Ripensare le politiche per il Mezzogiorno

A new approach to the Policies for Italy’s Mezzogiorno
The paper critically assesses the policy known as «programmazione negoziata» which has been the dominant approach to the development of the Mezzogiorno over the last 10 years. There is general agreement that this policy has not delivered the expected results but there is no shared consensus as to the reasons of this failure. The paper provides a general scheme of analysis of such failure making a distinction between the basic view of what Southern Italy needs in order to develop, the institutional conditions necessary to make effective the measures suggested by the view and, finally, all what makes the actual policies to diverge, and even to conflict, with the basic view. This last element called «implementation inconsistency», as the paper shows, has been quite important in the case of the «programmazione negoziata». The paper concludes with some suggestions on how to reinforce the basic view of the problems to be tackled and how to tackle both the risk of institutional dysfunctionality and of inconsistencies in the implementation.