| Giulia Valenti | |
| Doctorante à l’Université Roma Tre | |
| Dans la lutte contre la pandémie, le gouvernement italien a adopté de fortes mesures de simplification du système de passation des marchés, dans l’espoir d’éviter le blocage du pays. Ces mesures ont simplifié la procédure des appels d’offre publics en éliminant les contrôles et les publications. Pourtant, ils ont mis en évidence un arbitrage entre transparence et simplification qui a nui à la possibilité d’un contrôle démocratique sur l’action publique. L’e-procurement 2.0 pourrait permettre de s’affranchir de cet arbitrage. | In the fight against the pandemics, the Italian Government adopted strong simplification measures of the procurement system, in the hope of avoiding the stalling of the country. These measures simplified the procedure for public tenders by eliminating controls and publication disclosures. Yet they brought out a trade-off between transparency and simplification that damaged the possibility of democratic control over public action. E-procurement 2.0 could make it possible to overcome this trade-off. |
| The outbreak of the pandemic caught the Italian administration off guard, highlighting the weakness of the health system and of the entire universe of public procurement. The Government introduced several reforms aimed at addressing the emergency, providing a series of urgent and temporary measures.
After two years of state of emergency, the constant uncertainty regarding the evolution of the pandemic has led the Government to provide several extraordinary measures, whose effectiveness has been extended over time. The Government promulgated many law decrees (almost all subsequently converted into laws by the Parliament) enacting exceptions or suspensions of some of the rules set out in the Procurement Code. These had the common goal of simplifying and streamlining public procedures in order to avoid the block of the public procurement system and therefore allow the immediate supply of services and materials necessary to fight the pandemic. The Italian Government chose to achieve these objectives by relying strongly on simplification and urgent legislation which, however, occurred to the detriment of transparency and security. |
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| The weakening of disclosure requirements within tender procedures, and the use of emergency procedures, aimed at reducing bureaucracy and procedural delays, constitute a strong obstacle to transparency as a principle of democracy, not allowing full inferability of the procedures and preventing widespread control by civil society. |
L’avis du Comité scientifique Dans son article, Giulia Valenti encadre la question démocratique par rapport à l’administration publique en termes de transparence, en donnant une double contribution au niveau de l’analyse conceptuelle et des propositions concrètes en matière de e-procurement. Au niveau conceptuel, la spécificité de la notion de transparence est bien mise en lumière par rapport à d’autres notions qui lui sont proches ou souvent assimilées, comme celles de accessibilité, de responsabilité, etc. En analysant les reformes plus récentes adoptées en Italie, notamment pendant la pandémie, elle nous indique les effets positives qui peuvent dériver d’une renforcement de cette dimension. Simone BENVENUTI Professore associato en Droit public comparé – Université Roma Tre, Dipartimento di Giurisprudenza |
| The emergency legislation showed a massive trade-off between transparency and simplification: while transparency, as openness and inferability, increases bureaucracy, and thus slows down public administration, simplification speeds up public action removing controls and publication disclosures. However, the relationship between these two principles is not necessarily one of contradiction or conflict. Transparency and simplification can be reconciled through e-procurement and new ITC technologies, which would allow access to a multitude of large-scale data (big data) already indexed, or processed, thus allowing both a transparent and effective and fast administration, since many of the bureaucratic steps in the tender procedures can be carried out directly by the software.
In this sense, the drive towards computerization 2.0 pushed for by the recovery plan can be seen as a decisive solution.
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