External Public Audit and Contemporary Challenges: Promoting an Integrated Framework for Performance, Resilience, and Sustainability

External public audit, as an independent activity designed to assess the legality, regularity, and performance of public fund management, faces multiple and complex challenges today. Coming from both external and internal environments, these challenges fuel paradigm shifts and changes in external public audit practices, which have moved beyond their traditional role of financial verification towards compliance and performance assessments. Over the past two decades, performance auditing has gradually established itself as a distinct practice, regulated at both the international and national levels. The authors put forward the idea that, in the context of current global changes, marked by natural disasters, global warming, international conflicts, political instability, and crises that weaken public institutions, the performance paradigm is, if not outdated, at least limited from an epistemic and operational point of view. Organizational resilience and the persistence of natural and human systems in equilibrium form the foundation of the new paradigm of sustainability, which has become a major concern at both the national and international levels. Initiatives such as Agenda 2030, the Green Deal for Europe, and the European regulatory and normative framework on sustainability are concrete examples of this new direction. Promoting a framework for integrating the performanceresilience-sustainability (PRS) triad into external public audit is the guiding thread of this research, starting from a central question: what is the perspective of external public audit in the context of the new requirements for resilience and sustainability?