Economic Growth and Cohesion Policy Implementation in Italy and Spain by Mattia Casula

Author:Mattia Casula
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9783030369989
Publisher: Springer International Publishing

From an organizational point of view, the DPS was collocated within the Ministry of the Treasury, Budget and Economic Planning (Ministero del Tesoro, del Bilancio e della Programmazione Economica, MTBPE), that at the end of the 1990s was the most important national center in the matter of political economy, therefore playing a crucial role also in the more general governmental choices. As in the case of its four Departments, the DPS was organized by large organic functional areas within which all the technical, human, and financial resources need to carry out their functions were collocated (Dente 1999). It was composed by five services—one of which was specifically dedicated to the management of the structural funds, becoming the main Italian interlocutor with the Commission and supporting the activities of the national and regional administrations deputed to the management of the OPs. Moreover, it inherited from the Budgetary the Technical Evaluation and Investigation Testing Unit (Nucleo Tecnico di Valutazione e Verifica Investimenti, NUVAL) and the secretariat of the CIPE (DPS 2007). The latter had specific tasks of programming cycle instruction, representing a link between politics and administration. During the first years of the establishment of the DPS, the high technical leadership of Fabrizio Barca was recognized by all the members of the Department. Thanks to the great autonomy he had and to the total political support he enjoyed, Barca was able to build a well-organized organizational structure with a vertical coordination and to do a parsimonious scout activity which allowed him to have the best personalities within the Ministry. As emerged during the field analysis I did within the national offices in Rome, these years also represented a season of great professional growth, with an unique focus on the achievement of the objectives. It was also facilitated by the possibility to recruit up to a maximum of 60 external technical consultants with specific professional skills directly nominated by the Department. In the first years, their presence also facilitated a learning process of the whole national administration.

After describing the main institutional change introduced by the Nuova Programmazione, the following pages will seek to understand which has been the variations of the national decision-maker for development with respect its original characteristics, as well as the main criticisms of the new governance system of the Structural Funds for the management of the 2000–2006 and 2007–2013 programming cycles.

More in detail, I will present three different moments of criticisms had over the years and that in a different way they had undermined the proper functioning of the national institutions deputed to the coordination of the regional policy. By using a Hirschmanian approach, I will underline that in each of these three phases, it has been deprived by specific institutional features that until then had characterized it and allowed it to properly and adequately fulfill that desired role of guidance and direction that, according to the initial idea of Ciampi, it should have.

The first moment of criticism reached only few months later the formal establishment of the DPS.

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