Metropolitan Cities and the Italian Political Agenda: a Strange Relationship?

The institutional fragmentation and misalignment in Italy led to the failure of all the different legislative initiatives for almost 25 years, as the first legislation expressly dedicated to metropolitan level of local administration had made its appearance already in the 1990s, and the effective establishment of metropolitan cities in the Italian legal system took place with the law n. 56/2014. Since the efficacy of the solutions provided by the law and the way in which local contexts actually interpret these solutions are completely open to debate, this paper wants to present and discuss the elements of innovation and path-dependency that have affected the normative and institutional framework, moving from the particular climate at the time of the metropolitan reform and analyzing the political processes and conflict which followed. Although there remain evident obstacles (e.g. the indirect electoral system and the very poor administrative results due to budgetary dependency), the official birth of the metropolitan cities (already included in the Italian Constitution since the 2001 reform) was on January 1st 2015, with the aim to innovate and update the Italian administrative-institutional structure, but mainly by trying to respond to the economic-financial crisis that had reached Italy and other EU member countries, through a rationalization of public expenditures: this 'spending review' had therefore obtained a result that previously had only been 'touched' on a political-legal level. Not only was the implementation of the metropolitan cities in Italy very slow, but the integrated process of abolishing the provinces (the second tier of local government in Italy) was very technical and complicated, becoming at that time the central issue at stake in the political-institutional arena, rather than the effective potentialities of the newly born metropolitan governments. As a result, the political and symbolic investment in the metropolitan cities was quite limited both at national and local levels, since they started to be regarded as successors to the previous provinces rather than new institutions. Hence, analyzing inherited problems such as critical budgetary conditions, a fragile political role, competition with the regions and misinterpretation of their autonomous position which generated problems with the attribution of specific competences, this work will provide a timely state of the art on Italian metropolitan governance.