Anticorruption policies and risk management practices: the way to cope with the demands of reforms

Recently public organizations have all been invaded by ideas about risk and its management. However, apart from the regulatory initiatives and some effort to implement a Risk Management (RM) framework, little has been done to establish an overall internal public sector control system on RM basis. Moreover, although risk awareness is growing¸ RM activities continue to lack a systematic approach showing the public organizations’ weaknesses in implementing RM in day-to-day practice. It is in this spirit that both the Italian Reform (Law n. 190/2012) defined not only the general aims and the objectives of RM practices but also the factors, actors, steps, and tools related to the RM systems. Accordingly, we conducted a content analysis on the documents that Italian Ministries have produced in the four years after reform application. The research focused on both the extent of the application of the reform and both the quality and the effectiveness of its implementation and use. This paper aims to shade light on RM practices in the public sector investigating the relationship among organizations dynamics, RM approaches and actors behaviors applying the new institutional theory to our specific case-study. The analysis focused on three dimensions as identified by Arena and colleagues (2010): risk rationalities, uncertainty experts and the technologies. The case analysis outlines how these dimensions continuously interact in a circular motion determining different RM approaches and outcomes which introduce new scientific rationalities within the organizations, allowing in some cases to prevent the risks of risk management peculiar to the public sector.