Un gir més cap a la centralització i la uniformitat. Governança i reformes del sector públic en el Pla de recuperació i resiliència italià
| Autor | Stefano Civitarese Matteucci |
| Páginas | 21-38 |
Revista catalana de dret públic #63
www.rcdp.cat
A FURTHER TWIST TOWARDS CENTRALISATION AND UNIFORMITY. GOVERNANCE
AND PUBLIC SECTOR REFORMS IN THE ITALIAN RECOVERY AND RESILIENCE PLAN
Stefano Civitarese Matteucci*
Abstract
This article examines the implementation of the EU Recovery and Resilience Plan (RRP) in Italy. By analysing and
discussing the governance of the plan and the reform agenda it sets out, it aims to determine its political-constitutional
background from the viewpoint of the regional and local authorities. The author purports that the logic and political
inspiration of the plan is traceable to a longer trajectory of the political direction of executive power that results in the
side-lining of both parliamentary and devolved powers. In particular, four factors are detected that justify this claim: the
Prime Minister’s hegemony within the governance of the RRP; a considerable injection of technical/bureaucratic expertise
multilevel governance around this hegemony by
resorting to uniformity and concentration in the implementation process; and the adherence to a new public management
(NPM)-like ideology.
Key words: EU Recovery and Resilience Plan; governance; managerialism; reform; territorial governance; recentralisation;
Italy.
UN GIR MÉS CAP A LA CENTRALITZACIÓ I LA UNIFORMITAT. GOVERNANÇA I
REFORMES DEL SECTOR PÚBLIC EN EL PLA DE RECUPERACIÓ I RESILIÈNCIA ITALIÀ
Resum
Aquest article examina la implementació del Pla de recuperació per a Europa (Recovery and Resilience Plan, RRP) a
Itàlia. Mitjançant l’anàlisi i la discussió sobre la governança del pla i de l’agenda de reformes que estableix, es pro-
posa determinar-ne el rerefons polític i constitucional des del punt de vista de les autoritats regionals i locals. L’autor
sosté que la lògica i la inspiració política d’aquest pla responen a una trajectòria més llarga de la direcció política del
poder executiu, que es tradueix en deixar al marge les competències parlamentàries i les transferides. En concret, es
pla; una injecció considerable de coneixements tècnics/burocràtics en el Consell de Ministres; l’intent de rearticular
l’anomenada governança multinivell
recentralització; Itàlia.
* Stefano Civitarese Matteucci, professor of Public Law at the Department of Legal and Social Studies, University of Chieti-Pescara.
Università degli Studi “G. d’Annunzio”, viale Pindaro, 43, 65127 Pescara (Italy). stefano.civitarese@unich.it.
Article received: 11.09.2021. Blind review: 06.10.2021 and 06.10.2021. Final version accepted: 24.10.2021.
Recommended citation: Civitarese Matteucci, Stefano. (2021). A further twist towards centralisation and uniformity. Governance
and public sector reforms in the Italian Recovery and Resilience Plan. , 21-38. https://doi.
org/10.2436/rcdp.i63.2021.3723.
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Summary
1 Introduction
2 An outline of the Italian devolutionary political system
3 The nature and effects of the Italian Recovery and Resilience Plan
4 Governance of the IRRP as a power centralisation design
5 The “creed” of reforms
6 Discussion and closing considerations
References
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1 Introduction
This article examines the implementation of the EU Recovery and Resilience Plan (RRP) in Italy. By analysing
and discussing the governance of the plan and the reform agenda it sets out, it aims to identify its political-
constitutional background from the viewpoint of the regional and local authorities. Rather than seeking
to justify the plan, this research is based on the premise that the RRP is not merely an important aid and
investment programme, but rather it constitutes a crucial political event capable of rearrenging relevant aspects
of Italian government. It is symptomatic that the agenda set out by the national unity government, formed
in spring 2021 and led by the former head of the European Central Bank, Mario Draghi, revolves around
implementing the RRP.1
The article’s thrust is that the logic and political inspiration of the plan is part and parcel of a longer trajectory
of the political direction of executive power, which is resulting in the side-lining of both parliamentary and
1) The supremacy of the executive is really a form of prime-ministerial hegemony. 2) This hegemony is partly
rearticulate the so-called multilevel governance and power relations across the country around this hegemony
is explicitly pursued by applying principles of uniformity and concentration. 4) The cement of this institutional
design is primarily constituted by a new public management (NPM)-like approach.2
To articulate such an argument, in the following section, I start by giving a thumbnail sketch of devolution
as set out in the Italian Constitution. In section 3, I describe the nature and effects of the Italian Recovery
and Resilience Plan (IRRP),3 particularly by framing the constitutional position of the Regions vis-à-vis this
instrument. In section 4, I deal with the governance that has been set out to implement the IRRP through a
subsequent piece of legislation. The analysis shows that this governance departs from the usual constraints
of the Italian quasi-federal institutional arrangement. In section 5, I address the crucial issue of the public
administration (PA) reform agenda as a condition of compliance with the Next Generation EU framework.
here that uniformity emerges as the outstanding criterion for reshaping public administration, making short
shrift of the previous (still in the letter of the law) principle of “administrative federalism”. Section 6 concludes
with some considerations on the further “rationalisation” of the form of government, which revolves around
the hegemonic role of the Prime Minister (PM) and is upheld by the strain of European integration.
2 An outline of the Italian devolutionary political system
In this section, I provide a brief account of the Italian devolutionary political system.4 Under the 1948
Constitution, the twenty Italian Regions enjoy political (Art. 114), legislative (Art. 117), administrative (Art.
and local authorities a considerable number of legislative and administrative competences and enhanced
their political legitimacy (Groppi & Olivetti, 2003) without, however, changing the fundamental structure of
central power. Each Region has its legislature, executive, and electoral arrangements within the framework
established by the Constitution. All the Regions have chosen a presidential regime, where the president and
the legislative assembly (Council) are both directly elected.
