Fiscal Conversion Capacity: How Subnational Public Finance Mediates Place-Based Policy and Transformative Regional Resilience under Compound Shocks

Abstract

Place-based policy has returned to regional development agendas amid persistent territorial inequality, climate transition, demographic change, and recurrent economic disruption. Comparable interventions nevertheless produce divergent regional trajectories, and spatial targeting alone does not explain the divergence. This integrative review argues that the missing mediator is fiscal conversion capacity: the capacity of a territorial governance system to convert externally granted resources and locally borne exposure into implementable, financeable, and distributively defensible action. A two-track design combined a structured search of the 2023–2026 literature, which yielded 63 eligible peer-reviewed studies across regional science, economic geography, public administration and finance, planning, and transition studies, with a purposively assembled set of 24 conceptual anchor works retrieved by citation chaining. Three findings follow. First, fiscal conversion capacity is decomposable into four dimensions — resource adequacy, revenue autonomy and diversification, expenditure flexibility, and intergovernmental risk sharing — that correspond, respectively, to the level, controllability, reallocability, and covariance-pooling of subnational resources, and that map onto but are not reducible to existing typologies of governmental financial resilience. Second, the dimensions are non-substitutable and conditionally signed: revenue autonomy and value capture raise transformative capacity where tax bases are broad and administratively secure, and lower it where bases are narrow or asset-market-linked. Third, the synthesis identifies a resilience paradox with four distinct forms — temporal displacement, balance-sheet substitution, spatial shifting, and social shifting — in which aggregate regional recovery is financed by depleting the fiscal, material, or distributive foundations of subsequent adaptation. The review formalises these findings in the Place-Based Fiscal Conversion framework and eight testable propositions, and specifies the measurement and design requirements — consolidated subnational balance sheets, functional rather than administrative treatment geographies, and sequential-shock identification — through which they can be evaluated.