Anticorruption policies and risk management practices: the way to cope with the demands of Reforms

Recently public organizations have all been invaded by ideas about risk and its management. However, apart from the regulatory initiatives and some effort to implement a Risk Management (RM) framework, little has been done to establish an overall internal public sector control system on RM basis. Moreover, although risk awareness is growing¸ RM activities continue to lack a systematic approach showing the public organizations’ weaknesses in implementing RM in day-to-day practice. It is in this spirit that both the Italian Reform (Law n. 190/2012) defined not only the general aims and the objectives of RM practices but also the factors, actors, steps, and tools related to the RM systems. Accordingly, we conducted a content analysis on the documents that Italian Ministries have produced in the four years after reform application. . This paper aims to shade light on RM practices in the public sector investigating the relationship among organizations dynamics, RM approaches and actors behaviors applying the new institutional theory to our specific case-study.