Purpose.\ud The paper aims at contributing to the cutback management and organizational decline streams of research by providing an in-depth analysis of the main challenges that public managers have to address in managing public spending and activity cutbacks as a response to the current financial crisis.\ud Design/methodology/approach\ud After a literature review of the field, an analysis of the activities of international cooperation between public managers is carried out and the strategies adopted at the global level are compared to the challenges and complexities identified by the literature.\ud Findings.\ud Recovery policies adopted at the international level follow some literature indications such as the clear long-term forward-looking focus and the attention to post-crisis challenges. In turn, the crisis is perceived to have politicized decision making. There are concerns that the pressure to reduce levels of staff and services poses the risk that the public sector will not have the ability to manage future crises.\ud Originality/value.\ud Much of the discussion on the crisis focuses on macroeconomic policies and the business sector. Public sector policies are a powerful instrument to overcome the crisis. The article compares recommendations from the theory on crisis management, both in the public and in the private sector, with concrete strategies adopted at the international level

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The impact of financial austerity in many countries and the need to set the direction for governments have radically changed several aspects of Public sector management (Rubin and Willoughby 2014; Anessi-Pessina et al. 2016). A central component of this effort to transform public management involves using strategic planning and performance measures for budgeting decisions (Joyce 1997). Over the last decade, there has been an increase in the use of performance budgeting at the national as well as at subnational and local level, with varying approaches and results across countries (Bleyen et al. 2017; OECD 2017). This article analyzes the dynamics of strategic planning and performance management practices in relation to the budgeting processes in the context of the Italian central government, with the aim of evaluating whether a predominant integration model is apparent in relation to those used in different countries at the OECD level. Starting in 2009, reforms concerning the implementation of performance management tools in the Italian public sector have been promoted and revised, although the need to fully integrate the performance and budgeting processes looks urgent. Based on data from Italian Ministries, this article analyzes the type of relationship and the degree of coherence between adopted strategic plans and budgets. The results show the persistence of a prevalent misalignment between planning and budgeting. Data that were collected from the analysis of strategic plans and budgets from ten Ministries depict a patchy situation, in which some ministries integrate the processes defining a consistent and comparable model, while some others do not. In the conclusions, areas for improvement of the process are identified, while providing policy implications.

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