Hybrid reality and public administration: how operators negotiate the ecosystem of a 'Digital PA' in small italian municipalities

This study aims to analyse the effects of digitalisation in the Italian public administration (PA) using a socio‑technical systems perspective to investigate the current hybrid environment in which physical and digital spheres converge. Specifically, the work examines how operators and digital tools interact and mould each other under the bureaucratic structure of “PA as a platform”. The theoretical frame, grounded in a neo-Weberian, STS-informed perspective, conceptualises platformisation and the “big-data cage” as contemporary rationalisations that redistribute discretion across humans and artefacts. The sociomaterial lens accordingly enables a reading of software, rules, and routines as co-constitutive elements of organisational action rather than external tools. The case study is located in the Italian National Plan for Recovery and Resilience (PNRR), which allocates funding for a “Digital PA” to small municipalities within the Municipalities Union of Valconca and Valmarecchia in the Province of Rimini. Drawing on a desk analysis and the mixed-methods approach, the results indicate that the PNRR has operated as a powerful sociotechnical lever for reorganising local administrations around interoperable, auditable workflows. Yet the conversion of funds and templates into durable practice depends on institutional histories and meso-level arrangements through which instruments are procured, configured, and maintained. A comparative Dutch case is then examined to make legible, and therefore more governable, the sites where normative lag emerges, and where it can be addressed through methodological guidance and ongoing support. In conclusion, the PNRR’s top-down, efficiency-oriented impetus can be translated into a situated, accountable, and durable transformation in local PAs only when and where meso-level orchestration is present, instruments are co-configured by PA operators as enabling bureaucratic arrangements, and learning is treated as infrastructural work at the interface between social and technical actors.