The reform of public administration in Italy, as in more or less all advanced western countries, has been a subject debated for decades, and one which, in the final decade of the last century, found new impulse in countries such as the USA, where the federal “Government Performance and Result Act” (GPRA) of 1993 introduced “result-based management techniques.” The first experiences in the application of technical innovations in this field have shown that the decisive battle for innovation is fought and won on the field of educational activities to improve the skills of public managers.

The author, an authority on already-introduced managerial transformations (and those still being experimented with) in the United States and in other pioneering countries, and a professor in the Post-Graduate School of Public Administration attached to the Prime Minster’s Office in Italy, testifies with this book on both the concerns and characteristics of managerial innovation in the public domain, and on the efforts to improve the substance of methods of educational activities aimed directly and specifically at the preparation and training of public managers.

This book, in other terms, deals with the features and challenges of a new didactic method capable of introducing new professionalism and technical leadership into the civil service.

CONTENTS

Preface

1. The new public management and its formative implications
2. Ideas on a renewal of the ‘Scuola superiore della pubblica amministrazione’
3. Further ideas for the renewal of the SSPA in the form of a ‘general Programme’
4. ‘And the law?’: considerations on the role of the traditional disciplines in the training of the public manager
5. Preparing the new managers of public administration: a radical transformation of contents and methods
6. Suggestion for a didactic Programme for a Master of high-level public leadership
7. Observations on the planning of some traditional matters of learning and their adaptation to the new public management
8. The role of research for the activities of formative renewal of the ‘Scuola superiore della pubblica amministrazione’
9. How the ‘New Public Manager’ (Npm) should influence the didactic and the research activity of the SSPA
10. Further recommendations on the criteria of didactics, organisation and selection for the Course / managerial competition at the SSPA

Appendix: Caserta’s seminar (1997) on the educative implications of result-based-management