Report on the Future and Innovation of Public Administration – 2022 #735400

We decided to dedicate the Report on the Future and Innovation of Public Administration 2022 entirely to the National Plan for Recovery and Resilience (NRRP), as it contributes to an all−round reshaping of the public administrations of the future, in tandem with the future of public policy.
The Report is the result of multidisciplinary and interdisciplinary work  reflecting  the  composition  of  the  Tavolo  Cattolica  per  la Pubblica Amministrazione, to which were added important external contributions by scholars and technicians from the world of public administration.
The 21 articles have been divided into five thematic blocks.
1.   Strategies for (economic) recovery
2.   Strategies for resilience (emergencies and complexity)
3.   Ecological transition and sustainable mobility
4.  Employment policies and work in public administration
5.   Health and social services
Common to all is the conviction that the NRRP is an extraordinary opportunity for the country: for significant recovery in terms of the competitiveness, including at the regional level, and overall efficiency of public administration. The new drivers of this process, which marks a break with the past, are highlighted: education, culture and tourism, digitalisation and artificial intelligence, and the re−engineering of administrative procedures. Suffice it to say that culture alone accounts for 7% of Italy’s GDP (12% if you count satellite activities).
The legacy of the pandemic in terms of emergency management and system coordination is reconstructed, recognising the significant contribution that local government can make. Moreover, transparency and anti−corruption become tools for increasing the resilience of administrations, which is also key in managing the NRRP on the ground (preventing the mismanagement of economic resources). The dimension of the emergency is framed within a new complexity of  public  policies  and  requires  new  approaches  to  ensure  policy coherence in order to achieve the UN Sustainable Development Goals (UN SDGs 2030). 

Significant innovations, which are bolstering the resilience of the system outside and inside the public administration, exist at the level of active labour policies and public work. The journey into innovation and the future of public administration continues, then, with the scenario of the ecological transition and sustainable mobility: among the themes explored are the incompleteness of the revolution started with the European Green Deal (in relation to the regulatory choices it requires), the transformative potential of the circular economy, the new proprietary paradigms underlying urban regeneration, and the so−called twin transition in the transport and urban mobility sector.
The fifth theme addressed by the report is related to healthcare, which is analysed in terms of responding to the new needs expressed by an Italian population increasingly characterised by the presence of chronic degenerative diseases, the need to rethink homecare and the role of the community and social networks in taking care of the most vulnerable people. Since the impact of the management of health services on modern society is evident, we must develop those systems that maximise the efficiency and effectiveness of responses, including through the use of lean management tools.
The Appendix will, as of this year, be a recurrent section of the FuturAP Report. It is dedicated to a central theme for the future of Italian local administrations: that of the attractiveness of PAs as employers for the younger generations and young talent.