Environmental accounting and reporting in Italian local governments: a longitudinal analysis of changes in context, content and process

This research aims at contributing to a better understanding of changes in local governments’ accounting and reporting practices. Particularly, ‘why’, ‘what’ and ‘how’ environmental aspects are included and the significance of changes across time. It adopts an interpretative approach to conduct a longitudinal analysis of case studies. Pettigrew and Whipp’s framework on context, content and process is used as a lens to distinguish changes under each dimension and analyse their interconnections. Data is collected from official documents and triangulated with semi-structured interviews. The legal framework defines as boundaries of the accounting information the territory under local governments’ jurisdiction and their immediate surrounding area. Organisational environmental performance and externalities are excluded from the requirements. An interplay between the local outer context, political commitment and organisational culture justifies the implementation of changes beyond what is regulated and the implementation of transformational changes. Local governments engage in international networks to gain access to funding and implement changes, leading to adopting the dominant environmental agenda. Key stakeholders, like citizens, are not engaged in the accounting and reporting process. Thus, there is no evidence that the environmental aspects addressed and related changes align with stakeholders’ needs and expectations, which jeopardises its significance. Findings from the current research have implications in other EU member states due to the harmonisation of accounting and reporting practices and the common practice across the EU in using external funding to conceptualise and implement changes. This implies that other local governments could also be representing a limited account related to environmental aspects.

A double chance to investigate populist influence: The Five Star Movement.

In the last decade, new kinds of European populist parties and movements characterized by a left wing, right wing or “eclectic” attitude have succeeded in entering in governments where they could exert a direct populist influence on their coalition partners or, conversely, become victims themselves of the influence of the institutional background. Such a scenario brought this research to formulate two questions: (i) “To what extent did populist parties succeed in influencing their government coalition partners, leading them to adopt populist rhetoric and change their policy positions?” and (ii) “Have populist parties been able to retain their populist “outside mainstream politics” identity, or have they been assimilated to mainstream parties?”. As a case study this project chose the Italian Five Star Movement. Since 2018 this eclectic populist actor has experienced three different governments first with the radical right wing populist League (2018-2019) and then with the mainstream center left Democratic Party (2019-2021). In addition to this, currently the Five Star Movement is a coalition partner of the ongoing Draghi’s government. Theoretically based on the ideological definition of populism (Mudde, 2004), on a new “revised” model of the inclusionary - exclusionary framework to classify populist parties and on a novel definition of “populist influence”,this research made use of both quantitative (bidimensional and text analysis) and qualitative methods (semi-structured interviews) and mainly focuses on the years 2017- 2020.The importance of this study is threefold. First it contributes to the study of populist influence in government in relation to the ideological attachment of the political actors involved. Second, it contributes to understand if populists in power necessarily need to tone down their anti-system character in order to survive. Third, this study introduces conceptual and methodological novelties within the study of populism and populist influence in government.