The main effect of the 2001 reform was to tighten up the power remit of state institutions by adopting a
somewhat rigid criterion for allocating powers (Tarchi, 2006; Bilancia, 2010). In particular, the National
1 See the Speech by Mario Draghi presenting the Government’s Agenda at the Senate.
2
inside any public policy domain, taking place within a horizontally organized market-place – and where the key governance
mechanism is some combination of competition, the price mechanism and contractual relationships (…)”.
3 All references to and quotations from the IRRP throughout the text refer to the document sent to the EU Commission by the Italian
Government (last visited 26 October 2021).
4 See, for this notion, Aroney (2016). Devolutionary “federal systems” – such as Belgium, Spain, and the UK – stand opposite
to “aggregate” federal systems – such as the United States and Germany – which may be assumed to represent the pure federalist
form. In reality, the two ideal types sit on a continuum (Aroney, 2016: sec. 20). However, for clarity’s sake, I will use the term
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Parliament (composed of the House of Deputies and the Senate) only enjoys exclusive legislative competence
over enumerated subject matters. Article 117 of the amended Constitution includes criminal and civil justice,
private law, foreign policy, immigration, policing, market competition, education, customs, national borders
and international disease prevention treatments, and environmental protection. A second list of subject matters
is shared between the State and the Regions, such as healthcare, civil contingencies, land-use planning,
transport and navigation networks, communications, energy, and social security. The peculiar characteristic
of the Italian model of shared competences is that the central State must limit itself to laying down the
fundamental principles and establishing the essential levels of rights and services (framework legislation).
At the same time, the power to legislate is vested in the Regions. Thus, regulation in this area of shared
competence results from concurrence between state and regional rules. Finally, the Regions enjoy residual
legislative power in any subject matter not listed under Article 117 of the Constitution.
agreeing on what constitutes a “fundamental principle” adds to the usual problem of allocating responsibilities
based on assigning meaning to vague locutions such as environmental protection (state exclusive) and land-
which plays the primary arbitrating role in the relationships between the central government and the Regions.
This issue is exacerbated by the lack of robust institutional mechanisms to coordinate and mediate between
levels of government. A recurrent critique of the 2001 constitutional reform is that it has not provided for
any regional representation within the National Parliament or tools to participate in the law-making process
at the state level (Morrone, 2010).
In the absence of constitutional provisions, a form of multilevel governance called a “conference system”
has emerged through conventional rules, case law, and legislation. It is constituted by the State-Regions
of local authorities – municipalities (comuni) and provinces (province) – sit. Such conferences are the fora
where policies involving regional and local matters are discussed and agreed upon when rules require regional
consent. Inaugurated by a PM decree in 1983, this system has been enshrined in statutory law by Act of
Parliament No. 400/1988 regarding the organisation and functioning of the government. Since then, the
conference system has grown more relevant, mainly thanks to the Constitutional Court’s case law (Caridà,
2018; Covino, 2018). Such conferences have become de facto proxies of local political representation on the
national stage. Where regional policies and interests may be affected by state legislation, the Constitutional
Court’s doctrine of “fair cooperation” dictates that the government seek an agreement (intesa) at the relevant
conference.5
This “conference system” is destined to play a relevant role in the political processes triggered by the IRRP.
3 The nature and effects of the Italian Recovery and Resilience Plan
The Italian Government passed the Italian Recovery and Resilience Plan (IRRP) in April 2021 after only
giving Parliament the opportunity to debate the draft plan of January 2021 and formulate some guidance. The
IRRP was then sent to the EU Commission on 30 April 2021 and approved by the European Council together
with the other national plans.6
Hence, the IRRP is formally a Cabinet decision and therefore lacks the force of statutory law. From a domestic
to follow its directives and prescriptions, and neither are the regional legislatures. The IRRP provides various
implementing actions, including parliamentary bills, statutory decrees, ministerial regulations and orders, and
“quasi-federal” to evoke the transfer of governing powers from a formerly unitary state to a newly recognised state regional political
institution.
5 Decisions No. 50/2005; 44/2014, 234/2012, 187/2012, 88/2009, 50/2008, 213/2006, 133/2006, 231/2005, 219/2005 (see
Constitutional Court’s decisions).
6 See Council of the EU press release, 13 July 2021 (last visited 26 October 2021).
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regional and local authority decisions.7 The primary cement of the plan can be assumed to be comity between
the Cabinet and Parliament, on the one hand, and the central government and the devolved powers, on the
other. It is, in other words, awkward to consider a statute to reform, say, the civil servant recruitment system
However, the point is entirely different if regarded from an EU perspective. Indeed, the national recovery and
resilience plans are the cornerstones of a complex procedure provided by Regulation (EU) 2021/241 of the
European Parliament and the Council of 12 February 2021 establishing the Recovery and Resilience Facility
(RRF Regulation).8 Such a procedure involves the Commission, the Council, and the Member States, with the
objectives and measures laid down in the plans. In a sense, the nature of such plans according to the domestic
legal system is almost irrelevant. The fact stands out that they are cogs in an EU legislative mechanism (set
out by the RRF Regulation, which enjoys direct effect), which makes them mandatory if a Member State
wants to access (and maintain over time) the Next Generation EU funding.
