Patterns of Financial Resilience in Italian Municipalities

The 2008 economic and financial crisis has particularly hit Italy, forcing governments to cope with unprecedented shocks affecting their financial conditions. Drawing on the resilience concept, the chapter aims to investigate what capacities are deployed and developed by Italian local governments to respond to such shocks. Based on a multiple case study, it explores the role of organisational features and capacities, as well as the characteristics of the external environment, in affecting responses and the related results. From the analysis it emerges that different capacities have been deployed by Italian municipalities to anticipate and cope with financial shocks in recent years, leading to four main patterns of financial resilience: proactive and internally driven, fatalist, constrained and contented resilience. The contribution highlights that simply relying on (past) wealthy conditions, or accumulating resources, is not sufficient for coping with shocks. By contrast, it emphasises the importance of investing on anticipating the consequences of negative events.