Tips on complex administrative decisions: multiplicity of interests and elimination of dissent

Abstract

The emergence of objectives that affect the entire country often prompts the legislator to use the ‘national interest’ clause in the provisions that proceduralize public action.

The legislative intention is thus to speed up decisions and get more quickly to the desired result: this, all the more so when that result leads to obtaining European funding.

This is also the intention of the legislator in law decree no. 77/2021, which, in Articles 12 and 13, provides for the establishment of substitutive powers and mechanisms for overcoming dissent that, in fact, seriously risk translating into the elimination of public interests – conflicting with the ‘national’ one – that hinder (or even only slow down) its implementation.

The extreme mechanisms thus devised, however, have two critical aspects.

First of all, they do not guarantee respect for the ‘principle of result’, when understood as a corollary of the so-called ‘good administration’: attributing a driving value to a single ‘national’ interest while silencing other public interests that may conflict with it does not mean achieving a good administrative decision, which is – by its very nature – complex.

Secondly, they shift the centre of decision-making from administrative to political authorities: sacrificing administrative power on the altar of the ‘national interest’. The result is an inevitable disempowerment of the Administration from exercising its powers, in the wake of a rising trend.