Administrative Reforms in Italy. From new Public Management to National Recovery and Resilience Plan.

Italian public administration has an history of excessive legal formalism and poor attention to results. The first step of a Public Administration reform in Italy was at the end of the 70s when a distinguished academic expert was called to serve as Minister of the Public Service. In a Public Service Report outlined the contours of a reform that today we would call New Public Management model. Yet the political conditions were not ready for this change. At the beginning of the 90s, when Italian state got close to a default, the first attempt was resumed with a new report and this time Government began a path of Public Management reforms along which the different governments with different political coalitions brought some new initiative. Each new legislative reform was introduced when the evaluations of the previous one was still to be done. Policy learning was not the first concern of decision makers. Only in 2015, during Renzi Government, there was a try to put some order. In 2021, when the National Recovery and Resilience Plan was under construction, the legislative field of reforms was even too full. From the point of view of the Plan, public service is a tool to achieve the goal while its efficiency is a goal in itself. That's why the Conte Government decided to bet much more on speeding the decision making than on a comprehensive reform of the quality of the governance. Draghi went the same way. Pressed by the necessity to meet the deadlines of the EU, the focus of PNRR is now on the speed of spending much more than the quality of spending. A new centralized Governance of planning, spending and assessing was designed at the Presidency of the Council of Ministers. Deadlines for decisions have been halved and in case of administrative appeals the State prefers to pay than change its decisions. If state local units or autonomous local administrations do not hurry up, the Government has the power to overtake their decisions making. Considering the already poor attention to the quality of spending, this haste can bring many unintended consequences today and even worse when resources will be scarce again.