The Regional Studies Association Research Network on Municipalism and Regional Fiscal Geographies (MuniFisc)
An estimated 85% of the world’s population live under austerity. Over the last decade, this has generated a range of policy responses at the local, national and multilateral level. Across the Global South, structural adjustment has returned, impacting municipal as well as national finances. At the same time, municipal bonds based on North American models have been disseminated as part of a push towards green bond implementation, and efforts to address service delivery and infrastructure finance in a fragmented municipal landscape. In Europe and North America, a decade of municipal austerity has resulted in reorganisation of the local state, experimentation with financialized investment strategies and service delivery, and municipalist movements seeking to restructure relations between democracy, finance and the local state.
This network brings together academics, policymakers and community organisers working across disciplines (geography, critical accounting, development studies) and draw together converging research agendas across the Global North & South.
We propose the following events & activities for our research network:
Workshop 1: Municipalism meets Municipal Finance: Rewiring the Local State under Austerity
University of Sussex, UK, August 2025
This event will bring together scholars, policymakers and community organisers working on municipalism (i.e., movements to rewire projects of local government, democratising urban politics and policy) with those working on municipal finance. While some work on municipal statecraft has explored the relationship between imaginative projects of urban democratic renewal and economic arrangements under Austerity (e.g. Thompson 2023 Trans. Inst. Brit. Geog.), for the most part there has been a separation between those who focus on municipal fiscal geography under austerity (including on the management of restricted budgets through financial innovation), and those who work on municipalist platforms as projects of place- and identity-making. In this workshop, we will bring together scholars and organisers working across these divides to explore the relationship between municipalist imaginaries and the fiscal geographies of financialized local government.
Workshop 2: Budget Making, Democracy & Local Statecraft
Sheffield University, UK, April 2026
This workshop will build on recent work that has drawn Critical Accounting Studies into dialogue with Economic/Financial Geography. This event will be more UK-centric than the others, in part to tap into relevant policy-oriented work domestically, and in part to free up a greater travel budget for Global South participants in the final event of the series. The spate of English councils declaring S114 notices of their inability to balance their annual budgets (effective ‘bankruptcy’) over the last two years has been unprecedented. It comes against a backdrop of CIPFA, the UK Chartered Institute of Public Finance & Accountancy, hosting events in May 2024 that ask: ‘Are there good savings left?’ Public finance officials are grappling with the challenge of shrinking budgets, rising demand for social care and other services, inflation and increased costs, and underinvestment in those same crumbling service infrastructures. It is perhaps no wonder that so many S114 notices have been issued. Yet, research from the Audit Reform Lab has shown that in at least some cases, the S114 notices may have been given without full knowledge of local government finances because of issues with accounting transparency and management. Municipalities may be jumping into crisis before they are pushed. At the same time, the pressure to make cuts when there are ‘no good savings left’ has left many service users facing crises, and struggling to secure democratic accountability when they challenge those cuts, as work by Research for Action, and Sheffield’s ‘It’s our City’ has shown. In this workshop, we will bring together critical accounting scholars and practitioners, community organisers campaigning around municipal accountability and democracy in the face of shrinking budgets, and policymakers to explore challenges and solutions for UK cities under austerity.
Workshop 3: Municipal Green Bonds & The Local ‘De-Risking State’
Online, September 2026
This event will engage with the dissemination of models of municipal finance (especially municipal bonds) introduced in the first Workshop. Municipal bonds, modelled especially on US municipal bonds, have been exported to urban administrations across the Global South, particularly in the guise of ‘green’ municipal bonds, designed to fund adaptation to and mitigation of climate change. Yet, these bonds have frequently been criticised for either failing to be ‘green’, or for being inadequate to the particular complexities of urban service provision in Global South contexts. An under-explored dimension of these bonds is the degree to which they involve the downloading of what Daniela Gabor (2021 Dev. & Change) has termed the ‘Wall Street Consensus’ onto urban fiscal geographies. Gabor’s concept has been widely taken up in development studies to make sense of initiatives spearheading by the World Bank and IMF to make Global South governments more receptive to, and supportive of, private infrastructure finance. In effect, Gabor argues, national and local states are asked to ‘de-risk’ private investment in infrastructure that is thought to have a putatively developmental outcome. As cities are asked to support new financial products often at the behest of World Bank ‘City Creditworthiness’ initiatives, and face austerity imposed by debt crises and resurgent rounds of structural adjustment, the degree to which experiments with new municipal financial products involves a localization of the ‘de-risking’ state has been underexplored. This session will therefore examine both the dissemination of green municipal bonds, and the downloading of the’ de-risking’ state, onto urban centres in the Global South.
Workshop 4: Austerity, Municipalism & Infrastructures of Care
Hybrid/University of Sussex, UK, September 2026
Municipalities play a prominent role in providing public services associated with social care and caring labour (from adult social care to childcare, housing support and refugee support). The rationalization and even loss of these services due to austerity, or the alteration of these services due to financialization of outsourced care provision, has profound impacts on service users. It also has gendered impacts in terms of who ‘picks up the slack’ when public infrastructures of care crumble. Municipalist movements have argued for a feminist municipalism that responds to these crises of care. Urban studies scholars have also looked at imbuing ethics of care into broader infrastructure planning (Iossifova et al. 2022). But how does feminist municipalism, or caring infrastructure, intersect with municipal austerity and financial statecraft at the local scale? This workshop will bring together scholars and organizers from a range of geographies and disciplines to examine the intersections of these challenges and the possible pathways for policymakers and municipalist movements facing up to them.
Special Session 1 – Debt Crises, Structural Adjustment & Local Statecraft
2026 RSA Regional Futures Conference, UK, November 2026
With 54 countries currently living in debt crisis (Debt Justice UK, 2024), municipal finances and municipal service provision will be under strain in a number of settings. Since Covid-19, the return of structural adjustment-style conditionalities in countries from Zambia to Sri Lanka has meant significant changes to public sector budgets. This conference session will explore how municipalities have been tasked to respond, and what kind of cuts, financial innovations and local statecraft have emerged in the face of debt crisis and structural adjustment.
Special Session 2 – Emerging Policy Agendas: Municipalism & Austerity in the Global North and Global South
2027 RSA Annual Conference
This panel will form a capstone to the workshop series, inviting past participants as well as others outside the network to engage with lessons learned from the project, and develop proposals and commentaries for new policy agendas to deal with the issues addressed by the network, namely: municipalism’s intersection with municipal finance under austerity; budgeting, transparency, democracy and service delivery; financial innovation, green bonds, and derisking climate finance at the local level.