Abstract
Italian New Public Management (NPM) has been mainly characterized by a political orientation toward power decentralization to local governments and privatization of public companies. Nowadays, local utilities in Italy are often run by joint stock companies controlled by public agencies such as Regional and Municipal Administrations. Due to this transformation, these companies must comply with a set of diverse expectations coming from a wide range of stakeholders, related to their financial, competitive and social performance. Such fragmented governance increases the presence of “wicked” problems in the decision-making sphere of these entities. Given this multi-level governance structure, how do these agents influence public services performance? In recent years, coordination and inter-institutional joint action have been identified as possible approaches for dealing with governance fragmentation and wicked problems deriving from it. How can we adapt a performance management perspective in order to help us reform the system and so have a better collaboration between the stakeholders involved? In order to address and discuss these research questions, a case study will be developed. The case concerns AMAT, the local utility providing the public transportation service in the Municipality of Palermo (Italy). The result of this study is a dynamic model including a set of performance indicators that help us in understanding the impact of the governing structure on the system’s performance.
Highlights
The New Public Management (NPM) paradigm was aimed at solving the shortcomings with regard to efficiency and effectiveness, which are intrinsic in the traditional bureaucratic approach [1]
Multi-level governance is characterized by the inter-playing of different actors in a production/provision process
The problems that arise in this kind of structures are related to the different goals, interests and values that these stakeholders have in respect to the product/service outcome
Summary
The New Public Management (NPM) paradigm was aimed at solving the shortcomings with regard to efficiency and effectiveness, which are intrinsic in the traditional bureaucratic approach [1]. This has been pursued by implementing a new set of practices, inspired by the private sector. The private sector perspective intended to shift attention onto results as the dominant focus; that implies the adoption of a Performance Management (PM) perspective. Performance Management can be defined as the cyclic process of identification of objectives, definition of actions and performance indicators, implementation, and monitoring in progress and ex-post the results achieved. The main features of Italian NPM can be identified as privatization of public companies and decentralization of power to local authorities [2,3]
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