Roberto Rizza, Rebecca Paraciani
The research project ALMADIA falls within the field of study of street-level bureaucracy. Studies in street-level bureaucracy (SLB) draw attention to understanding how discretionary decisions and daily practices implemented by frontline workers in public services – the Street-Level Bureaucrats (SLBs) – shape public policies and their outcomes. The policy field selected for the research is active labour market policies (ALMPs) – an increasingly central area of state intervention to respond and deal with the labour market impacts of emerging transnational challenges such as the twin digital and green transition. The following research questions drive ALMADIA:
1) Focusing on the interaction between Public Employment Services (PES), SLBs, and policy users, how are ALMPs transferred into practice?
2) What type of discretion frequently arises within PES policy implementation processes?
3) What are the most critical aspects influencing how PES SLBs exercise discretion?
The first step will explore these issues via a survey of a representative sample of Italian PES and direct observation of PES practices on the ground. Through the reconstruction and classification of different clusters of SLBs’ discretionary practices, the survey will develop an original (and replicable) street-level database. To accomplish the objective of unpacking the policy implementation process, the project has three primary goals:
1) a descriptive objective to define and classify what types of discretion frontline workers use;
2) an analytical objective: the survey leads to a PES street-level workers database to understand what activities they carry out, the conditions of their everyday work, the interaction with users, and how they use their discretionary power, adapting formal rules to specific situations;
3) co-designing a replicable research model to fill the gap in international comparative studies in this field.
ALMADIA aims to address the scarcity of quantitative studies in street-level bureaucracy research, which is often criticized for its emphasis on qualitative and micro-level approaches limited to national or local contexts. This initiative will introduce a new stream of research with a comparative international perspective, and the findings will contribute to transnational policy learning and policy transfer in best practices for PES.
PRIN PNRR 2022