Proceduralized local autonomy and decentralization under budget constraints. When Nothing Else Matters

Misconceptions about local autonomy over the last decades have triggered the annihilation of the capacity of the thousands of Italian small Municipalities to carry out their administrative duties. Italian under-resourced Local Authorities had been overburdened of administrative tasks, frequently impossible to be fulfilled, under a frequently conflicting and frantic multi-layered national and regional legislation. The fatal blow for small Municipalities has been delivered by an asphyxiating digital bureaucracy that led to a new sophisticated form of tutelle administrative. Digital deadlines have become the metronome of administration and thousands of small Municipalities are obliged to take their few civil servants away from the services to the community and reassign them to discharge dozens of daily digital obligations all year round. The entire reduction of the local autonomy to the decentralization of powers risks being a point of no return.