Abstract

It's been long time, more than two decades, since public management can not find its own identity, and lives hanging in between public and private, skills and politics, impartiality and trust. This situation has produced an almost uninterrupted flow of rules, caracterized by rapid accelerations, sudden stops and abrupt reversals. The results, however, are not at all positive: to date, public management does not have any certainty about its legal status, which remains suspended somewhere between common and public law; it is not able to determine whether the role assigned to it by the Law corresponds to that of an entrepreneur or to an high-level employee; it does not know how to relate to politicians, who gives to public managers temporary assignments and arrange for their possible renewal; it has not clear if the choices and responsibilities assigned to it by Law should be measured on a purely technical parameters, or according to the will of the community and to the logic of representative democracy. The hope is that, through the balance and the measure, we may get a Legislation more aimed at concrete solutions and less bound to ideological visions of bureaucracy. It must be built up a regulatory apparatus for public management that is able to distinguish the individual skills in function of individual responsibilities, without succumbing to preconceived and stereotyped models.