The role of governance and government in the resilience of regions: the case of the 2012 earthquake in the Emilia-Romagna region in Italy

Resilience means the capacity of a territory to react to, reconstruct, adapt and learn from a shock. The shock can be an economic crisis like the financial crisis started in 2008, or a sudden and unexpected event such as a natural disaster. The earthquakes that affected the Emilia-Romagna region in Italy in May 2012 are a case in point. On the 20th and the 29th of May of that year two earthquakes of medium intensity affected the region, with limited impact on the health of people but dramatic impact on buildings, houses, schools and industrial plants. The literature has stressed the importance of factors such as the magnitude of the natural disaster, the amount of available resources, tangible and intangible capital and endowments in favouring the resilience of places to disasters. The recovery governance has also been shown to be important, in particular democratic participation in the recovery process. We highlight through the analysis of the Emilia Romagna case that recovery governance is indeed a key aspect, and in particular the capacity of the government to rapidly set priorities and favour the cohesion of local communities. For this purpose, we argue that a key level of the recovery governance process is the meso-level of governance, namely the regional one.