. This can include state withdrawal from governance fora and decision-making processes [27,42], moving away from the 'collaboration ethic' implicit in normative governance theory [49] and, ultimately, 'rescaling' the role of the state in governance [25,43,50]. Thus, state retreat represents both a withdrawal from the intellectual life of collaborative governance as well as the practical activities of governance.…”

“…The findings related to 'relationships' and highlighted how they broadly considered them to have withdrawn from both the intellectual activities of governance in the biosphere reserve but also from its collaborative ethics [24,49]. The distancing of these agencies and actors [17] from the governance fora, decision making, and co-production [27,42] as they realigned towards new positionalities [25,50] as the gatekeepers of scarce austerity funding correlates with state retreat theory's [43] notion of declining state authority. That said, other participants expressed how austerity was not so much a retreat as transformative period [50,52].…”

“…From one perspective, this was evident in this study, where participants discussed how the disassociation of state agencies and actors from governance fora had facilitated their ability to make decisions based solely on the interests of the biosphere reserve. They argued that this allowed true biosphere-centric planning and decision making, though a greater number considered that austerity had reduced their power at the local scale [17,43]. Certainly, the localism literature discusses how for some local-scale governance actors, austerity has seen an increase in decision-making and budgetary powers [18,41].…”

Cities and their hinterlands 10 years on: Local and regional governance still under debate

“…Similar reductions in local and regional capacity as a response to the post-2008 fiscal crisis and its political fall-out have also been noted in Belarus (Sarazhinsky, 2014), Slovakia (Buček and Sopkuliak, 2014;Halás and Klapka, 2017) and Portugal (Nunes Silva, 2014). In other instances the focus has been on the reduction in the number of local government units by means of forced mergers, as has been the case in Italy (Armondi, 2017). Where existing governance arrangements are more resistant to change this type of 'upward' rescaling appears to have involved less entrenched targets: the establishment of a smaller set of merged 'super-regions' in France in 2016 is a case in point (Anon., 2016).…”