Public Leadership: From Bureaucratic Managerialism to Place-Based Thinking—International Insights for Italian Public Administration

This chapter explores the topic of public leadership within international scholarship in the field of public administration. Four perspectives on studies of public leadership are depicted: leadership for public value and in collaborative governance; decentralized and collective leadership; crises leadership; and administrative leadership. The third section discusses how Italian public administration systems seem to be mainly characterized by the third and fourth approaches to public leadership, enacted primarily through a logic of bureaucratic managerialism. Moreover, it problematizes multi-level governance relations, describing them as characterized by apparent decentralization, which is, however, intertwined with stronger centralization patterns. In the last section, this chapter argues the need to adopt place-based thinking to better understand the role and potential of public leadership, as contemporary and complex challenges require more collective and collaborative approaches.