The Rise of Austerity and Its Impact on Local Public Service
Local Governance in Europe has recently undergone dramatic retrenchment due to the fiscal consolidation adopted by the central governments because of the economic crisis and the consequent decline of fiscal capacity. From 2010 to 2014 a wave of financial cutbacks and limits on public expenditure was enacted by most of the Eurozone central governments (Lodge and Hood 2012). These measures envisaged reductions of provisions and resources as well as new arrangements implemented to save costs (e.g. central budget supervision, reorganization, privatization, and program termination) (Kickert et al. 2013).
This retrenchment severely affected local policies across Europe and particularly degraded their core business: the public services. As demonstrated by a recent research (Wollmann et al. 2016), public services increasingly became a crucial and strategic core of local governance in Europe. In recent years, local authorities have managed a large percentage of the public expenditure on producing and delivering public services to citizens. Hence the steering of services at local level became of major importance for the public sphere, on the one hand, and for citizensâ rightsâinsofar as citizensâ proximity to local power enhances transparency, public scrutiny, and participationâon the other (Wollmann 2014). Accordingly, the public services (ranging from welfare servicesâhealth and social servicesâto public utilitiesâwater provision , waste collection, transport) may now be considered a crosscutting and significant key to understanding the extent of the retrenchment and its detrimental impacts. As a result, the Local Public Service (LPS) will be the unit of analysis adopted in this book to reflect on austerity policy and look for recommendations.
A large body of studies have recently focused on austerity policies and their capacity to solve problems (Reinhart and Rogoff 2009; Hood 2010; Pollitt 2010; Schaefer and Streeck 2013; Hood and Himaz 2017), as well as their impact on specific and strategic areas like welfare (Leon et al. 2015) and employment. This book focuses on the public services for two reasons. Firstly, because the importance of austerity for public service provision has often been neglected by scholars in favor of its economic and sociological impact. Secondly, because the public services are also a good lens through which to consider the center/periphery (government and governance) relation (reduction of autonomy, upscaling, recentralization) due to the crisis and fiscal consolidation (Wollmann 2016).
Nevertheless, this consequence is not homogeneous across the European Union. If on the one hand it is evident that the economic crisis has impacted harshly on almost all the European countries, ranging from Iceland to Romania, and affected also consolidated economies in the Eurozone, like Germany and Denmark, on the other we know that there is a significant difference among European areas (Kitson et al. 2011). Southern Europeâand more precisely the Mediterranean areaâhas suffered decidedly more than Central or Eastern Europe from both the crisis and the following therapy. Scholars argue that Mediterranean countries have combined low economic growth with low-performing public sectors (Verney 2009; Hopkin 2012; Ongaro 2014), especially in regard to the capacity to implement New Public Management (henceforth NPM ) reforms in recent decades (Kickert 2007; Di Mascio and Natalini 2015) Additionally, we believe that there are two further important reasons for considering Mediterranean Europe.
Firstly, public services are managed and delivered by local authorities to a greater extent than in central and northern Europe. As well known, this prominently concerns the so-called Napoleonic arrangement (Kickert 2011; Kuhlmann and Wollmann 2014; Kuhlmann and Bouckaert 2016), a highly traditional, fragmented, and innovation-resistant pattern of local government that at the same time is of great importance in the national politics of southern Europe (Sotiropoulos 2006; Kickert 2007; Ongaro 2010).
Secondly, the EU member states as well as the non-EU member states (or EU candidates) suffered the economic crisis and the following neoliberal stream of measures in a manner more sweeping and homogeneous than in other parts of Europe, where some countries were affected more specifically and dramatically than others, with a strong variance (e.g. Ireland compared with the United Kingdom). By contrast, in Southern Europe the crisis dramatically affected all the countries, and austerity increasingly spread like a contagion (Verney 2009). Time and space influence this phenomenon. The Mediterranean area, more specifically than âgenericâ Southern Europe as a whole, experienced a stream of coercive or mimetic isomorphism imposed by supranational authorities and agencies: from 2010 to 2014 a permanent agenda of retrenchment became the core of policy making across the Mediterranean area, spilling over from country to country (step by step, first to Greece, then to Portugal, Spain, Italy, Cyprus and so on). The above-mentioned underpin the fact that in the context of austerity the Mediterranean region has ceased to be only a geographical entity and becomes more of a unit for political analysis.
Finally, time and space are variables that shed light on a further important aspect (Overmans and Noordegraaf 2014). A recent study on the relation between fiscal austerity and local governance (Silva and Bucek 2014) has shown the scattered and variable impact of fiscal retrenchment on local governance across the European countries. The aforementioned book is a precursor, because it highlights some recurrent features, like centralization, stricter regulation, the shift of competences and resources from the local to the central government, the introduction of budgetary supervision, and a move back from networking to hierarchy. All these impacts create strong disparities among countries according to the institutional profile and intergovernmental relations. The main result was that the conception of austerity was probably the same, but its implementation at local level was differentiated and sometimes contradictory: âmany responses to a similar overall external pressure â, as Silva and Bucek put it in the conclusion.
This is the starting point of this book. Austerity travelled across Mediterranean Europe as a global discourse that took place at local level (Christensen 2012) due to (or in spite of) local factors and center-peripheries dynamics. There is a lack of knowledge about the concrete variance and its factors far from macro-economic indicators and political discourse. The goal of this book is to take the evidence a step forward. The intention is to investigate how many (and what) responses took place to the similar input and because of what factors. In other words, we want to understand (according to the stream of study on comparative studies in the public sector (Kuhlmann and Bouckaert 2016)) if there are regularities in the way that the Mediterranean countries adopted and implemented the austerity measures and how these latter impacted on local government and LPS management and delivery.
Hence, the book addresses three main research questions:
- (i)What kind of austerity policies affected the Mediterranean LPS? Were they similar or different? Is there a common pattern and who promoted them at supranational or domestic level?
- (ii)How were austerity measures adopted and implemented in terms of strategies, instruments, and organizational arrangements in the LPS? What domestic factors favored or disfavored this adoption at central or local level?
- (iii)What impacts really affected LPS management and delivery and what were the political and social reactions?
The book is intended for scholars, researchers, and students, and it makes recommendations to policy makers in the fields of local governance, public policy and public administration, political science, and geography. The collection of chapters describes ...