It's called the Ethical Foundation and they know it better in the rest of Italy than in Maremma, where, however, it still has an office: in the city, in via Pertini. Fondazione Etica was established in 2008, in Milan, and among its creators and promoters the name of Paola Caporossi from Grosseto stands out – today director and vice president. In recent years, Fondazione Etica has become more than ever an instrument of innovation in the public and social sphere. During 2017, first the Municipality of Grosseto and more recently the Tuscany Region adhered to it with memoranda of understanding. In the meantime, Caporossi has been appointed director of the new research center of the Luiss "Guido Carli" university in Rome for the assessment of local governments, based on public ratings and its flags.
«Faced with the easy and widespread tendency to list problems - explains Caporossi - the Foundation has preferred to propose itself as a positive tool, to think and build solutions, not improvised, but part of a broader and more coherent project. Solutions that do not satisfy this or that interest, but that respond to an overall design of the institutions, their role and their authority in our country. Institutions that are not detached and distant from society, that know how to interpret and guide it».
But why, ever since the time of Emilio Bonifazi mayor (and then with Antonfrancesco Vivarelli Colonna), has the municipal administration of the capital felt the need for an evaluation by the Ethical Foundation? Municipalities have long had an obligation to measure and evaluate their own performance, as well as transparency. Fondazione Etica's experience in analyzing the efficiency of public administrations, starting from the quality of public spending, is now consolidated to the point that a new model for assessing and measuring public bodies has been designed, implemented and tested, called " Sustainability rating of public administrations”, whose acronym “Rep” and logo are registered and protected by copyright. Therefore, every year it is possible, on the basis of certain performance indicators, to establish the extent to which it has been well managed, also by making comparisons with other bodies. Fondazione Etica has no partisan nature and periodically releases a Report on the Public Rating of Municipalities, a journey through the stereotypes and age-old problems afflicting Italian Municipalities. A journey in which data is identified and citizens are informed, as it is aimed more at improving the public machine at its various levels than at reporting the facts. It is a complete analysis of the Municipalities which, unlike the existing ones, does not focus on partial aspects such as the economic-financial profile or the environment, nor on the perception and satisfaction of the local community.
The Report, as we said, is a useful tool for administrations, because a benchmark is identified through a ranking of the Municipalities selected on a sample basis, i.e. a winner to be taken as a model. The ultimate goal is to trigger an incentive/disincentive mechanism that rewards the most virtuous Municipalities and penalizes the defaulting ones. Only in this way will the spending review, evoked on and off in Italy, be able to avoid linear cuts and finally be set up
on meritocratic criteria. In short, a healthy reputational competition between local administrations. Municipalities adhering to the public rating will be able to display a logo such as that of Tripadvisor on their website, which will indicate the number of flags, from 1 to 7, depending on the result they obtain.
