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The study contributes to the literature on public value and performance examining politicians’ and managers’ perspectives by investigating the importance they attach to the different facets of performance information (i.e. budgetary, accrual based- and non-financial information (NFI)).

We survey politicians and managers in all Italian municipalities of at least 80,000 inhabitants.

Overall, NFI is more appreciated than financial information (FI). Moreover, budgetary accounting is preferred to accrual accounting. Politicians’ and managers’ preferences are generally aligned.

NFI as a measure of public value is not alternative, but rather complementary, to FI. The latter remains a fundamental element of public sector accounting due to its role in resource allocation and control.

The preference for NFI over FI and of budgetary over accruals accounting suggests that the current predominant emphasis on (accrual-based) financial reporting might be misplaced.

Public value and performance are multi-faceted concepts. They can be captured by different types of information and evaluated according to different criteria, which will also depend on the category of stakeholders or users who assesses public performance. So far, most literature has considered the financial and non-financial facets of performance as virtually separate. Similarly, in the practice, financial management tends to be decoupled from non-financial performance management. However, this research shows that only by considering their joint interactions we can achieve an accurate representation of what public value really is.

The purpose of this contribution is to investigate whether popular reports can strengthen public governance by fostering greater transparency and public participation.

The analysis is based on the case of the “Bilancio in Arancio” of the Municipality of Milan. Data are collected through a triangulation of sources, including the authors’ direct observation, conversational interviews, the press, and a questionnaire distributed to the citizens participating in the experience.

The analysis discusses how popular reports can improve Public Governance, and identify related critical issues. More specifically, four key aspects of Popular reporting appear to play a central role in strengthening governance, that is, their capacity to ensure greater transparency, neutrality, enhanced participation and impacts on decision making. We suggest that every aspect represents an important “step” to be taken in an ideal “ladder of participation.”

Governments that want to enhance public governance may have an interest in developing popular reports, paying attention at ensuring transparency, neutrality, stakeholders’ participation, and their contribution to decision-making processes.

Popular reports can provide to citizens the education on public budgeting issues required to consciously participate in public decision-making processes and give them greater voice and power to express their instances. Popular reports can also promote a two-way communication and dialogue between citizens and governments.

Drawing on the experience of the Municipality of Milan, more general lessons are learnt on the role of popular reports in strengthening public governance, and on the related strengths and weaknesses.

Governments are no strangers to dealing with crises. On the contrary, a central role of any government is to absorb, navigate and mitigate them. However, crises themselves are unpredictable and represent a significant challenge to governments at both the national and local level. Despite such uncertainty, studying how governments in different countries respond to crises offers a great opportunity to learn from the past and to understand the nature of resilience in the face of significant shocks and disruption.

This book charts how local governments in 11 countries, covering Europe, the United States, South America and Australia, responded to the recent crises and austerity period by shedding new light on the role of contextual- and policy-related conditions as well as the internal capacities and conditions that may influence responses and, ultimately, performance.

This chapter sets the scene for the book, by highlighting the relevance of examining financial crises and austerity and the ways in which governments, and more specifically, local governments, are facing the related shocks. In doing so, it proposes a preliminary framework for exploring governmental financial resilience at the local level. In such a framework, financial resilience is seen as the dynamic combination of internal and external dimensions, including the external environment, financial shocks, vulnerability, anticipatory capacity and coping capacity.

Ambitious though it is to summarise the richness of experiences emerging from the country chapters in a few lines, in this concluding chapter we attempt a short synthesis and interpretation, searching for different approaches to resilience and the underlying contextual and organisational explanatory variables. In doing so, we summarise what we have learned about the financial resilience of local governments across 11 countries and discuss possible developments and future research avenues.

While the financial crisis – in some way – impacted most of the countries included in this book, the effects on local governments were not uniform, with some being affected immediately and/or more substantially than others, partly due to the proximity of the crisis, the natural effects of pre-existing fiscal profiles and intergovernmental relations or national coping policies.

The analysis conducted across the 45 local shows that resilience can take different forms, but that important commonalities can be identified across countries. This reveals that there is no one single approach to resilience and that organisations have the choice, based on their latent capacities and how they perceive their vulnerability in the face of a crisis, over which pathway they follow.

The different patterns of financial resilience that emerge can be interpreted as the result of the dynamic interplay among the dimensions of anticipatory capacity, coping capacity and financial shocks, as well as a local government’s associated vulnerability to them.