Il principio della programmazione e il ciclo di gestione della performance. Quale integrazione? L’esperienza di tre comuni “sperimentatori”

During last years, literature on performance management in public administrations has focused on the performance cycle of planning, programming and controlling for the creation of public value. It has been highlighted that the definition of objectives consistent with the administration purposes and the expectations of stakeholders is essential to create public value. Thus, the objectives used for evaluation must nec- essarily be defined in coherence with the governance strategies. Accordingly, the accounting reform introduced in Italy in June 2011, primarily aim- ing to accounting harmonisation of administrations operating at different levels, placed the programming phase as the fulcrum of the information system of local public administrations oriented to the evaluation of results. This paper aims to investigate how the Italian accounting reform on harmonisation impacted on the performance cycle of local governments. Using a case studies ap- proach, the paper investigate if local governments which have been considered “best practices” in accounting harmonization are also best practices in performance man- agement cycle and to what extent specific provisions introduced by Legislative De- cree n. 118/2011 have influenced their performance management cycle.