Simona Milio

The conflicting effects of multi-level governance and the partnership principle:Evidence from the Italian experience

With reference to cohesion policy, multi-level governance (MLG) is the policy-making architecture that implements the subsidiarity principle, which aims for direct involvement bringing government closer to the citizen. In parallel, the partnership principle (PP) has been introduced to guarantee the participation of social and economic actors in both decision making and implementation processes in order to better understand and respond to territorial needs. A review of existing literature identifies opposing views on the benefit of this complex architecture. This paper investigates potentially conflicting effects of MLG and the PP on political accountability, for example by blurring responsibilities and corrupting stakeholder engagements. The Italian case is used to test this hypothesis and identify bottlenecks. Initial findings suggest that the empowerment of new actors by means of MLG has had the effect of disclosing political influence from several players in the decision-making arena, therefore obscuring the accountability of the different tiers involved both vertically and horizontally. This is because actors in the governance chain might tend to shift blame of policy failure towards higher or lower governmental levels. Additionally, the engagement of stakeholders may reduce the efficiency of implementation processes both through a lack of inclusiveness in the decision and policymaking style or through a lack of competences within civil society in interpreting local needs in relation to EU cohesion policy goals. This article concludes by outlining possible solutions for cohesion policy practice to minimize the negative consequences of a multi-tier/multi-actor system.

How Political Stability Shapes Administrative Performance: The Italian Case

During the last decade in many European Union countries it has clearly emerged that states with weak administrative capacity at the subnational level are more likely to have serious problems with the mismanagement of Structural Funds, or even with accessing them. As a result, some member states such as Italy have embarked upon a programme of institutional and administrative reforms aimed at increasing their administrative capacity. However, retrospective data shows that even though some regions have implemented all the required reforms, their performance has remained unchanged. Along with administrative requirements, are political conditions as such to guarantee that administrative capacity can produce the desired effects? What happens if we do not have political stability that allows for continuity and coherence in administrative actions? Political stability is a controversial variable and theories within the literature present ambiguous results. Some authors strongly claim that stability hinders performance because it fosters the practice of clientelism and the entrenchment of distributional coalitions. In contrast, I aim to explore whether and why, in some cases, stability is actually a variable that accounts for better and improved administrative performance.

Conclusion: Budget Policy, Past Experience and the Future

Much political capital has gone into the principle of budget reform in the past and in the present, but this has often floundered not on account of support for continuity but on account of division between the governments of EU member states. At the time of writing, the countries of the EU face the most serious economic crisis since the 1930s and yet the EU’s budget in terms of payments is fixed at no more than 1 per cent of collective national wealth. One solution that seems politically impossible would be for a massive federaltype expansion of the budget in order to provide compensation for economic shocks. Only in part, this may be possible via the semiformal mechanisms explored by Charles Blankart and Gerrit Koester in Chapter 5 although this could occur only outside the principal architecture of the EU system. Indeed, Ackrill and Kay (2006) provide an interesting account of how reform of the EU budget has occurred not through changing existing policies or procedures but by adding yet another layer of institutions on top of all the old ones. On the other hand, partial solutions confined to that 1 per cent of payments could involve investment in new policies at the expense of pre-existing policies, which has happened in the past.