A Common Trend, Different Houses: Devolution in Italy, Spain and the UK

Territorial Boundaries as Limits: A Foucauldian Analysis of the Agglomeration of Municipalities

“…In many countries, the reforms of the last decades have indeed restructured public sector organisations, by modifying powers and the distribution of tasks among them and introducing managerial logics to bureaucratic organisations under the well-known umbrella term of NPM (Barzelay, 1992(Barzelay, , 2001Fedele-Ongaro, 2008;Hoggett, 1996;Hood, 1995).…”

“…In terms of public services, it is important to highlight the impact of the devolution process, especially on public administrations at the local level (Fedele & Ongaro, 2008;Grossi & Mussari, 2008). First of all, the number of public services to be provided by local public administrations has increased.…”

Advancing the theory and practice of public sector reform through the analysis of social mechanisms

“…Let us first see an example of how this perspective may be contrasted with the approach of social mechanisms, by reviewing in a paired way two papers dealing broadly with the same theme, and at least partly studying it in the same polity and jurisdiction (Italy, Spain and the UK). Fedele and Ongaro (2008) tackle the same issue, the dynamics of devolution processes in two legalistic countries (Italy and Spain, using the UK as a comparator from a non-legalistic tradition), as Ongaro (2006, focused on Italy only, and notably on one specific episode of devolution reform in the Northern Italian region of Lombardy), with a different theoretical perspective. Ongaro (2006) relies on the analysis of social mechanisms to identify developmental patterns that may lead to relocating tasks and staff from upper to lower tiers of government in the presence of unfavourable conditions that would otherwise tend to hinder and ultimately thwart the implementation of devolution processes.…”

The Role of Politics and Institutions in the Italian Administrative Reform Trajectory

“…The most evident effect seems to be on a single component of the reforms that occurred in Italy over the period under investigation: devolution. The argument (originally elaborated in Fedele and Ongaro 2008) is that the southernization of the administration may hinder the process of devolution. Claims about why this may occur include: first, that many southerners may be unsupportive of devolution since this process could increase regional disparities and weaken the redistributive policies of the central state; and, second, that southern civil servants at the central level could be sceptical, because of their direct knowledge about the capacity of regional governments to run the devolved functions about the overall benefits of devolution reforms.…”