1,720,978 research outputs found
Le pratiche collaborative per la co-produzione di beni e servizi: quale ruolo per gli enti locali?
Full text linkIn last decades the academic and political interest for local collaborative arrangements in the production of goods and services has spread across Italy and abroad. As a consequence, the concept of collaboration has been progressively stretched, hovering amidst social and political practices attributable to diverse empirical objects and theoretical perspectives, such as participatory democracy, public-private partnership, peer to peer relations and sharing economy. Such a success has boosted the appeal of collaborative practices likewise, eventually leading towards institutional isomorphic tendencies and bandwagon effects without taking due account of territorial and administrative contextual features. Drawing upon these premises, and relying on an empirically based public policy approach, the article tries to identify and classify the policy instruments that local governments may use to promote and implement different kinds of collaborative practices, as a starting point to understand the role municipalities may play therein, and to reflect upon the possible shortcomings of their institutional actions
Upstream and downstream implementation arrangements in two-level games. A focus on administrative simplification in the Italian National Recovery and Resilience Plan
Full text linkThe onset of the European NGEU program represented for European member states a formidable opportunity for post-pandemic recovery and yet a significant challenge at the same time: to receive and retain EU funds, each state had to promptly draw up a National Recovery and Resilience Plan-NRRP) and commit to a pressing timetable for its implementation. Regarding this challenge, the Italian government's response is a case in point: first, Italy is by far the largest beneficiary of NGEU funds; second, it has long had a reputation for being laggard in both the implementation of European directives and the spending of cohesion policy structural funds; and the formulation of the NRRP, the design of the governance in charge of its implementation, and implementation itself, occurred at a particular moment in the country's political life. Based on these premises, the article examines the upstream process by which the Italian government designed the implementation arrangements for the adoption of simplification policies under the NRRP and their downstream recalibration in the first two years, taking the implementation arrangements as the dependent variable. Analytically, the focus is on the interplay between the pressures of EU timetables and internal political dynamics, be they the legacy or strategic political considerations on the part of national policymakers, in determining the design and eventual re-design of implementation arrangements as the plan unfolds
A shallow rationalisation? ‘Merger mania‘ and side-effects in the reorganisation of public-service delivery
No full textThis article focuses on the mix of reorganisation measures recently
adopted by Italian governments in the delivery of public services
in four policy sectors that are (co)managed at different levels of
government, but all mostly delivered locally. The aim is twofold: to
understand whether a single, coherent approach to rationalisation
can be identified in the policy provisions; and how – and how
much – the onset of austerity affected governments’ choices. Little
attention has in fact so far been paid to the task of providing an
overall, cross-sectoral analysis of the changes that have been
made to the organisation of public intervention at the local level,
and especially those bodies actually providing public services to
citizens. The empirical evidence adduced shows that the recent
changes in the Italian administrative geography have been the
effect of a cost-cutting-oriented, recentralising trend reflecting
a one-size-fits-all solution for each and every policy sector: consolidation
through ‘merger mania’ or upscaling. Moreover, the
reorganisation measures described for the various policy sectors
have had side effects with significant political implications, especially
as far as centre-periphery relations are concerned
Not a black or white issue: choosing alternative organizational models for delivering early childhood services
Full text linkThis article investigates how municipalities choose their organiza- tional arrangements for delivering early childhood services and the interplay among the regional framework, local legacies, and agency factors influencing these choices. We answered these questions through a mix-method approach and a comparative analysis of four European regions in the same country (Italy). Our data shows that a variety of hybrid organizational models for service delivery is possible, and the fundamental role played by the regional framework in affecting organizational choices – with local factors such as legacy and agency compensating in the event of its absence
Eppur si muove? Il riordino territoriale oltre la crisi
No full textFollowing pressures toward restoring public finances in the era of global crisis, the Italian local governments have been recently the object of several proposals of reform aimed at the «rationalization» of functions, competences, and costs. Among these proposals, however, only the «Delrio Law» of 2014 had been definitely approved by the Parliament, producing relevant - albeit transitory - changes in the institutional system. Drawing upon a comparison with former attempts of reform, the article analyses the process of formulation and approval of the Delrio Law in order to assess the type and amount of change it has been able to produce, as well as the determinants of its «success» beyond the austerity rhetoric
Going Beyond Counting First Authors in Author Co-citation Analysis
Full text linkThe present study examines one of the fundamental aspects of author co-citation analysis (ACA) - the way co-citation
counts are defined. Co-citation counting provides the data on which all subsequent statistical analyses and mappings
are based, and we compare ACA results based on two different types of co-citation counting - the traditional type that
only counts the first one among a cited work's authors on the one hand and a non-traditional type that takes into
account the first 5 authors of a cited work on the other hand. Results indicate that the picture produced through this non-traditional author co-citation counting contains more coherent author groups and is therefore considerably clearer. However, this picture represents fewer specialties in the research field being studied than that produced through the traditional first-author co-citation counting when the same number of top-ranked authors is selected and analyzed. Reasons for these effects are discussed
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