The “Regulations for the Care of Commons”: an Italian Policy Innovation Based on a Collaborative Governance Model.

The aim of my contribution is to attempt to analyse the decision model that led to the adoption of a specific policy such as the "Regulation for the care of common goods". The “Regulations for the care of common goods” is a policy recently widespread in Italian municipalities which allows citizens to take voluntary care of public spaces or common goods, as claimed in art. 118 of the Italian Constitution concerning the principle of subsidiarity. The first part of the paper will discuss the main theoretical models on which the Regulation is rooted. The “shared administration” and the collaborative governance model are both consistent with this normative tool and provide some prescriptive and normative issues which need to be verified. Through the analysis of the context and the players in the policy arena it will be possible to highlight both structural and agency dimensions of the decision model. The perceived motivations of the players might provide useful information on the issues at stake and about the possibility of introducing a real innovative policy. In the case of the Regulation, for example, it is very interesting to investigate the mixture of political and administrative elements. The roles of politicians and the administrative officers are not clearly separated and do not correspond to traditional behaviour. For this reason, it could be interesting to analyse if a depoliticization process is taking place. The analysis of the decisional context should reveal the complex network of interactions between the various players (political, administrative and social), the stakes and their available resources. A further element of investigation is the assumption that the spreading of the Regulation could be related to the transformation of the local government connected to the economic context and to the consequent reorganization of the local administrative system in a neoliberal way. This emphasizes the importance of the structural elements connected to the context and reduces the role of the ideas and the agency of the players involved. According to this interpretation, some transnational policies, such as the Fiscal Compact, had an impact on the local scale, reducing the autonomy of the political decision-makers. This leads to the experimentation of inclusive governance models, attempting to stem the externalities of the financial cuts. The identification of the decision model (rational, incremental or garbage can) that has been used in the Regulation for the commons would be useful to establish the level of innovation of the policy. Innovativeness, together with the scope and evaluation of the issues at stake, will be able to establish whether a reconfiguration of the frame (reframing) or a mere application of practical knowledge is in progress.