From the Great Recession to the Post-COVID 19 Pandemic U.S. Municipal Fiscal Condition: “Austerity Urbanism,” “Pragmatic Municipalism” and On-Going Explanatory Challenges

Abstract

How much did the Great Recession change U.S. municipal budgetary and fiscal governance? According to an academic literature that subsequently emerged, the period saw a combination of both change and continuity. The work offered two distinct ways to explain and understand the emerging context: austerity urbanism and pragmatic municipalism. This paper reviews these explanations with the goal of showing how and why they developed contrasting conceptualizations. We argue differing epistemological approaches underpin the two competing approaches. Understanding these differences is, we argue, critical for moving forward. The COVID 19 pandemic saw another round of changes to U.S. municipal budgetary and fiscal governance, thus stimulating, we argue, the need for another round of conceptual development. However, an under-appreciation of the distinctions between austerity urbanism and pragmatic municipalism threatens to stymie this on-going, post-COVID 19 pandemic conceptualization. We review recent developments in the broader U.S. municipal fiscal governance literature to generate a set of guideposts for this much-needed work.