Public Ownership and Management of Public Services: Key Sustainable Success Factors of the In-House Model in Italy

Why do in Italy periodically return to talking about privatization and, above all, about having local public services managed by private firms instead of directly or indirectly by the municipalities or the State? Why does the Italian legislator frequently push for the entry of private investors into companies that deal with public services? Why isn’t frequently recognized that private ownership is not always better than public ownership, especially if the performance measures used are not merely economic and financial (profits, dividends, etc.) but also linked to environmental and social results? One of the answers that was given to the questions posed above is that Italy has substantial economic and financial needs and privatization can be an answer to the need to find funds to be used to meet other economic and social needs. However, this statement is, to date, contested and lacks empirical support. Most of the local public services contracted out to private individuals have higher costs and lower efficiency than in-house utilities and do not bring any benefit to the municipalities' resources; the decades-long concessions, not only local but also national, of strategic infrastructures to private investors have often led to the practice of sweating the asset, with a reduction in maintenance investments, an increase in prices for users and a financial provision for the State which is purely provisional, clearly lower than what it could have obtained with its own virtuous management. Moreover, the cases of remunicipalisation that have occurred in the water and waste sectors (in Paris with Eau de Paris, in Italy with Contarina and Alea Ambiente more recently for example) demonstrate how the dissatisfaction with past privatizations is such as to arouse a contrary movement precisely among those actors who in the past had favored the loss of public control. The aim of this research is to analyze the main critical factors of sustainable success of in-house companies through the study of some success cases in various public services sectors to show how good governance and good management of public utility services have contributed to creating and developing "excellent" publicly owned companies that obtained better performance of their private counterparts considering economic, social, and environmental results in a triple bottom line approach. Local public services are a backbone of collective well-being: the aqueduct, sewerage and purification, waste collection, treatment and disposal, public transport, healthcare and pharmacies are some examples that demonstrate how easily a management distant from the needs of the territory and citizens can create numerous problems, not only economic, but also and above all environmental and social.