Conflicts and disputes between Public Administrations

Abstract

The study of conflicts between administrations, although it had been dragged out for a long time, has recently returned to be investigated by scholarship. Due to various factors, the emergence of conflicts has, in fact, become a visible and explosive phenomenon: institutional pluralism, the fragmentation of administrative functions, territorial disarticulation, and the enlargement of the area of supervision all combine to generate new and continuous conflicts between Administrations with respect to the interests entrusted to them. In some cases, the administrative system, both at state and regional level, provides Administrations with specific instruments ('conflict procedures'), which allow the parties to resolve conflicts between public interests ('administrative conflicts'). When this is not the case, the lack of such instruments leads to a de facto 'flight' of Administrations to the constitutional and administrative process. For many reasons, examined in the study, however, the constitutional conflict of attribution has, in recent years, lost its attractiveness, so much so that the Administrations have turned overwhelmingly to the administrative judge, pouring a large amount of litigation onto the latter. Administrations do not only take legal action to protect their own functions, but also supra-individual interests with repercussions on the entire system of administrative justice and the legal system. The study ultimately aims to show that judicial resolution of conflicts between administrations is not always able to resolve them but, on the contrary, risks making them a cyclical and stagnating phenomenon.