“Neither smart nor open, in the meantime a city” – Report on Municipalities

There is an evident contradiction that has marked the last twenty years of reform of administrative institutions; and this well before they began, with the last two legislatures, to mark time, tiredly repeating, in a thousand pedantic rules of detail, a general objective of effectiveness and efficiency that it was no longer possible to effectively pursue in the daily practice of government.

This contradiction can be described as follows: the ambition was declaimed for a more open, transparent, measurable, scrutinyable administration; but at the same time, in the mechanisms of governance of the structures, a Fordist assembly-line programmatic determinism was imposed, with an increasingly strong (and at times even autocratic) command of politics in all the crucial moments of the organization and management of the administrative structures.

It was the naive transposition of a governance model of the large complex private organizations, entirely managerial and engineering, which has also done a lot of damage in the sector from which it was borrowed: not a few of the most attentive scholars, at national and international level , have been highlighting for years how the "old" Fordist management, responsible to a plurality of stakeholders social and internal, ensured a greater balance (patrimonial, financial, productive, social) than the new wave of a "new" managerial system linked only to the "creation of value for the shareholder" and to very strict "short-term" evaluation parameters of a performance reduced to one-dimensional dynamics of profit.

This is not the place to delve into the by now rich literature on the subject; one cannot, however, fail to underline how this trend has de facto sterilized trends in business theory that emerged in the same years, towards theempowerment of internal resources, towards the crushing of the chains of command, towards the disintegration of bureaucratic and formalistic practices, towards the enhancement of innovative teamwork dynamics and quality circles: trends that could have led to results of multidimensional effectiveness and innovation of very different companies, and to a well-balanced relationship between production and social sustainability.

In the light of what has recently been highlighted, it is easy to understand how much greater damage this naive simplification could have produced in the public sector, by its nature oriented towards settling disputes, integrating situations, balancing differences, serving plurality and diversity of interests and visions .

In fact, the traditional three-way relationship between politics, professional bureaucracies and social actors, which characterizes the best tradition of liberal and democratic constitutional thought, has been fictitiously traced back to an implausible univocal chain of command: the administration responds (only) to politics , which responds to citizens (only) through the moment of electoral verification.

The impoverishment of the public debate on this scheme, and even the disillusionment of individuals with politics, perennially unable to respond in a subtle way to extremely changing needs and situations in mature democratic contexts, can be explained in no small measure by the contradiction that has tried, albeit briefly, to illustrate.

For this reason, the effort that Fondazione Etica has been making for years to activate concrete and non-demagogic forms of evaluation of the performance of public administrations. Effort conducted through the provision of a model of ratings multidimensional audience, suitable for measuring in an integrated, albeit analytical way for individual thematic dimensions, as well as adhering to the many obligations of disclosure of data and information required by various regulatory provisions, the quality of the action of any public administration.

Continues…