From the point of view of the quasi-federal structure of the Italian constitutional arrangement, a Region
could object that a given reform, policy, or measure laid down in the IRRP impinges on either its legislative
or administrative competence. The array of policies the reforms must take on is of such scope that various
regional competences will be affected. Let us bear in mind that the IRRP is based on three strategic axes –
digitalisation and innovation, ecological transition, and social cohesion – which, in turn, are divided into six
“missions”, sixteen “components”, and forty-eight “lines of intervention”. Three transversal priorities are
regional and local administrative tasks to the different levels of government according to the interdependent
criteria of subsidiarity, adequacy, and differentiation. This means that, in principle, local authorities carry out
administrative tasks unless they lack administrative capacity. If the latter occurs, the law allocates the function
to the next level of government, up to the national one. The Constitutional Court (Decision No. 303/2003)
has interpreted this clause as conferring ample margins of appreciation to the State. In particular, the National
Parliament can legitimately legislate on policies reserved to regional competence if it deems it necessary to
confer administrative tasks to the central government in application of Article 118 of the Constitution. It is
a case where the capacity criterion that governs the distribution of administrative tasks impinges on – and
disrupts – the allocation of legislative power between the State and the Regions based on the competence
criterion.
Be it as it may, a Region could seek redress from the Constitutional Court should it feel that a particular policy
or measure provided in the IRRP falls within its competence. However, it is highly implausible that the Court
would bulldoze over Italian state obligations towards the EU by disregarding the IRRP or implementing its
by referring to the exclusive state competence over the relationships between the State and the European
Union under Article 117 para. 2 a) of the Constitution. The problem is that Article 117.3 of the Constitution,
in turn, lists the “relationships (…) of the Regions with the European Union” among the subject matters
where the power to legislate is vested in the Regions within the fundamental principles laid down by the
National Parliament. It is hard to accommodate the meaning of these two provisions together. Their standard
interpretation is that the EU law to be incorporated into domestic law does not alter the competences that the
Constitution confers on the two different levels of government according to the subject matter (competence)
criterion.9
7 IRRP implementation entails a vast amount of ensuing legislation: 53 acts including statutes, statutory decrees, and delegating
statutes to be passed within a demanding schedule spanning from 2021 to 2026.
8 See the Recovery and Resilence Facilty regulation (last visited 26 October 2021).
9 Decision by the Italian Constitutional Court No. 126/1996.
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subsidiarily should the Regions fail to implement the EU legal provisions.10 The second being that the relevant
piece of EU legislation unequivocally requests a unitary action by the central level of government.
One can argue that the latter is the case regarding the RRF, even though there is no explicit reference to a unitary
implementation in the Regulation. It could also be maintained that only the mechanism (the “governance”) for
directly implementing the IRRP’s missions (along with associated expenditure) is, potentially, traceable to a
unitary, central form of implementation, as implied in the obligation structure of the Facility. Hence, from this
line of argument it would follow that the standard implementation of EU law, with the usual division of labour
between the central State and the Regions, should apply at least to the vast programme of reforms provided
in the IRRP. Again, the problem with this argument is that it is hardly reconcilable with the substance of the
(conditional) framework of the Regulation, as laid bare by the Commission.
must be accompanied by a reform strategy to enhance regulatory and systemic conditions and a country’s
(SWD),11 the primary element on which an RRP hinges is called a “component”. Member States should
investment priorities in a policy area or related policy areas, sectors, activities or themes, aiming at tackling
12
It is therefore hard to disentangle reforms and investments. According to the EU provisions, only the
interplay between policy, investments, and reforms can guarantee the initiative’s success. Accordingly, the
implementation process must be monitored and audited by the European Commission. In fact, the strict
timetable mentioned above is instrumental in achieving such objectives, legislation reforms included. In
the aforementioned SWD, the Commission stresses that “to ensure an effective implementation, clear
responsibilities need to be established: A lead ministry/authority should be nominated that has the overall
responsibility for the recovery and resilience plans and acts as a single point of contact for the Commission
(‘coordinator’)”. This authority is expected “to ensure coordination with other relevant authorities in the
country”.
How this mandate has been shaped into governance is the subject of the following section.
4 Governance of the IRRP as a power centralisation design
As previously mentioned, Statutory Decree No. 77/2021 – transposed into statutory law by Act of Parliament
No. 108 of 29 July 2021 – constitutes a milestone in the overall IRRP process,13 setting up its governance and
instituting the coordination authority. As we will see in the next section, it also introduces several changes in
legislation aimed at streamlining administrative action in key sectors for the IRRP implementation.
The marrow of this governance is represented by a steering committee14 (cabina di regia) for the Recovery
and Resilience Plan (SCRRP) chaired by the Prime Minister.15 The SCRRP has a variable composition
since ministers and junior ministers join according to the topics to be discussed. The SCRRP enjoys general
10 According to the Constitutional Court’s doctrine, this subsidiary power can even be exercised in advance, save if the Regions
decide to replace the State’s provisions by legislating in turn. This abstract rule is extremely uncertain at the application stage.
State level legislation never points out which provisions are meant to be replaceable, and so each Region should decide whether an
implementing EU law national provision falls within the regional competence or not.
11 See EU Commission (2021). Staff Working Document (part 1) of 22 January 2021 (last visited 26 October 2010).
12 EU Commission (2021). Staff Working Document of 22 January 2021 (No. 4), 13.
13
14 Named “Control Room” in the Technical Annex (in English) “Implementation, Monitoring, Control and Audit of the National
Recovery and Resilience Plan”.
15 The exact denomination of the PM according to the text of the Italian Constitution is “President of the Council of Ministers”. The
PM’s constitutional position vis-à-vis other ministers is debated. The received view is that PM are a primus inter pares and as such,
they perform a coordinating function only (Constitutional Court decisions No. 262/2009 and No. 24/2004). However, in the literature
some, such as Catelani (2017: 293), defend the view of the PM’s pre-eminence.
