Autonomy of agencies and semi-Autonomous organisations in Italy

1. Introduction and research question Resorting to semi-autonomous organisations and non departmental public bodies for the execution of public functions is far from being a novelty. In many countries, in fact, some activities are carried out by organisations which are in some way disaggregated from the ‘core’ government structure, organised along departmental lines. The governance problems of these bodies have been traditionally a recurrent issues in public administration studies (Wettenhall, 2005). In the last decade, however, this issue has been again on the top of research and political agendas (Pollitt and Talbot, 2004; Pollitt, 2005). Partly under the influence of New Public Management ideas (Hood, 1991), there has been a remarkable global trend toward specialisation and autonomization in the public sector (Pollitt and Bouckaert, 2004).Governments in many countries decided to establish semi- autonomous single purpose organizations (Oecd, 2002). These bodies have been variously named: quangos, non departmental public bodies, agencies. Ministries and other departmental bodies have been split up into several entities and these entities enjoyed some freedom to manage. As a result we often observe a landscape of a highly differentiated public sector with several thousands of “satellites” which operate quite independently and which are often only loosely coupled with their parent and core governments. Many problems are associated to this trend to disaggregation and specialisation: accountability of agencies to legitimized political bodies, divergent goals, information asymmetries, lacking incentives, etc. Consequently, the issue of the “autonomy” of these bodies has become a central one in public management and public administration research. On the other side, the conceptualisation of autonomy is difficult task since it is not only a legal-formal matter (Verhoest et al,2004). Under the organisational research point of view becomes thus relevant to analyse what are the “determinants” and the “antecedent factors” of autonomy of agencies. At this stage, consequently, the main research question can be broadly formulated as follows: What factors do influence the autonomy of agencies? The analysis will focus on the Italian public sector; there is, in fact, still a remarkable lack of empirical and analytical knowledge concerning Napoleonic, Rechtsstaat, south Mediterranean countries in this field. 2. Brief theoretical background Many theoretical perspectives have been adopted to analyse and explain the autonomy of agencies under different lights. We start by sketching a brief reference framework of the factors, drawing on a review of literature. First of all, the agencies’ shape and degree of autonomy can be influenced by the rational choice of the principal (governments and political officials) who delegate powers and functions to agencies. In this mainly functional logic, principals are willing to pay the costs of delegation, if they expect benefits to outweigh those costs (Thatcher e Stone Sweet, 2002). Consequently, they will grant agency some discretion to achieve the benefits of delegation, trying to minimize the risk of agency loss. According to this approach, the main explanatory factors of agency discretion and autonomy are elements like policy complexity, credible commitment (Pollack, 2003) policy conflict and uncertainty (Moe, 1995). Hypotheses related to these factors have been often tested (Elgie, 2006; Yesilkagit, Christensen, 2006; Elgie and McMenamin, 2005; Gilardi, 2002). It could be argued, for example, that agencies which operate in economic policy field are more enjoy a higher degree of autonomy since there is more need to reassure relevant stakeholders about politicians’ credible commitment. Functional logic and the Principal-Agent framework are not the only available analytical tools. It is, in fact,