New development: the crisis and European local government reforms

This article highlights the main reform trajectories put in place in French, Italian, German and Portuguese local governments during the crisis and identifies a number of convergence trends: the crisis is engendering the centralization of decision-making powers to central governments and the decentralization of solutions to local governments; institutional and managerial reforms rather than accounting and financial reforms appear to be at the forefront of the reform agendas of local governments; reforms during the crisis tend to have a more short-term view. The paper emphasizes the opportunity for local governments to use reforms during the crisis not in terms of incremental and pragmatic adaptation but as an opportunity to strategically reposition their value proposition.