Austerity Measures and Local Public Services in Cyprus: Coping with Challenges Old and New and Reinforcing Historical Continuities

Abstract

Austerity measures have substantially redrawn a number of boundaries, challenges and perceptions in Cyprus’ political, economic and administrative history. Empirically, austerity measures seem to outreach their immediately apparent scope of fiscal consolidation with repercussions for the economy as a whole as well as for wider public management and citizens’ well-being. This has created new dynamics and posed new challenges to local public services, which constitutes a theoretically and empirically challenging endeavour within the framework of Europeanization research. This chapter contextualizes and analyses the variety of austerity measures and their impact on Cyprus’ local public services from a two-fold perspective. In the first place, it does so through a mapping of austerity measures, their specificities and impact. Secondly, it examines how divergent brands of policies and reforms could potentially be transferred via unofficial channels, such as the Learning and Development function of a public administration system. Finally, this work argues that the design and delivery of local public services depends on historical continuities that affect the interplay between central and local government structures and that austerity measures cannot but reinforce them.