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coordination and direction powers regarding the implementation of the measures provided for in the IRRP.16
It also devises guidelines that apply to regional and local authorities. Such a Committee has been engineered
to respond to the requirement set out in Article 18.4 (q) of EU Regulation 2021/241 that local and regional
authorities, social actors, civil society organisations, youth organisations, and other relevant stakeholders be
plan. The model employed by the Italian Government has been to involve such authorities and stakeholders in
the governance framework. In particular, the Regional President participates in the SCRRP’s meetings when
the decision in question directly affects a single region. The President of the Conference of the Regions17 takes
part in the meetings when the topic concerns more than one region or the whole regional level of government.
Equally, the President of the Association of Municipalities (ANCI) and the President of the Province Union
(UPI) take part in the meetings if questions of local interest arise.
As for the consultation process with the stakeholders, Article 3 of Statutory Decree No. 77/2021 establishes
that the Prime Minister institutes a so-called “permanent Table for the economic, social, and territorial
partnership”. At this Table, besides ministers or their delegates, sit representatives of unions and industrial
associations, Regions, local authorities and their associations, universities, and members of civil society. Its
primary role is to raise questions for the SCRRP to discuss.
In brief, the SCRRP, in addition to directing all the authorities responsible for implementing the IRRP,
implementation process, and sorting out bottleneck situations. An interesting issue is how the Committee
makes decisions. The law is silent about this, and the variable composition of the SCRRP makes us speculate
that it will not operate by the majority rule for deliberation ordinarily followed by public law bodies, including
the Council of Ministers. In other words, the Committee’s meetings appear to be informal in register, which
brings about a role of supremacy of the PM, who is its chairperson and the only component ever necessary.
It is not unreasonable to purport that the decision-making pattern will resemble what is called in the UK
“collective responsibility” about Cabinet decisions.18 The Cabinet is meant to be a space for private, frank
discussions of issues where ministers are not necessarily are on the same page. However, once a position has
been agreed, usually based on the PM’s lead, all ministers are expected to abide by it. However, we need to
consider that – to counterbalance the PM’s pre-eminence – when sensitive powers, such as substituting those
of non-compliant regional/local authorities, are at stake – Decree No. 77/2021 bestows them on the Council
of Ministers.
The prime-ministerial orientation of such governance is also discernible in the creation of a Technical
Presidenza del Consiglio dei Ministri) to support the SCRRP. The
Secretariat members are appointed, on a discretionary basis, by the PM from among non-partisan outside
experts and career civil servants. The Secretariat appears to be the real powerhouse of the Committee19 and will
last, irrespective of government changeovers, until 31 December 2026.20 It has the crucial task of collecting
information from the RRP Central Service21 and channelling it into the SCRRP and the Stakeholders’ Table
as well as proposing to the PM any measure or action to achieve the IRRP’s goals. Among the said measures,
16 Two other “inter-ministerial” committees have been created which operate in parallel with the Steering Committee. They are
the Committee for the digital transition and the Committee for ecological transition, which have the same directing functions as the
Steering Committee regarding their sectoral competences.
17 The Conference of the Regions is an association created in 1981 by the twenty Italian Regions plus the two “autonomous
provinces” (Trento and Bolzano). Its mission is to ensure a unitary regional voice in the relationships with other levels of government
within the “conference system”. In turn, the Conference of the Regions has been somehow legitimised by successive laws as an
interlocutor both of state organs (government, parliament) and European institutions. In particular, Act of Parliament No. 234/2012
in which Member States (and their territorial institutions) have a say in the prospective law. See De Donno (2020: 228).
18 See (2011), 31 (last visited 26 October 2021).
19
Rationalisation, and Improvement, tasked with advising the SCRRP on legislative reforms to implement the IRRP.
20 The same applies to the Unity mentioned in the previous note. See Articles 4 and 5 of Statutory Decree No. 77/2021.
21
EU Regulation 2021/241.
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the power to substitute defaulting authorities is probably the most crucial. Article 9 of Statutory Decree No.
77/2021 establishes that public administration at each level of government is responsible for all implementing
actions, such as works, purchase of goods and services, and payments, according to the ordinary allocation
of competences and procedures provided for by the law. The Ministry for Public Administration was keen
implementation process.22 To this end, the IRRP provides technical assistance and administrative capacity
building at the local level to help local authorities speed up their procedures and adapt to digitalisation.23
However, to ensure that milestones and targets are completed, a broad power to substitute regional and local
authorities which fall behind is established by Article 12 of Statutory Decree No. 77/2021. It provides that
whenever they fail to make or execute decisions necessary to implement the plan or make poor decisions, the
Prime Minister, at the proposal of the SCRRP or a competent minister, is entitled to give notice to the non-
compliant authority to act within 30 days. After that, if the problem persists, the Council of Ministers designs
a central authority or a commissar to act in lieu of the defaulting authority. The appointed authority must act
as quickly as possible and can derogate from any administrative law rules, whether national or regional, save
for in criminal law, provided it abides by the “general principles of the legal system” and EU law.
A special procedure is also provided for bypassing dissenting positions, by both central government bodies
and regional/local authorities, that can hinder the execution of any measure or project included in the IRRP.
that the question be submitted to the Council of Ministers for them to make the necessary determination.
question be submitted to the State-Regions Conference to seek an agreed solution within 15 days. If no way
through is found, the PM (or the Minister for regional affairs) resorts to the Council of Ministers to exert
the substitutive power under Articles 117 or 120 of the Constitution. Article 117 para. 5 establishes that the
Regions implement EU law regarding their legislative competences, but state law must provide ways for
substitutive powers to be exercised when the Regions do not comply. In Article 120, a general substitutive
power clause (introduced in the constitutional text in 2001) is laid down. It awards the government the power
to substitute regional and local authorities in three circumstances: when they violate international treaties
and norms or EU legislation; in case of a danger to safety and security; and when the protection of legal or
economic unity – particularly for guaranteeing the basic levels of social and civil rights – requires so. This
exceptional power has rarely been used since successive coalition governments have sought political solutions
to crises involving regional prerogatives. Even during the COVID-19 pandemic, despite several problems
caused by different regional healthcare policy approaches, the government has never resorted to triggering
Article 120 (Civitarese Matteucci et al., 2021). The rationale of linking the government’s substitutive power
to implement the IRRP to the general clause under Article 120 of the Constitution is to unequivocally assert
the national unitary nature of the IRRP.
