Municipalities and the challenge of esg sustainability

Citizens and local administrators usually discuss public services and policies on issues ranging from nurseries to public parks and gardens. Yet, the discussion almost never concerns the administrative capacity of a Municipality, without which those services and policies are not feasible. This is why the European Union regularly recommends that its Member States strengthen their administrative capacity as a condition, for example, for the good use of structural funds and the NRP (PNRR). After all, the arrival of European money is not enough to guarantee development: at the same time, the public organisational machinery in each country must be improved. Otherwise, it would be like injecting petrol into a car with a broken engine. The Public Rating analysis presented here does not aim to assign report cards to Municipalities, but to identify their strengths and weaknesses, so as to be able to better direct targeted actions to support administrative strengthening. The book is therefore a cognitive tool for citizens and a compass for the Government on the qualitative performance of Municipalities, capable of identifying the many existing good practices. Transparency is the prerequisite for this to be possible: therefore, faced with the difficulties of some Municipalities in fulfilling their publication obligations, the response of a modern State cannot be to reduce transparency obligations, as stated in the PNRR, but to support fulfilment itself, first and foremost through digitalisation.