La rilevanza pratica dei sistemi di misurazione delle performance negli Enti Locali: analisi di un caso

In the last decades, public organisations have been subject to several institutional changes, aimed at increasing their efficiency through the introduction of manage-ment control tools. The proliferation of management accounting tools planned for public companies has not always generated a corresponding diffusion of these tools in practice, widening the gap between theoretical models and practice. This gap is due to the divergence between meanings and roles assigned to performance meas-urement by theoretical models and practical dimensions. Focusing on the Local gov-ernment context, this paper aims to understand the practical relevance of perfor-mance measurement systems in public organizations, verifying how these systems can affect the logics and behaviours of actors involved in the decision making pro-cess. The theoretical insights coming from literature review are used to interpret the practical relevance of performance measurement systems in a case study of a Local government placed in the South of Italy. The empirical evidence showed that the actors’ interests and objectives can affect the Performance Plan contents and its im-plementation, activating interpretive processes that are not always consistent with the underlying logics to which the measurement should be inspired. The case study showed how the practical relevance of the performance Plans is greater for those projects in which there was a sharing of the measurement meanings by political and administrative actors, which affects the definition of the Performance Plan contents and its implementation.