In sum, the supranational dimension of the IRRP, and its linkage to national political interest, was key to
designing an implementation framework – the so-called IRRP governance – that is somewhat detached from the
usual constraints of the Italian quasi-federal institutional arrangement. This governance embodies a pyramid-
like structure. If the management of actions and projects involves a plurality of authorities, any technical,
legal, or political problem triggers mechanisms to scale up power to the Cabinet. The issue, though, does not
only concern the quasi-federal dimension (in Italian constitutional law parlance, the “form of the state”) but
the structure of central government itself. The IRRP implementation model does not afford Parliament much
room for manoeuvre. Decree No. 77/2021 only provides that the SCRRP send a report to the Parliament on
the implementation progress every six months, but the steering of implementation, including most of the
Besides the governance framework, another hint of this orientation comes from the legislative process
anticipated in the plan. Reforms will be primarily operated through either various soft law instruments and
22 See (last visited 26 October 2021).
23 The IRRP makes available to local authorities a task force of around one thousand professionals for three years by investing 368.4
million euros.
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ministerial regulations or urgent and provisional government decrees that have the force of primary legislation.
Under Article 77 of the Constitution, the Parliament exerts ex-post scrutiny on statutory decrees in transposing
them into an Act of Parliament. If it fails to do so within 60 days, the decree expires and becomes void from
the start. This outcome is barely in the realm of possibility, however. By not transposing the decree into
statutory law, the majority in Parliament would risk a Cabinet crisis and the dissolution of Parliament by the
To understand the extent to which successive governments use “urgent decreeing”, one should bear in mind
that between 2008 and 2016, four different Cabinets have enacted, on average, two statutory decrees per
month. During the present parliamentary mandate alone, more than seventy statutory decrees have already
been enacted. This situation has been favoured by the Constitutional Court’s doctrine that the requirements
of necessity and urgency set out in the Constitution are a matter of political discretion so that governments
decreeing” has nearly become the ordinary way of legislating in Italy is one of the clearest signs of the
dominant position acquired by the executive over the legislature. 24 Hence, if the IRRP reference to the
recourse to “urgent decreeing” follows a well-known track, the fact that, in devising a programme of reforms
over several years, it indicates that track as ordinarily possible25 is a further step to side-lining Parliament.
Another emerging characteristic of such governance is the sizeable involvement of civil servants and experts,
of professional non-partisan expertise to the government’s action and blurs the distinction between politics
of government until after discussing – in the next section – the approach to public administration reform,
another testbed of the long-term dimension of the IRRP. The inspiration for such a reform would appear to
be traceable to the same logic of power centralisation and concentration.
5 The “creed” of reforms
As stressed in the Commission’s Staff Working Document (SWD), reforms must tackle the country’s structural
weaknesses in addition to boosting the post-pandemic socio-economic recovery and resilience. The concept
of conditionality resurfaces here.26
impact and long-lasting effects on the functioning of an institution or administration’s market, policy, or
structures. We have already mentioned the interdependence between reforms and investments. Reforms are
supportive business and administrative environment and by preventing the misuse of EU funding”.27 On the
other hand, such reforms should improve no more and no less than the “functioning of the economy and society
24 There is overwhelming literature on the so-called abuse of statutory decrees by the government, a long-standing feature of the
Italian political system: (Simoncini, 2006; Celotto, 1997; Grottanelli dè Santi, 1978; Cazzola, Predieri, & Priulla, 1975).
25 See IRRP, p. 43, where it states: “The Government is committed to carrying out the Plan’s reform strategy according to set
schedule and objectives, even by resorting to urgent decisions if necessary to comply with the established deadlines (…)”. (In
Italian: “Il Governo si impegna a realizzare la strategia di riforme del Piano secondo i tempi e gli obiettivi previsti, anche ricorrendo
a provvedimenti d’urgenza ove necessario a garantire il rispetto delle scadenze programmate (…)”).
26
enlargement phase, also called accession conditionality (Blauberger & Van Hüllen, 2021), to foster institutional convergence on
EU-15 practices. It is sizeably different from macro-economic ex-post conditionality, epitomised by the Troika loan to the Greek
Government on condition that it implemented draconian austerity measures and passed politically divisive structural reforms (Jacoby
transition towards a conditionality-based culture within the EU’s internal relationships.
27 SWD, part 1/2, 14.
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and quality of public administration is essential”.
public administration.28 However, public administration reform has been on the agenda of all governments
in Italy since the 1990s; and several waves of reform have sought to change various parts of administrative
law and organisation. It is not an exclusively Italian phenomenon either (Kuhlmann & Wollmann, 2014).
The emphasis on the need for public administrative reform and its global extent are a consequence of the
and its reliance on the market, business, and
private law as values to import into the public sector (Hanlon, 2018). It is well known that the New Public
Management ideology sprang from this approach (Hughes, 2018).29As in many other countries, in Italy public
administration reforms have often been launched to tackle “big challenges” (Savino, 2015: 643). This is also
to drive socio-economic overhaul.
