Governmental financial resilience under...

The recent economic and fiscal crisis provides an opportunity for

learning lessons of general and practical relevance about how governments

face shocks affecting their financial conditions. This article

draws on the resilience concept to investigate the

organizational capacities that are deployed and/or built by local

governments (LGs) to respond to such shocks, looking at their

combinations and interactions with environmental conditions. The

article presents the results of a multiple-case analysis of 12

European LGs across Austria, Italy and England. The analysis

allows us to highlight and operationalize different patterns of

financial resilience, that is, self-regulation, constrained or reactive

adaptation, contented or powerless fatalism, that are the result of

the interaction and development over time of different internal

and external dimensions.