Process tracing change management: the reform of the Italian judiciary

• DOI: https://doi.org/10.1108/IJPSM-06-2017-0158
• Date: 09 July 2018
• Published date: 09 July 2018
• Pages: 566-582
• Author: Simone Busetti,Giancarlo Vecchi
• Subject Matter: Public policy & environmental management,Politics,Public adminstration & management

Process tracing change

management: the reform of the

Italian judiciary

Simone Busetti

Department of Management Engineering,

Politecnico di Milano Dipartimento di Ingegneria Gestionale, Milano, Italy, and

Giancarlo Vecchi

Department of Management,

Economics and Industrial Engineering –Policy Analysis Team,

Politecnico di Milano Dipartimento di Ingegneria Gestionale, Milano, Italy

Abstract

Purpose –In 2009, the Italian Government initiated a national programme to improve the management of

judicial offices. Programme implementation has been patchy and unsatisfactory in all but a few cases.

Against this background, the Law Court of Milan has achieved exceptional results and is now recognised as a

good practice benchmark for Italy. The purpose of this paper is to investigate this case in order to reconstruct

the local conditions for successful implementation of the national programme.

Design/methodology/approach –To test a theory of the programme based on leaders’engagement,

their access to managerial knowledge, and the transfer and consolidation of that knowledge, the present

study applies process tracing, a qualitative method that uses Bayesian reasoning to improve the accuracy of

within-case inferences.

Findings –The analysis shows how programme and context features interacted to support change.

In particular, while the national programme succeeded in providing resources for leader engagement and

knowledge access, the transfer and consolidation of managerial knowledge depended largely on a brokerage

function performed locally between consultants and magistrates.

Originality/value –The paper sheds light on the local conditions for change management and does so by

employing an innovative qualitative method that improves the reliability of within-case inferences.

Keywords Change management, Judiciary, Process tracing, Public sector modernization

Paper type Research paper

1. Introduction

By international standards, the Italian judicial system is performing poorly (OECD, 2013a;

Esposito et al., 2014; Ministero della Giustizia (Italian Ministry of Justice), 2015). Scholars

and practitioners have advanced a number of possible reasons for this critical condition,

such as the high level of litigiousness in the Italian society (Buonanno and Galizzi, 2014;

CEPEJ, 2014); the limited availability of alternative ways of resolving disputes (Castelli,

2013); and tensions between political and judicial powers (Guarnieri, 2015). In addition,

however, deficiencies in the management of Italian judicial offices are also blamed; despite

long-running debate, efforts to modernise and reform managerial practices began only in the

late 2000s (Steelman and Fabri, 2008; Vecchi, 2013a).

The present paper investigates the implementation of a national programme for

improving the management of judicial offices and describes an in-depth case study of the

Law Court of the Milan District (LCM). Amid patchy implementation of this programme,

Milan stands out as a success story and therefore as a possible source of insight into how

modern management tools can be introduced to judicial offices.

For present purposes, we adopt the perspective of programme designers and

policy makers at the national level. Confronted with the poor implementation results

across the country, a prospective designer might look to the LCM in envisaging a more

International Journal of Public

Sector Management

Vol. 31 No. 5, 2018

pp. 566-582

© Emerald PublishingLimited

0951-3558

DOI 10.1108/IJPSM-06-2017-0158

Received 21 June 2017

Revised 3 October 2017

17 November 2017

Accepted 22 November 2017

The current issue and full text archive of this journal is available on Emerald Insight at:

www.emeraldinsight.com/0951-3558.htm

566

IJPSM

31,5

effective intervention. Learning from the LCM success requires an understanding of

whether and how the programme helped to initiate change in the LCM and –given the likely

influence of local factors –how these can be integrated into a new national programme and

reproduced in different contexts.

To begin, the analysis develops a three-step theory of how the programme may have

contributed to the LCM success by engaging leaders, providing previously inaccessible

knowledge, and securing knowledge transfer. This theory is tested using process tracing

(PT) (Beach and Pedersen, 2013; Bennett and Checkel, 2015), which is an innovative method

for making within-case inferences from a single case study. PT is one of the most promising

developments to emerge from recent debate concerning qualitative methodology (see Brady

and Collier, 2010), and the public management context represents fertile ground for the

deployment of this method.

The paper proceeds as follows. Section 2 provides an overview of both the national

programme and the LCM case. Section 3 introduces the method of PT, and Section 4

elaborates the three-step programme theory referred to above. Based on PT prescriptions,

Section 5 discusses the prior likelihood of the hypothesis and sets out the relevant evidence.

Finally, Sections 6-8 describe the case material and discuss the probative value of the

evidence collected.

2. Changing the Italian judiciary

Between 2007 and 2008, the European Commission allocated EU structural funds to finance

a reform programme for the Italian judicial system. During this period, Italy’s Ministry of

Justice, Ministry of Public Administration, and regional governments designed a reform

programme called “Diffusion of Best Practices in the Italian Judicial Offices”(BPJO).

BPJO provided funding for technical assistance to enhance the quality of civil and penal

justice attained in selected Prosecutors’Offices, Ordinary Law Courts, and Courts of Appeal

by improving efficiency, external accountability, and communication skills under the

innovative frame of “justice as public service”. Regional governments would receive funding

to hire consultants to collaborate with internal personnel in the design of new management

tools, mainly to optimise procedures and improve relations with users by means of ICT

solutions. Withtotal funding of almost 40 million euros, 191 judicial offices (about 30 percent

of the total) were invited to participate in the programme, and activities commenced in 2009.

As the judicial sector had always been exempt from previous reforms targeting public

administration and therefore lagged far behind most of the Italian public sector, BPJO

represented a major opportunity. However, the first evaluation reports were discouraging,

as about 70 per cent of the participating offices delivered insufficient or deficient outputs

(see www.risorseperlagiustizia.it; Vecchi, 2013a, b; Xilo, 2014). The heterogeneity of results

owed in part to weak national coordination, as a political crisis severely undermined the

national steering bodies just one year after the programme commenced, leaving regional

governments and local judicial offices with no overarching guidance. In addition, because

BPJO was structured as a national framework that provided resources and set general goals

(such as improved use of ICT or enhanced communication with the public), it was left to

individual offices to define and implement projects congruent with that frame. For a sector

with no experience of driving managerial innovation, weaknesses of coordination at

national level may have proved particularly harmful.

Against a background of widespread failure, the LCM case is a clear outlier, even when

compared to good performers. In fact, Milan achieved almost double the average number of

interventions and led the way in experimenting with new tools and procedures. Unlike most

other offices, Milan implemented projects across a wide range of organisational areas,

entailing a profound reorganisation of internal working arrangements such as the

distinction between back-office and front-office processes, along with the adoption of a

567

Process tracing

change

management