European local authorities’ financial resilience in the face of austerity: a comparison across Austria, Italy and England

European local authorities have been particularly stricken by the current context of decline and cutback management, and represent an ideal place where to study how governments respond to shocks affecting their financial conditions and management. Along these lines, this paper adopt the perspective of financial resilience for looking at the current context of austerity, and related responses, by shedding new lights on the role of internal capacities and conditions in influencing such responses and, ultimately, performance. Through a multiple case study analysis based on 12 European local authorities in Austria, Italy and England, the paper identifies the main shocks perceived by local management, the related short-term and long-term responses, highlighting the dynamics of financial vulnerabilty, awareness, anticipatory capacity, flexibility and recovery ability (ie, financial resilience) in its interaction with the external context and shocks. From the analysis, four patterns of resilience emerge: pro-active resilience, adaptive resilience, passive/fatalist resilience, complacent resilience

Financial resilience in local authorities: an exploration of Anglo-Italian experiences

For more than thirty years public management and accounting theories and practice have been strongly influenced by the search for efficiency, heralded by the New Public Management and similar public sector modernization movements. Public administrations have focused their attention on economy, efficiency and effectiveness, looking for cost containment, matching resources and goals, output maximization or input minimization. Even the wave of development of performance measurement and management tools have mainly emphasized the importance of short-term efficiency, often without worrying too much about their ability to ensure public administrations’ responsiveness in the face of unexpected events and crises

The shaping of public services through calculative practices: The roles of accountants, citizens, professionals, and politicians

This contribution introduces the special issue on the roles of accounting practices in the context of reforms to and within public service organizations. The papers in the special issue provide fresh insights into the ways in which calculative practices intervene in public services, and thus come to affect the experiences of such actors, offering important perspectives on how the latter act to resist, reshape, redefine, and change those very practices, or strategically and tactically use (or avoid the use of) accounting to impact the ways in which services are defined and delivered

Contrasting and explaining purposeful and legitimizing uses of performance information: a mayor’s perspective

This study looks at purposeful and legitimizing types of performance information use in local governments. Drawing on a survey of Austrian mayors who are at the politico-administrative apex of local government, the paper shows that purposeful and legitimizing uses of performance information coexist, but they appear to be negatively associated. In exploring the contextual and organizational conditions under which legitimizing uses prevail over purposeful ones, the analysis shows that oversight (coercive) and political (normative) pressures, hierarchical culture, and low-performance information availability foster the dominance of the legitimizing use type over the purposeful one

Heritage: the priceless hostage of accrual accounting

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to examine how the convergence of private and public sector accounting standards is affecting conceptual and practical issues relating to heritage. More specifically, the paper is intended to provide a better understanding of the state of the art in national and international accounting standards on heritage assets, and of the views influencing such standards. Design/methodology/approach: A qualitative documentary analysis is carried out to explore the variety of existing positions and views on heritage, ranging from the scholarly literature, through potential stakeholders and users, to international and national standard setters. Findings: The analysis shows that the path of convergence between public and private sector standards and practices is still problematic. After more than two decades of debate around the nature, definition, measurement, and reporting of heritage, these issues are far from settled. Research limitations/implications: In the light of calls for increased measurement and reporting of public sector “assets”, and specifically for the definition of standards to recognise heritage, the paper suggests the need to strongly reconsider whether the convergence between public and private sector standards is desirable, feasible and effective. As such, the risks of embracing simplified or hybrid forms of accounting and reporting for heritage should be more seriously assessed. While reporting on heritage is important, it is fundamental to keep it distinct from reporting on government’s regular operations, in order to appreciate its specific value, nature and features. Originality/value: Looking at European national standards for heritage, the IPSASB’s proposals, and the reactions to the latter by relevant stakeholders, the paper provides a pluralistic view on the positions and experiences about heritage, contributing to the debate on the convergence between private and public sector accounting standards

Co-producing an evidence-based toolkit for financial resilience: translating ideas across practitioner and academic communities

