Local governments and metropolitan cities: The Italian experience and its comparative relevance

The Italian system of local government derives from a variety of arrangements which were developed by Legislature implementing the principle of Autonomy established in Article 5 of the 1948 Constitution. The most recent developments in local government took place at the end of the twentieth century with the reforms of the Consolidated Act on Local Autonomies of 2000 and the reform of the Title V of the Constitution (Constitutional Law No. 3 of 2001), and in 2014 with the institutional reform of the Delrio Law (see Section II, B). Italy’s case touches important nodes of the scholarly debates at the core of the legal and political transformation of local government. It deals with several problems regarding municipalities and other local authorities in both regional and federal systems, such as the issue of the constitutional entrenchment of local authorities, the problem of (over)regulation of municipalities (Palermo and Kössler, 2017), the issues of governing the development of urban areas (Graizbord, 2008), the questions of democracy and participation, and the need for socio-economic reforms in times of austerity.