An Efficient Management of the «External» Economic Activity of Public Administrations: «Program Management» and Return to Planning. The Experience of the Extraordinary Intervention and the NRRP

This paper starts from the interpretation of the Public Administration rooted in the classical approach of the Italian school of business economics and addresses the issue of the relationship between planning and programming, with particular reference to the relevance of these concepts for the efficient organization of the «external» economic activity of public authorities. The work account for the strengthening of organizational methods inspired by the logic of program management as one of the principal results of reforms encouraged by New Public Management, with particular reference to the public procurement sector, but it identifies the fundamental limit in the increasingly strong programming action by single Administrations in front of inadequate strategic coordination of public economic activity. In fact, the failure of the match between the increasing program management by individual Administrations and an «upstream» general planning of the strategic objectives for vast areas, has weakened the programs themselves in their capacity to deliver maximum yield from investments, exploiting synergies and complementarities. The paper concludes by giving an account of the fact that today’s context makes it possible to grasp some positive signs of trend reversal, on the basis of a collective cost-effectiveness assessment. These undoubtedly include the approval of the first general economic plan (the National Recovery and Resilience Plan - NRRP) after thirty years of rejection of policy models based on planning actions, as well as the preparation of a clear institutional-organizational system to guarantee a balanced implementation of the plan itself. Seeming to treasure the experience that was already at the basis of the «golden age» of the extraordinary intervention in Southern Italy – which was born within the cultural framework of SVIMEZ, consistent with an important economic-managerial literature – today the NRRP returns to propose the idea of an integrated governance system of the public action in the economy, where the moment of central planning by the State (and governmental coordination) may converge with the moment of programming (and implementation) by individual competent Administrations and providing appropriate institutional incentives for the convergence of particular programming within the general plan. Thus, this research allows the public management studies to take a step forward to understand the new challenges of general planning that today affect Italy as whole in the NRRP post Covid-19 scenario