Le unioni di comuni e l'erogazione dei servizi in forma associata negli enti locali

Over the last decades, the public sector has been involved in a series of reforms aimed at improving public services’ efficiency and effectiveness; the objective was to provide better services to meet public needs, in a context in which the available resources are even more scarce and insufficient. Small municipalities have greater difficulties in guaranteeing suitable levels of efficiency in the use of the resources and effectiveness in providing services. To solve this problem different policies with the objective to provide services in a shared way have been designed and implemented. The cooperation between municipalities becomes an effective strategy in searching for a greater efficiency of the administrative activity. The research studies the case of the Unions of municipalities in Italy. The Italian legislation in the last few years obliged municipalities with a population less than 5.000 inhabitants to provide services jointly and the Union of Municipalities are one of the main ways to deliver shared services. However, they did not achieve the desired objectives and are still lagging behind. This research aims at understanding how the Unions of Municipalities actually work, what are the main problems and what are the possibilities for their future development. The research has been carried out through a qualitative and quantitative methodology. In the first phase a normative and documental analysis and two focus group, that have involved politicians and technicians of Sardinian Unions of municipalities, have been done. The analysis of the results of the first phase allowed to individualize the relevant variables that have been analyzed in the second phase through a structured questionnaire administered to the Presidents, the Secretaries and the General Managers of all the Unions of municipalities in Italy. The results of the descriptive analyses show what are the motivations that lead to the choice to set up a Union, what problems and benefits have been found and what are the principal causes of resistance. Moreover, the correlations between different variable have been analyzed. The research tried to investigate whether the variables studied influence shared services management. The main problem seems to be the difficulty of the politicians in giving up the control of the resources and their autonomy. Moreover, the law is not clear and it is continuously changing; it makes the providing of shared services even more difficult