The Municipality of Milan and Fondazione Etica have signed a collaboration agreement for the development of a policy aimed at enhancing the accountability of the Civic Administration by starting from the Qualitative Rating of Public Administrations developed by Fondazione Etica.
The aforementioned agreement states that through "the programmatic lines relating to the actions and projects to be implemented during the mandate, presented by Mayor Sala to the City Council, assign the ability" to allow citizens to evaluate the work of those who administer the city and the effectiveness of the interventions it implements” the rank of guiding value for the action of the Civic Administration.
This programmatic address calls for the implementation of an accountability policy, understood as "a dynamic relationship between the public administration and various subjects who have the right and interest to monitor its effectiveness (...) such as the media, voters, citizens" (L. Reggi , Formez PA, 2017).
The public sharing of the results of administrative activities can induce a public monitoring/testing process, with returns in order to general or targeted indications to improve the efficiency or effectiveness of administrative action, for example by providing evaluation elements with respect to containment costs or to reduce the risk of corruption. A methodical feedback of this kind, supported by the participation of citizens, can also allow to start a process of continuous improvement of the qualitative-quantitative levels of the services rendered by the Administration for the overall benefit of the citizens.
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The assessment of the accountability of the Municipality of Milan with respect to the publication of the data required by law, in terms of visibility, overall organization and clarity of the system suitable for guaranteeing the immediate accessibility, traceability, understanding and extraction of the data sought, requires highly specialized skills and qualified, not common knowledge, especially as regards complex realities such as those of today's local administrations, today real multi-utility companies with a particularly complex and differentiated profile, according to the socio-cultural and economic characteristics of the territory.
The rating methodology applied by Fondazione Etica, called "Public Rating", appears to have a solid methodological and scientific framework. It makes use of a set of indicators, an evaluation model (scores and weights), an algorithm for calculating the final rating and an IT platform for processing data from the mandatory publications of the Municipalities.
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The proposal (…) allows for
- place the civic administration at the forefront in experimenting with adequate scientific models to interpret and evaluate the performance of a complex multi-utility that provides services to citizens,
- increase the know-how of the civic administration in the field of public rating, since the methodology in question for the Municipality of Milan will be developed with its own contribution, due to the specificities of the Milanese administration,
- bring a strong strengthening to the propensity of the civic administration towards transparency and accountability, conceived as fundamental, unavoidable conditions, and to be directed towards continuous improvement, to create a relationship of participatory interaction between civil society and public administrators.