The academic-practitioner gap is a long-standing issue in public administration, as noted for more than 50 years by Waldo (1965). Over the years, attempts have been made to identify reasons for this gap, which include a lack of agreement and ambiguity between academic scholars’ research outputs and practitioners’ organisational practices (Orr and Bennett, 2009), concerns about rigour and relevance (Schön, 1991; Antonacopoulou, 2010; Cepiku, 2011), or a preference for short-term over long-term time orientation (Buick et al., 2015). This attracted the attention of interested scholars to discover possible ways to bridge the gap. Orr and Bennett (2012) and Cepiku (2011) emphasised the need to engage in “co-production” among researchers and practitioners, a process of research where both parties collaborate to achieve negotiated objectives – ultimately leading to “full partnerships with a high degree of interaction” (Buick et al., 2015, p. 37). Borrowing the concept of “translation of ideas” from the Scandinavian institutionalism, we argue there is a transfer of ideas between the academic and practitioner worlds (or organisational fields), as different actors translate such ideas to fit their needs (Wedlin and Sahlin, 2017). It means that public organisations and their members are not simply passive recipients of academic scholarship discourses, but actively transform the concepts raised by scholars into meaningful practices embedded in their daily organisational routines – including the technological aspects that turn ideas into practice (Sahlin & Wedlin, 2008). The same applies to scholars who translate ideas that emerge from the organisational practice field into new research objectives. By framing the academic-practitioner gap as an issue of “translation”, including its discursive, operational, and technological aspects, we aim to answer calls from the literature on better understanding the mechanisms through which we can make the work of PA scholars more useful for practitioners (Bushouse et al., 2011). This paper analyses the translation of ideas between academia and practice on the co-production of an evidence-based toolkit for local governments. As known, the co-production of knowledge works better when there is a clear and common purpose between academics and practitioners (Buick et al., 2015). Thus, our toolkit focuses on the financial resilience of local governments – which has been a matter of concern and topic for debate among practitioners in the last few decades. Local governments were challenged to continue improving service delivery amidst reduced financial resources and increased demand for services. The toolkit aims to translate Barbera et al. (2015; 2017) financial resilience framework to the local governments’ operational routines. We relied on (i) surveys, (ii) focus groups (round table discussions), and (iii) interviews that were used to feedback into and co-produce the financial resilience toolkit for UK LAs. Each of these steps is linked to the editing rules identified by Sahlin-Andersson (1996): formulation, logic and context. Our findings point out how the cooperation between academics and practitioners led to the development of an online-based toolkit that exceeded the initial foreseen uses of the toolkit as compared to the initial design solely by academics – i.e., the toolkit become a legitimate solution to different problems (logic) when framed on the right way (formulation) and respecting the local settings specific needs (context)

Editorial: Gender budgeting—Insights from contemporary experiences

This theme is the second of two themed issues of Public Money & Management (PMM), and is the result of the enthusiastic response received to our initial call for papers on gender budgeting, as well as the responses to the first theme. We hope these two PMM themes will contribute to redressing the previous imbalance of attention, by offering new perspectives on gender budgeting and, more generally, on gender-responsive policies

Better understanding financial resilience through an innovative toolkit

This document summarises the main points discussed at the workshop “Better understanding financial resilience through an innovative toolkit” organised by the University of Essex, in collaboration with CIPFA South East (SE), where participants had a hands-on opportunity to explore the toolkit and engage in open discussions and breakout groups to exchange knowledge about financial resilience. Our evidence-based toolkit is being developed by Ileana Steccolini, André Lino, and Bernard Dom. The workshop was facilitated by Jeffrey Matsu (CIPFA), André Lino (University of Essex) and Bernard Dom (Nottingham Trent University), and funded by the University of Essex internal Policy Support Fund programme. The programme is a University’s strategic initiative to increase and speed up the beneficial social, economic, policy, and environmental impacts of our research at home and abroad