Local Government Amalgamation in England and Italy: Economic or Democratic Necessity?

Presenter requested to be added to this Panel. Empowering local government has been a recurrent element of political programmes of British and Italian governments since the 1990s. What is important, one of important goals of system reforms is to improve the economic situation of local authorities. The political decisions made in the past decade were undoubtedly influenced by the effects of the 2008 economic crisis and the global metropolisation processes with the growing importance of urban development affecting international economy and culture. Cities are the centres of economic development, and together with their adjacent areas, they are expected to be the incubators of entrepreneurship. The complex problem of metropolitan reality calls for more effective solutions, the establishment of a decision-making and administrative centre responsible for the aggregation and advancement of the interests of municipalities and the whole area. This objective cannot be achieved by municipalities working individually. Local government has become the workshop of testing changes and new solutions. United Kingdom and Italy are regional unitary states with different traditions of local government. In the United Kingdom and Italy the regional dimension of local government reforms is crucial for the conditions in which they are carried out. The process of devolution even intensified the profound differences within the UK, that is why we limited the analysis of amalgamation processes to England. It is the only constituent part of the state where, in the last decades, the amalgamation processes in local government have been gaining pace and importance. In the British case, combined authorities are currently functioning in England, based on devolution agreements between the central government and local authorities. In Italy the central authorities have chosen another way: metropolitan cities are established top-down, by way of constitutional and statutory laws (except in autonomous regions). The aim of the paper we want to present is the comparative analysis of the process of development of English combined authorities and Italian metropolitan cities. The analysis is to provide us with a basis for discussion of the principles of amalgamation of local government units over the past decade. We analyse legal, administrative, political and economic factors that contributed to the formation of new entities. In both cases the analysed period was from the adoption of legal acts allowing the formation of new structures (in England, 2009, in Italy, 2014) until 2018. We conclude, that chosen solutions reflect the need to develop a new form of administration inspired by the concepts of multi-level governance. There are many concepts and models of governance of functional economic areas. Apart from the issue of efficiency of governance, its political and democratic dimension must also be taken into consideration. Municipal authorities as entities of local government are predominantly the representatives of local communities, and their task is to build local democracy. Our study shows that both England and Italy face the problem of insufficient democracy in the bodies of combined authorities and metropolitan cities established after the onset of the economic crisis in 2008.