Bridging spending review and change management in Italian public administrations

In recent years, Italy launched a spending review process to pursue budgetary retrenchments through expenditure cutbacks at the central, regional, and local level. This paper tries to interpret a diverse set of spending review initiatives realized in Italy during the last three years as part of an extensive program of organizational development, through the framework of organizational change. In particular, the main goal of this work is to understand the spending review processes in terms of the levels of decision-making, sense making and learning changes developed by the public organizations analysed. The case studied show an incremental and pluralistic approach to organizational change, involving multiple mental models and actors that is useful to solve wicked problems