1. How to enhance coordination: an evergreen
Enhanced coordination is an evergreen in public management (Bogdanor 2005). No phrase expresses as frequent a complaint as does ‘lack of co-ordination’ and no suggestion is more common than ‘what we need is more coordination” (Pressman and Wildavsky, 1984).
As concerns the local level, literature has often discussed the benefits of stronger intermunicipal coordination: attracting investors(Downs, 1994; Felbinger, 1984; Nunn & Rosentraub, 1997; Orfield, 1997); increasing officials’ professionalism (Barlow, 1991; Lind, 1997); reducing costs through economies of scale and reducing concomitantly taxes (Bunch & Strauss, 1992; Dolan, 1990); increasing planning capacity (Fleischmann & Green, 1991; Rigos, 1995).
2. Intermunicipal coordination in Italy: structural design or management systems?
Enhanced coordination among municipalities has always been a “reform talk” in Italy (Garlatti et al., 2013). The Italian local government system, in fact, is highly fragmented, and very small municipalities often struggle to perform their functions. Recently, due to budget cuts and the impossibility to keep raising local charges, the issue is back on the agenda. Coordination can be obtained through different policy tools, from contractual arrangements to structural redesign (Verhoest et al., 2010). The most common “structural” solutions are mergers of existing municipalities or second level tiers that integrate neighboring municipalities. The present paper focuses on the second type of structural mechanism since this arrangement, although promising in theory, has been hollowed out in practice. Often, when required to establish second-level bodies, municipalities would enact mimetic reactions (DiMaggio and Powell,1983), formally establishing them, so to signal compliance, but would substantially keep on working separately. Some policy makers, therefore, advocate and try to implement joint management systems, such as planning and control procedures as a necessary complement to structural design. The (policy oriented) research question this paper address is therefore: how does the adoption of joint planning and control processes influence intermunicipal cooperation?
3. Analytical framework and methodology
The study follows the realist evaluation logic (Pawson and Tilley 1997; Pawson et al., 2004). Therefore, it uses the CMO (context, mechanism, outcomes) framework to analyze a number of cases, within the Italian public sector, where joint management systems were successfully adopted within some second level body. Data collection is carried out through documental analysis, semi-structured interviews and direct observation.
4. Results
Results can contribute to research on intermunicipal coordination, adding knowledge on one specific angle, through first-hand qualitative evidence and second-hand quantitative data. More specifically, the paper highlights the effects of joint planning, programming and control systems in mitigating interagency fragmentation (also through developing shared cognitive frameworks and culture) at the municipal level. This might enhance overall coordination, ultimately leading to better quality of service delivery and policy-making. On the more practical side, the paper can provide policy makers with “euristic technological rules” (Barzelay, 2012) to design management systems that favor inter-municipal coordination.
