Ongoing Pristina – Belgrade Talks: from Decentralization to Regional Cooperation and Future Perspectives. EDAP 04/2012, 2012

On 17 February 2008, Kosovo declared independence, ending its nine years unresolved status. The principal goal was, and remains, the need to involve different communities in the state structures. The new state, which aims to fulfil all the obligations set by the Ahtisaari plan, is trying to complete the decentralization process the implementation of which continuous to face obstacles in the two main communities: the Serbs and the Albanians. This article discusses matters related to community acceptance of the decentralization process, the functioning of the parallel structures, the situation in North Kosovo and the on - going talks between Pristina and Belgrade. The article provides evidences that while the implementation of the decentralization process is the best possibility for Kosovo, it must not follow only an ethnic line.

The Dynamics of Decentralization in Italy: Towards a Federal Solution? European Diversity and Autonomy Papers, EDAP/04 2013

This paper analyses the recent process of state decentralisation in Italy from the perspectives of political science and constitutional law. It considers the conflicting pressures and partisan opportunism of the decentralising process, and how these have adversely affected the consistency and completeness of the new constitutional framework. The paper evaluates the major institutional reforms affecting state decentralisation, including the 2001 constitutional reform and the more recent legislation on fiscal federalism. It argues that while the legal framework for decentralisation remains unclear and contradictory in parts, the Constitutional Court has performed a key role in interpreting the provisions and giving life to the decentralised system, in which regional governments now perform a much more prominent role. This new system of more decentralised multi-level government must nevertheless contend with a political culture and party system that remains highly centralised, while the administrative apparatus has undergone no comparable shift to take account of state decentralisation, leading to the duplication of bureaucracy at all territorial levels and continuing conflicts over policy jurisdiction. Unlike in federal systems these conflicts cannot be resolved in Italy through mechanisms of “shared rule”, since formal inter-governmental coordination structure are weak and entirely consultative.

Labor Market Policy Decentralization in Germany, the United Kingdom and Italy - Dynamics and Reasons. ACES Working Papers No. 5, 2008

This article argues that welfare-to-work or activation policies, which have been adopted across a range of OECD countries during the last two decades, do not only have led to changes in the substance of the welfare state but also to transformations in its institutional configuration. This institutional transformation includes the spatial reconfiguration of the welfare state, which has given new roles to the supra-national, national, and sub-national levels of government as well as private actors in the management and creation of labor market policies. By bringing institutions into these debates, this article seeks to expand the literature on welfare-to-work and activation as to date authors working on this topic have said very little about the degree, types, and reasons for the spatial re-configuration of welfare-to-work policies across different states. To fill a gap in the literatures on changes in the welfare state and its territorial configuration in particular, we compare trends in the re-configuration of welfare-to-work policies in Italy, Germany and the United Kingdom. We find that there is a cross-national trend, when it comes to the institutional effects of the implementation of activation. These trends bear a tension between decentralization and centralization, as both central and sub-national levels of government have acquired new responsibilities to implement the activation paradigm.