Funzione amministrativa, governance e controlli: verso una logica della appropriatezza

Abstract

This article analyzes the evolution of the administrative function in the context of multilevel governance and the growing complexity of public decision-making processes, proposing the logic of appropriateness as an interpretative and normative alternative to the traditional paradigm of formal legality and instrumental rationality. Starting from the overcoming of the crisis of the authoritative model and the progressive inadequacy of a conception of administrative action based exclusively on acts and procedural compliance, the article reconstructs results-oriented administration as the outcome of an expanded and contextual rationality, in which results do not coincide with the mere achievement of measurable objectives, but with the overall quality of public decisions with respect to the context, the interests involved, and the effects produced.

From this perspective, appropriateness emerges as an evolution of the theory of results, taking shape not as an ex post evaluation criterion, but as an internal canon of administrative action, oriented towards the congruence between decisions, institutional role, constitutional values, and factual conditions, including financial conditionality. The management of complexity, understood as a combination of multiple interests, regulatory uncertainty, and organizational fragmentation, structurally encompasses the dimension of risk, which becomes a physiological element of public action and an essential parameter of administrative rationality. Sustainable appropriateness is thus linked to a precautionary and proportionate logic, in which discretion (including technical discretion) is not a free zone from control, but rather a space for informed responsibility, assessed in terms of cognitive coherence, reasonableness, and sustainability in the medium to long term. This represents a path to strengthening the democratic accountability of administrative action