Winners of the 2020 Jim Lewis Prize

Ioannis Chorianopoulos and Naya Tselepi: On austerity governance in Athens

We are honoured and thrilled to receive the 2020 Jim Lewis Prize for our paper, a greatly appreciated acknowledgement of our work, which also owes much to a broader team effort. Austerity governance in Athens stems from the Collaborative Governance under Austerity: An eight-case Comparative Study, an international research project funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) (2015–2018 – Ref: ES/L012898/1) and led by Jonathan Davies (see Davies, 2021). The main concerns of the programme were to explore patterns of continuity and change in collaborative urban governance, in different austerity conditions in Europe (Athens, Barcelona, Dublin, Leicester, Nantes) and elsewhere (Montreal, Baltimore, Melbourne). Cities, in our view, were and are at the frontline of austerity (Peck, 2012), and turbulent laboratories for collaborative experimentation (Swyngedouw, 2005). Athens could inform this quest.

In our EURS paper, inquiry focused on a wave of collaborative initiatives launched by the local state amidst austerity and recession, aiming at engaging civil society in common efforts to address austerity quandaries. This high degree of municipal mobilization was perplexing to start with. In previous decades, the local state in Greece has been particularly inactive on the collaborative front, ignoring both EU calls for partnership arrangements in the Structural Funds, and national authority reforms aiming to instigate networking governance arrangements at the local level. What was different this time round, we argued in the paper, was the fierceness with which austerity was imposed in the city, aligning as a catalyst with parallel neoliberal offensives in three emerging scales of governance. At the European level, the common currency shielded monetary decisions from the political process and elevated the EU as a distinct and forcible scale of economic policy. The national authorities, in turn, re-organised state space amidst recession (2010) shifting socio-economic responsibilities to local authorities, rendering them institutions of last resort. Finally, our case study, the city of Athens, adopted a complacent stance towards austerity, recognizing no alternatives to cuts and prudent budgeting, and effectuated change in the role and orientation of the local level by admitting likeminded ‘elite’ partners into the policymaking process. The neoliberal qualities of this rescaling process are evident in the surge of privatizations, exclusionary networks and the deregulatory traits of the policies pursued – their apparent failure in the economic downturn and the social plight they triggered locally (Arapoglou and Gounis, 2017). They are underscored, however, by the active role of the state, in three different regulatory scales, and in setting itself and civil society for the market. After all, isn’t that what’s ‘new’ in neoliberalism?

The EURS article was the first outcome of our work on the changing matrices of Athenian urban politics. Just before submission, an early version of the paper was presented at the 10^th EURS Conference in Chania, Crete (2017), in a fascinating session chaired by current Editor-in-Chief, Nick Henry. Soon after, our focus shifted away from the local authority, toward informal collaborative vehicles for decision-making and adversarial stances to austerity. The emergence of an urban social movement in Athens, and its antagonistic relationship to municipal collaborative perspectives and austerity choices, can be seen in Chorianopoulos and Tselepi (2020), in a Journal of Urban Affairs special issue (42(1)) that features essays on each of the eight cities of the ESRC programme including Athens. The experiences of Athens with respect to the other cities in the programme are also discussed in a forthcoming collectively authored volume that articulates the team’s viewpoints on collaboration under diverse austerity conditions (Davies et al., 2022). As an international research team, we are currently planning to pin down the recent turn away from austerity in international policy discourses, and revisit the question of urban austerity governance in the (post-) pandemic world.

The choice of submitting this paper to EURS was based on the relevance of the topic to the debates and perspectives nurtured by the journal. Dating back to the early 2000s, the journal has steadily supported a vibrant discussion on scale (Brenner, 2003), linking it gradually to austerity, collaboration and the EU (Kokx and Van Kempen, 2010; Souliotis and Alexandri, 2016). In fact, EURS has been a welcoming platform for Ioannis’s previous research on scale (Chorianopoulos, 2012), influencing recursively our analytical and investigatory path. For us engaged in research and academia, there are few opportunities, if any, to publicly acknowledge the quality of the reviewing process in a journal. This is one of them, and we would like to thank the anonymous referees for their constructive comments and support, and to express our gratitude to Tuna Taşan-Kok for an appealing editorial process that greatly enhanced our paper.