Abstract

After the implementation of the law no. 56/2014, which has deeply changed the nature of Italian provincial governments, political actors in Lombardy engaged in a policy process aimed at revisiting the territorial architecture of local government, in the eyes of Italy's ongoing constitutional revision. Provincial and inter-municipal bodies have notably been the focus of this process, since Lombardy is characterized by the complexity of such bodies, as well as a cumbersome system for the territorial management of regional policies. This complexity ultimately caused the failure of the attempted reform. The article illustrates such framework and the process aimed at rationalizing it, by resorting to categories and analyses of the policy studies literature.