Analysing the implementation of local partnerships : an organisational perspective

This article investigates joined-up government, especially the policies designed to incentivise partnering between municipalities, adopting an as yet under-explored perspective of the organizational type. A recent survey conducted in the Lombardy Region (Northern Italy) shows that, despite the financial incentives allocated by the regional administration to promote local agency collaboration, only one-fifth of the services currently made available by local councils are delivered in associative form. While the councils seem to have grasped the importance of partnership to help provide coordinated responses to public needs, in practice, the evidence is mixed, in terms of both the size of the aggregations and the types of projects implemented on the back of the regional programs. The paper claims that the rational assumption of the incentive policies (i.e. more financial incentives = more partnership creation) is too simplistic and concludes with some reflections on the use of a theoretically founded tool for evaluating implementation