A further twist towards centralisation and uniformity. Governance and public sector reforms in the Italian Recovery and Resilience Plan

Abstract

This article examines the implementation of the EU Recovery and Resilience Plan (RRP) in Italy. By analysing and discussing the governance of the plan and the reform agenda it sets out, it aims to determine its political-constitutional background from the viewpoint of the regional and local authorities. The author purports that the logic and political inspiration of the plan is traceable to a longer trajectory of the political direction of executive power that results in the side-lining of both parliamentary and devolved powers. In particular, four factors are detected that justify this claim: the Prime Minister’s hegemony within the governance of the RRP; a considerable injection of technical/bureaucratic expertise within the Cabinet Office; the attempt to rearticulate the so-called multilevel governance around this hegemony by resorting to uniformity and concentration in the implementation process; and the adherence to a new public management (NPM)-like ideology.

Keywords

• eu recovery and resilience plan
• governance
• managerialism
• reform
• territorial governance
• recentralisation
• italy