We collaborate

Publish date 09-07-2022

by Gianfranco Cattai

Moving from competition to collaboration. The new relationship between public administration and the third sector. An important and demanding challenge.
Moving from the concept of calls for which those who wrote and financed it - in the case of the public administration - actually planned the initiative and controlled its implementation, reducing the function of the Third sector to a mere executor, to the concept of co-planning is easy to write, but not easy to do.

Building healthy collaborative relationships between public bodies and third sector organizations is one of the great challenges which bodies are called to face in the coming months. The economic and social crisis triggered by the pandemic has accelerated the emergence of new needs and denied rights and, consequently, requires increasingly effective responses.
The sentence 131/2020 of the Constitutional Court has dissolved any doubts on the possibility of using the shared administration devices provided for by the Third Sector Code, specifically in articles 55, 56 and 57, but to do so, public administration and Third sector entities are aware of their functioning, from the possible advantages to the possible risks.

Above all, it requires a change of mentality, a culture of a sense of collaboration and subsidiarity, an ability to see mutual benefits far away, mutual respect and the will to value the other, the determination to want the common good for all. and for each.
In other words, this change requires common training and self-training of each one. It requires strong creativity in dealing with the problems of the "bureaucracy that kills" behind which procedural stupidity and the desire not to lose power often hide, by taking on new tools with new capabilities: obviously without forgetting transparency and traceability.

It means taking on together, women and men from the public administration and the third sector, beyond the roles of each, a generative logic capable of making us make unprecedented leaps in quality. The challenge has just begun but the speed with which we must proceed will be decisive if we do not want to frustrate it.
A simple, almost banal exercise between people in good faith from the public administration and the third sector is to imagine ourselves in the role of the other: perhaps this simple exercise could help us to seek together highly innovative solutions, obviously in compliance with the rules valid up to until they change.


Gianfranco Cattai
NP March 2022

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