An interesting key to understanding the Italian PA reform trajectory is to distinguish between “external”
decentralisation. Besides substantially reducing the number of ministries, which were cut from twenty-two
of Parliament No. 59/1997 (the so-called “Bassanini Law”) was based on three objectives: to limit Cabinet
main inspiration of the reform – commonly known as the “administrative federalism” turn – to reallocate as
many administrative tasks as possible to the regional-local system. The underlying idea was that the Regions
would be the engines of such a system, directly regulating and organising local authorities’ actions within their
jurisdiction (Merloni, 2002). This would halt the traditional central state sway on localism. The narrative was
so powerful that even the application of the general law on administrative procedure within regional territories
was called into question. Under the constitutional reform of 2001, which represented the apex of the federalist
trend, the lack of a subject matter traceable to “administrative procedure” among the parliamentary legislative
competences listed in Article 117 of the Constitution led several commentators to claim that administrative
functioning and organisation was a matter of regional legislation (Cammelli, 2001; Zanetti, 2003). However,
Hence, they have largely remained on paper while new legislation and Constitutional Court case law have
boosted recentralisation.30 For example, despite the original purpose of severing politics and administration,
Internal reforms concern the functioning and regime of civil service and its accountability, and it is mainly
performance assessment to improve productivity, promote meritocracy, and strengthen result orientation. As
claimed by one of the protagonists of this design, “the reform draws on a management model borrowed from
28
delivering a Council recommedation on the 2020 Stability Programme of Italy. See also EU Commission (Directorate-General for
Employment),
(2018) (last visited 26 October 2021).
29 NPG is in turn a sort of umbrella concept, capable of covering a range of reform strategies and often with contrasting aims, such
as “the reinforcement of steering and control principles in public administrations versus the devolution of powers and increased
autonomy granted to the individuals and organizations implementing public policies” (Bezes, 2017: 253).
30 The attempt to completely suppress Provinces – local authorities provided for in the Constitution that are intermediate between
the Regions and Municipalities – is often felt in the literature as a sort of turning point vis-à-vis the federalist turn (Civitarese
letter sent on 5 August 2011 by Jean-Claude Trichet and Mario Draghi (then respectively President of the ECB and Governor of the
abolition of the provinces. The constitutional amendment that established, among other things, the suppression of Provinces was
rejected by referendum on 4 December 2016; nonetheless, the Provinces were depleted of most of their competences and resources
and transformed into indirectly elected bodies.
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private enterprise” (Bassanini, 2000). The backbone of the reform was the so-called “privatisation” of the
legal status of civil servants and the adoption of a form of managerial separation between politics (politicians
setting policy goals) and administration (formally responsible for implementation) that somewhat departed
from the principle of individual ministerial responsibility. It was initially accompanied by a spoils system
by which to assess public manager performance by politicians would be their capacity to yield the expected
rules and procedures (Travi, Occhetti & Gambino, 2018) (red tape reduction) can be traced to this general
neo-managerial inspiration. The rejection of the position that administrative law was to become prevalently
a regional matter31 pushed forward a never-ending process of amending the general rules on administrative
procedure and the decision-making process32 through numerous statutory decrees or (less frequently) acts of
statutory law. Such reforms – pursued essentially by changing primary legislation – have not produced the
expected outcomes either. An implementation gap was detected early on (Ongaro & Valotti, 2008; Cepiku
& Meneguzzo, 2020). We cannot delve into the details, but the most obvious proof of this failure is that PA
Facility instrument.
As we are about to see, the IRRP seems to partially change the reform tactic. It contemplates three types of
reform: horizontal, habilitating, and sectoral. Horizontal or contextual reforms aim to introduce structural,
institutional change that is transversal across every mission provided in the plan. There are two horizontal
reforms, affecting the public administration and the judicial system. Habilitating reforms are functional to
guarantee the IRRP implementation and eliminate bureaucratic, regulatory, and procedural hurdles that affect
business and negatively impact public services. Some examples of habilitating reforms are measures to make
healthcare assistance, and tackling the black labour market. The boundaries between the three types are blurred,
and if we look at the horizontal public administration reform, we can see that it combines all the types.
By reading through the 2,500 pages of the plan, we sense that the government has learned from experience.
They admit that purely regulatory intervention will produce limited effects if not accompanied by adequate
complementary actions on the organisation, implementation, and monitoring of the policies. Furthermore,
provided. Here the reforms concern:
- streamlining ICT procurement;
pool to orchestrate and support the overall migration effort and the centralised negotiation of “packages” of
cloud and debottlenecking/removing procedural constraints to the broad adoption of digital services.
Enhancing the administrative capacity of Italian public administrations at central and local levels, the second
axis is intertwined with digitalisation, which far from consisting of a simple shift from analogue to digital,
31 The right of the central State to legislate on administrative law process and organisation was acknowledged by the Constitutional
Court, arguing that such regulation was part of the exclusive Parliamentary competence on establishing the basic levels of social and
civil rights all over the country (Italian Constitutional Court decisions No. 246/2018, No. 62/2013, No. 207 and No. 203 of 2012).
This doctrine was often coupled with tracing administrative laws to the regulation of market competition (Decision No. 247/2020),
another matter within the exclusive state legislative competence.
32 The general law on administrative procedure, Act of Parliament No. 241/1990, has been amended since then almost every year.
has been changed as many as nineteen times, often twice in a year, and once four times in a year.
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of interaction between people and all stakeholders”.33 The IRRP indicates four reform branches, all concerning
“internal reforms”, which somewhat overlap.
