The Involvement of Citizens in Political Decision Making and Public Accounting Process as a Way to Strengthen the Economic and Social Resilience of Local Government: The Italian Case

Recently, in Italy, in the public sector, an ambitious path for change of the methods and tools of accounting of local governments was started in order to respond to a crisis situation of the classical forms of democracy. This path was developed substantially in two directions: on the one hand, laws (see Laws No. 131/2003 and Nos. 42 and 196 of 2009) and acts ranked as laws (see Legislative Decrees Nos. 170/2006, 118/2011 and 126/2014) have changed internally the criteria and the traditional accounting logics, to make the public accounting systems more uniform and comparable with each other, on the other hand, voluntarily and through an evolution which be occurred by “topics integration”, additional accounting forms (such as the social budget and the participatory budget) have been introduced to inform the community and groups of stakeholders in the social effects of the collective choices and to extend as much as possible the participation of private entities to public decision-making processes. The paper analyses the financial situation of some Italian municipalities which have recently proposed multi-year financial recovery procedures, as provided by article 243-bis of the Consolidated Act of the rules on the Italian local governments (Legislative Decree No. 267/2000), in order to show, in the light of the results of their annual financial statements, as these new tools of accounting, borrowed from the business world and the third sector, can now offer to public bodies, and especially to municipalities, an important opportunity to restore a correct relationship with stakeholders (businesses, households and, in general, all recipients of municipal services) and to strengthen the economic and social resilience of municipalities. Moreover, the paper shows how the Public Sector (especially Regional and City Authorities) can support the implementation of Corporate Social Responsibility (CSR) in the framework of Europe 2020 Strategy. In particular, we want compare the global perspective in the World Bank studies with the EU frameworks for CSR and the Europe 2020 Strategy. Already in 2008 the European Economic and Social Committee declared the need of «development of “socially responsible regions”, flanking the objectives of grassroots democracy with plans to make administrations and all public and private operators shoulder their responsibilities, working towards an integrated strategy of making the best use of local resources to increase competitiveness» (Industrial change, territorial development and responsibility of companies, 2009/C 175/11). Finally, we analyse the implementation of duties of transparency and Social Audit (SA) in: 1) local authorities offices and agencies; 2) the company structures for public service delivery (“in house” companies) which operates in holdings and networks with local authorithies; 3) the Public Procurement; 4) regional and local state-aids recipient companies.