Crises, conditionality, and the commodification of local public services: the case of Italy

Darragh Golden

Chapter 9 in Critical Political Economy of the European Polycrisis, 2025, pp 129-144 from Edward Elgar Publishing

Abstract: Crises unfold and abound, creating opportunities for commodifying forces. Against the backdrop of EU-related crises, the politics of conditionality come back into play in novel ways. Whereas Critical Political Economy scholars anticipated functional dissonance within the EU's two flagship projects – the Single Market Programme (SMP) and the Economic and Monetary Union (EMU) – how the EU responds to crises remains understudied. Local public services (LPS) lie at the intersection of the SMP–EMU nexus and have been targeted for EU commodification with mixed results. Following a decade of austerity and increasing levels of Euroscepticism, EU executives had an opportunity to mitigate the socio-economic impact wreaked by the financial-cum-sovereign debt crisis and the COVID-19 pandemic. The implementation of the Recovery and Resilience Facility (RRF), particularly in the case of Italy, was introduced to further the commodification of LPS. Italy is instructive as ‘in-house’ contracts, a bugbear of the European Commission, remain prevalent for LPS.

Keywords: Crisis; Conditionality; Local public services; Italy (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2025
ISBN: 9781035347933
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