“a strategic planning tool to identify the human capital needs of central and local administrations, and to
monitor the performance of individuals and organisations”. The inspiration possibly comes from the European
34 EPSO aims to
provide a list of candidates from which all the European institutions and bodies can recruit staff. Following the
Kinnock report,35 the inception of EPSO is part of the New Public Management turn by the EU Commission
under Romano Prodi’s presidency (Ban, 2010). In brief, the selection process – replacing the traditional
competition mechanism – includes the development of a competency framework by an outside consultant
on which to carry out competency testing both in the preselection phase (to assess “derived knowledge” and
skills) and in the assessment centre phase (where the focus is behavioural).36
measures. It entails taking on the excess of regulation, streamlining specific procedures linked to the
implementation of the IRRP and reviewing all existing permission regimes. Part of the latter, concerning
landscape protection, environmental impact assessment, renewable energy infrastructures, public procurement,
complex infrastructure projects, and aids for southern Italy, has already been delivered by Statutory Decree No.
77/2021 as a “fast-track” RRP implementing action. Part of such deregulation will be rolled out as temporary
measures during the fast-track phase. After assessing their effects, the government will incorporate them in
programme of standardisation of administrative procedures (i.e. “deregulation”) aims to cut red tape by
silenzio-assenso) after a certain
time has passed since the application. Another goal of the programme is a complete digital re-engineering of
the decision-making process. A screening of the regulation affecting business was already under way as part
By adding the RRF resources, the plan aims for an overall review of “roughly the entire universe of existing
procedures” (about six hundred). The adoption of a uniform regulatory regime throughout the country is one
of the major targets of the agenda. As stated in the plan – in somewhat of an understatement – this goal must
be “shared with Regions” and local authorities since much of this regulation concerns matters of regional
by instituting a “Technical Table” within the Department of Public Administration. The Table – which must
of the Regions, three by ANCI and UPI, and four by the Department of Public Administration. The Table,
although referred to as “technical”, seems to have mainly a political mediation role. The driving machine of
consisting of 25 experts, “responsible for the overall coordination and monitoring of the activities of the
resolution of bottlenecks; the necessary adjustments in the allocation of resources for the implementation
actions for non-compliant regions”.
33 IRRP, p. 396.
34 See EPSO website.
35 White Paper, (European Commission, 2000). See Ban (2013).
36
while some see the “competency management approach as an essential part of contemporary HR management and as supporting
broader organizational change processes, others express concern that it is the latest HR fad, pushed by management consultants and
generating lists of competencies that are so general as to be simplistic platitudes” (Ban, 2010: 18). Recently, the EU Court of Auditors
issued a special report called
needs (2020) (last visited 26 October 2021), whose central recommendation is to tackle the problem that “EPSO’s selection process
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Decree No. 77/2021 also provides for some “horizontal” changes by amending the general law on administrative
procedure No. 241/1990. The scope of such amendments is not dramatic, given that – as remarked before –
three aspects of the decision-making process: 1) The duty on every public authority to appoint a person or
twelve months, by which a public authority can quash its previous unlawful decisions permitting activities
or awarding economic aid.
c) The third branch, branded “competence”, aims to change the public sector job market through a reform of PA
careers designed to enhance horizontal (between different authorities) and vertical (within the same authority)
mobility. The aim is to improve career opportunities by replacing position upgrading and appointment to
senior positions based on tenure time and specialised knowledge assessment with individual performance
and assessment of competence and managerial skills. For the overhauling of career paths and lifelong
learning, the plan provides the creation of a “strategic Human Resources management capability for Public
Administrations”. To this end, the government will add two additional digital elements to the recruitment
A further reform regards access to the Senior Civil Service (SCS), based on three principles: (1) qualify the
SCS in terms of leadership model, managerial, and policy-related competences; (2) rationalise the pathways
to access the SCS based on the different recruitment pools (internal vs. external); (3) support the creation of
a single national market of SCS, to better allocate competences and ensure broader mobility within the single
policy area or function, even across different government levels. The government will enact a regulation for
public competitions to access the SCS, the competitive appointment system, and a continuous learning system.
appraisal based on effective “activity-based cost management” (Cokins, 1996), which is more outcome-focused
than merely output-focused. For larger authorities (ministries and national agencies, Regions, municipalities
with more than 250,000 inhabitants), result-oriented performance indicators will be gradually introduced
– also through the creation of a special Delivery Unit – to assess the performance of individual managers.
Moreover, the organisation of medium-sized authorities (about 500 municipalities between 25,000 and 250,000
workspaces, foster the green transition, and retrain employees. For smaller authorities, a project coordinated
by the Ministry of Economy and Finance, along with the Department for the Public Sector and the Ministry
for Digital Transformation, will create a network of digital “one-stop shops”.
To sum up, what emerges from the analysis above is that the driving force of the public administration reform
revolves around criteria of uniformity and concentration to ensure that the IRRP is implemented properly and
in a timely fashion across the country. However, there are no clear and distinct boundaries between the reforms
to implement the IRRP (“habilitating”) and the reforms to improve administrative capacity “structurally”. In
fact, the latter are inspired by the same criteria as the former. The core idea is that all public administrations
are governed by the same principles, procedures, recruitment, and bureaucratic culture. This idea is in sharp
contrast with the perspective (already fading over the years after the 2001 quasi-federalist constitutional
reform) (Civitarese Matteucci, 2010) of a region-centred (administrative) system of local authorities.37 Even
more than that, considering the Italian constitutional framework regarding the relationships between levels
of government, there has been a reversal of the notion that administrative law, procedure, and organisation
are, in principle, a responsibility within the legislative remit of the regions.
37
system of local authorities to pursue economic, social, and civil development.
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6 Discussion and closing considerations
considerations on the evolving dynamics of government in Italy.
