I PIANI E I PROGRAMMI NEL DIRITTO AMMINISTRATIVO. UNA TEORICA GENERALE, NELLA PROSPETTIVA DELLA DIGITALIZZAZIONE DELLA PUBBLICA AMMINISTRAZIONE

The research focuses on studying the planning procedures within administrative law, with a particular emphasis on the digitalization of public administration. The rationale for the investigation is based on the observation that in recent years, numerous and in-depth studies have been conducted on the digitalization of administrative activities, management of public administration databases, transformation of administrative functions, especially those related to knowledge, determined by technological advancements, and the enhancement of public information assets. Reflections on cybersecurity have also been prevalent, addressing a specific traditional area of public administration activity – public security – and studying its different and new object constituted by a new domain of action, no longer territorial but digital. Many of these studies have also been strongly influenced by the proliferation of supranational regulatory frameworks aimed at establishing a single digital market. All the aforementioned studies demonstrate a strong awareness that the digitalization process is well underway, and that public organization is already showing significant changes that can be examined from a purely legal perspective. Indeed, there is frequent attention to the use of new technologies in the activities of public administrations to improve efficiency and ensure better service to the community, in terms of good governance and impartiality in providing non-discriminatory services. However, it is believed that similar attention has not been given to the processes of political-administrative direction that govern these organizational processes. Assuming that planning processes are, among administrative procedures, those that directly contribute to political-administrative direction, this study aims to fill this gap by studying the Three-Year Plans for Informatics developed by AgID within the framework of planning procedures, considered a privileged venue for forming political-administrative direction in digital matters. In the first part of the thesis, planning procedures are studied as administrative acts with general content. This study is necessary for two main reasons. Firstly, on an institutional study level, it meets the need to frame these procedures within the most shared elaborations regarding the classification of administrative procedures, thus elucidating their main formal characteristics. Secondly, from a critical perspective, this initial analysis highlights the problem arising from the legal nature of such procedures, which previously only intersected with the realm of normativity – generating contrasts, and relative positions, regarding the criteria to distinguish regulatory acts (regulations) from administrative acts with general content (plans and programs). Then, at a later stage, this analysis is enriched by the entry into the legal system of new subjects, particularly independent administrative authorities, new regulatory acts, their regulations, and new types of norms, technical ones, characterized by different legal efficacy. In addition to an institutional framework, the first chapter allows us to exclude the usefulness of resorting to formalistic elements to isolate the specificity of general administrative acts and highlights the need to interpret them as typical discretionary instruments of the activity of forming and implementing political-administrative direction. The second chapter, building on this acquisition, moves on to examine programming experiences as models of public intervention in the economy and therefore planning procedures suitable for the formation of a global economic policy direction, and then a sectoral one. In particular, global programming experiences are analyzed, followed by sectoral programming experiences that develop in the mature regionalism phase. In this chapter, which proposes a historical reconstruction of the transition from one type of programming to another, the typical elements of each of the two experiences are analyzed, and the reasons that led to the failure of global programming and those that led to the consolidation of sectoral programming at the regional level are offered, without omitting the present criticisms. The third chapter, continuing the evolution of programming procedures, focuses on their strategic evolution and proposes to find the specificity of this new type of planning in having internalized political-administrative direction activity, directing it not towards societal development but primarily towards executive bodies, in order to prepare administrative structures most useful for consolidating a social market economy. In this sense, the change in the function performed by planning is highlighted, which is no longer to organize apparatus and activities for the democratic governance of the economy or a specific sector but, on the contrary, to guarantee the efficiency of administration, benchmarked against the needs emerged in private competition contexts. In this context, regulatory interventions that have directly regulated the relationships between politics and management are examined. The fourth chapter, able to incorporate all the elements disseminated in the previous chapters, finally focuses on the study of the Three-Year Plans for Informatics of the agency entitled to develop them – the Agency for Digital Italy (AgID) – and offers a framework for them using the interpretative keys collected above. It concludes, therefore, by affirming the strategic nature of these procedures, studying their relationship with other strategic planning procedures, noting, not without some criticisms, a timid connection to sectoral economic programs.