Guidance Policies Reform in Italy and Users with Migratory Background: Teacher and PES Centres’ Operators As Street - Level Bureaucrats

As part of the Recovery Plan guidance policies have become one of the main tools to follow the objective of “making European economies and societies more sustainable, resilient and better prepared for the challenges and opportunities of the ecological and digital transitions”.

For Italy, indications on guidance reform have been provided for education and active labour policies: however, the policy implementation chain produced general governmental guidelines at local government that street-level bureaucrats have taken on definitive - or renewed one - relevance in policy making.

Both the policy implementation literature and the literature on street-level bureaucracies or street-level organizations have already convincingly argued that policy implementation is part of the policymaking process (Hupe, Buffat 2015) and that SLBs themselves are policy makers (Lipsky 2010).

The subject of this study is therefore the agency of frontline workers - Teachers and PES Centres’ operators - to guide users with migratory background: students to post school transition and unemployed to workfare path.

Moreover, the frontline workers also under our spotlight need to use platforms for the users’ assessment to standardize practices and procedures for the provision of public services (Busch etal. 2018).

To analyse the actual use of the standardised assessment tool by new civil servants to guidance, we conducted ethnographic observations in three PES Centres and in three schools in the Campania Region during the winter, spring and summer of 2024[1].

If equal access to public services is a foundational element of democratic societies (Bell & Jilke 2024), by exploring how SLBs interact with platforms and users, we conclude that SLBs exercise discretion through various strategies even just to allow equity both access and treatment otherwise denied by conditions of limbo due to bureaucratic and administrative systems.

[1] This research is based on PRIN Project Almadia and PhD Program in Social Sciences