We have seen that both the governance and decision-making process laid down in the IRRP is mainly based
on the pre-eminence of the Prime Minister in a direct dialogue with the EU institutions rather than any mixed-
the “material” characteristics of Draghi’s Cabinet, which has been formed directly as a result of a decision by
the President of the Republic.38 It followed the failure by political groups in Parliament to reach an agreement
to form a new government after the resignation of Giuseppe Conte’s Cabinet in January 2021. All the main
parties (except for the far right Fratelli d’Italia) have backed Draghi’s government and had ministers appointed
in his Cabinet. Nonetheless, it remains technocratic in nature. This attribute does not only refer to the public
programme and that the parties, as people’s representatives in the legislature, do not have substantive power
This may be a transitory arrangement, however, prone to be set aside as soon as party politics and parliamentary
institutions are functional again. From a strictly legal point of view, the governance analysed in section 4 is
contingent on the six years of the IRRP implementation. Yet, we should bear in mind that the IRRP and its
resources will be the main concern of any central or regional government throughout the implementation
As regards political and administrative decentralisation in particular, the magnitude of the IRRP’s objectives
intimates that such a framework marks a steadier change in the political power structure in Italy.39 It is telling
that most of the special bodies, such as the Technical Secretariat, created around the IRRP governance, will
last irrespective of government changeovers until the completion of the programme.
Along with them, the Steering Committee for the Recovery and Resilience Plan – and several other consultative
entities in which different levels of territorial government and stakeholders cooperate – epitomises an idea of
who is the decision-maker of last instance. Another factor boosting the Prime Minister’s steering and
coordination capacity is the involvement of experts and top bureaucrats in political direction. The Technical
are disseminated across the plan. It is a well-documented and discussed feature of a neo-managerial reform
style to establish ad hoc structures, such as the Performance and Innovation Unit set up by Tony Blair in 1998,
which in 2001 became the Prime Minister’s Strategy Unit (Bezes, 2017: 255).
The reform agenda discussed in section 5 is entirely coherent with this picture. It still draws its core principles
from the arsenal of NPM tradition. The IRRP resolves administrative capacity and good administration into
strategy of moving steadily towards such principles of administrative activity is at odds with devolution and
even decentralisation, in stark contrast with the Italian constitutional devolutionary model. Indeed, the whole
administrative reform is “internal” in nature, viz. concerning the functioning and regime of bureaucracy and
its accountability, which the IRRP treats as a thorough unitary body throughout central, regional, and local
government. The transcendent logic of such reforms is one of concentration and centralisation, aligning with
the change in the form of government discussed in section 4. Avoiding “external” reforms is instrumental to
the overall design of centralisation and uniformity. However, even within the same NPM logic, there is an
issue here. This approach fails to recognise that the worst governance failures may well be political rather than
38 Resorting to technocratic cabinets that tackle major challenges is a recurrent feature of Italian politics. In three previous occurrences,
in 1993, 1995, and 2011, party politics stalemates were solved by the President of the Republic through the appointment of non-partisan
denominator of such a government is that they operate in close relationship with EU institutions (De Fiores, 2021; Volpi, 2017).
39 The stealthy change envisaged here couples with the open and heated discussion on formally rethinking the Italian quasi-federal
model because of how the regional system has been performing during the pandemic crisis. See Gardini (2020); Tubertini (2020);
Camerlengo (2020); and Bilancia (2020).
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bureaucratic. Then, better governance would require identifying the underlying political causes, which often
lie in the failure of political institutions to provide clear policy goals, and the fact that they rarely allocate
in implementation (Meier et al., 2019). The bureaucracies, in turn, try to rationally adapt to such political
failures, “but their responses can create a set of pathologies that detrimentally affect policy. While the public
and the media view these ills as bureaucratic pathologies, they are in reality bureaucratic symptoms of political
failure” (Meier et al
solely through additional bureaucratic reforms (Meier et al., 2019: 1597).
By using the doctrinal metaphor of the “political direction stream”, constitutional law scholarship has promptly
noticed the signs of the rearrangement discussed in this article, hinting at a change of paradigm affecting the
form of government.40 “Political direction”, as elaborated by eminent Italian constitutional scholars (Crisafulli,
1939; Mortati, 1931), is a descriptive tool to make sense of policymaking as a complex process involving
constitutionally legitimated players (the people, Parliament, the Executive, courts, etc.). Political direction
somehow logically prioritises policymaking, even though it can only be captured ex post (Lavagna, 1942).
It expresses the moment when the political unity of a constitutional order tames the centripetal force of
the separation of powers. The gist of this concept resides in the broadest possible political power at the
State’s disposal to decide its ultimate ends. In a slightly different formulation, it can be expressed in “the
them” (Goldoni M. Wilkinson, 2018: 590). Hence, political direction expresses not only a process but also
a substance. In its pure version, this notion has long been subject to sensible revision, given the necessity,
among other things, to add the EU legal order to the equation. Even within a more nuanced idea of “political
direction”, distinguishing the contribution of diverse institutions operating at different power levels to its
formation remains problematic.41 However, if we take the IRRP as a litmus test, we can discern the image of a
“political direction” substantially determined by a relationship between national executives that is dominated
by the President/Prime Minister and EU governance. It is a political direction that is framed in a legal structure
aimed at binding national political institutions over time, irrespective of political-electoral cycles.
Is there a democratic problem regarding the matter at stake?42 We could either shrug at the unfashionable
nation-state obsession of some nostalgic persons or regard that question as yet further proof that there is indeed
a critical problem regarding political processes in the European space.43
40 See Sciortino (2021).
41 From an even broader perspective, the story told in this article may just be accounted for as a mere peripheral wave of a more
profound epochal change brought about by globalisation and European integration. According to a robust strand of political science
scholarship, the traditional notion of the nation-state as end-free has already been destabilised. It argues that we should rethink states
as part of a network whose organisation and powers depend on the set of policies they can actually decide and implement rather than
on abstract concepts such as sovereignty, the form of government, separation of powers, checks and balances, and so on (Le Galès
& King, 2017).
42 See Sciortino (2021: 261).
43 See Bilancia & Civitarese Matteucci (2021).
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