Public Administration Reform in Italy: A Shopping-basket Approach to the New Public Management or the New Weberianism?

Abstract

The literature on public sector reforms in Italy analyzes the success of the NPM model, highlighting a relevant implementation gap and areas of reform which cannot be ascribed to the NPM. The combination of these two features may be read as the adoption of a modernization framework different from the NPM called the New Weberian State. The article reviews the debate on the NPM, analyzes reforms in Italy, contrasted with the United States and other countries. Several characteristics resemble the New Weberianism in Italy, which, however, appears to be more an ex-post rationalization than a new trend and embodies NPM-learned lessons.

Keywords:

• new public management
• new Weberianism
• public governance
• Italy
• United States

Notes

¹A survey conducted in 1999 found that during the last two decades 40 percent of the world's 123 largest countries had at least one major reform movement and 15 percent of the world's largest countries had some public management reforms but no national level reform initiatives. Cf. Kamarck, 2000.

³For instance, the joined-up terminology can be traced to the substitution of the CPA: Comprehensive Performance Assessment carried out by Audit Commission on local governments in the UK by the:

• CAA: Comprehensive Area Assessments; performance assessment of all (or most) public services in a local authority area.

• LAA: Local Area Agreement, a sort of performance agreement between different public services in a single local government area (mandatory).

• MAA: Multi-Area Agreement, similar to the above covering multiple local authority areas (voluntary).

• LSP: Local Strategic Partnership- loose agreement about priorities and policy for a single LA area.

• IRS: Integrated Regional Strategy- same sort of thing as LSP covering a whole region (http://whitehallwatch.wordpress.com/tag/joined-up/).

²For instance, the new areas of systemic change proposed by the OECD include well-known NPM reform areas such as the budgeting and financial management process, the civil service system, public transparency and accountability, executive agencies and organizational change, the use of private sector service providers, and the devolution or centralisation of decision-making power (Matheson & Kwon, 2003: 20).

⁴One example is the adoption of a key NPM principle: i.e., the political-administrative separation. In Italy, the principle of delineating functions between politicians and senior civil servants has been introduced for the first time in 1993 and reinforced by several additional decrees in the late 1990s, emphasizing a clear cut between political and administrative actors. These provisions established a performance management model for senior civil servants. However, since the early 2000s, there are some signs of a reversal in this trend and Italy is moving towards more political control, getting closer to the United States. For instance, the civil service law states that heads and boards of non-ministerial or departmental agencies appointed by the government in the last semester before a general election can be removed by the new government. Finally, during 2008–2009, new regulations point again towards a performance management model.