Italy

The different types of local government (metropolitan cities, provinces, municipalities), are caught between national and regional legislation in a situation in which the national legislature has the upper hand, with the exception in a few special regions in Italy’s system of asymmetrical regionalism. Although the system of local government was and still is quite symmetrical on the whole, in practice it is less than fully symmetrical with regard both to the performance of local governments and to their role in intergovernmental relations. Local governments are in search of role-clarity amidst a background of a unstable politics and several seasons of unfinished (federal) reforms. Meanwhile, intergovernmental relations are complicated by structural challenges, by a range of socio-demographic trends such as urbanisation and the hyper-fragmentation of local governments, and by the challenges arising from the financial crisis of 2008 and later from the Covid-19 pandemic.