Italy

Abstract

In the last decades Italy faced a long political transition, which displayed its effects also on the institutional policy of this country. The changes occurred in these years on local and meso-governments will be scrutinized in this chapter looking at the different strategies adopted. Remapping local government in Italy fundamentally meant three different ‘R-approaches': a Re-allocation of legal power (decentralization in the light of NPM) (from 1990 to 2000); a Re-shaping of the institutional setting (devolution) in favour of subsidiarity (from 2001 to 2009); a Re-scaling of functions in terms of recentralization (upscaling) and a search for an optimal territorial scale in times of economic crisis (since 2008).