Mediterranean Austerity as Window of Opportunity for NPM's Revival

Austerity programs have mainly been promoted by international bodies in a very detailed way suggesting aims, strategies and policy instruments but then implemented by national and subnational governments. As known, the most part of austerity measures have been invented and packaged by international agencies and regulators like the IMF and the OECD and refined by the ECB and the European Institutions. It deals with a list of measures submitted from prestigious and influential supranational stakeholders (consultants, opinion makers, representatives, chief executives, advisors) to the central governments in some cases through a coercive application and in other cases by suggesting a mimetic isomorphism. As a matter of fact, the most part of the central governments re-transferred the austerity measures to the Subnational Governments delegating the implementation again by a coercive or mimetic application. In other words, austerity measures have been transferred twice: from a political environment external to the state to an internal one and then from the central governments to the local ones. This fact raises some questions about the players and the effects: who transferred and what has really transferred through the double trajectory from global to national and from centre to periphery? According to recent publications about global discourse and local impacts, Austerity transfer is interpreted as ‘a global discourse that became a local practice’ (Christensen, 2012). Actually, in the transfer process many changes occurred and influence by the central government as well as by the local ones are crucial. Local assemblage, translation and reshaping shed light on the significant critical drivers and stakeholders that contributed to transform an external importation to an internal construction. The paper aims at describing the double transfer of austerity programs in six Mediterranean Countries by comparing the trajectories of adopting and transmitting goals, strategies and instruments from the global discourse to the local implementation. It investigates how austerity policies impacted local public services (health, social services, water and sanitation, waste and local transportation) with special regard to the interplay between external and internal, on the one side, and central and local policy makers, on the other, who favoured or resisted, biased or re-interpreted the austerity policy by fiscal and financial measures, reorganizational process and ideas.