Does a strategy enhance inter-institutional performance? Rational and emergent logics in the Italian Recovery and Resilience Plan

Abstract

This article examines how a broad and overarching strategic framework influences the performance management of inter-institutional collaboration, contributing to the debate on rational and emergent approaches to strategy and the boundary object literature in public sector settings. The article conducts an embedded qualitative case study of the Italian National Recovery and Resilience Plan (NRRP), based on 23 semi-structured interviews with representatives of 20 public organizations involved at different governance levels. The case reveals a mechanism of cascading rationalization whereby supranational results-based conditionality is translated into domestic compliance-oriented financial control, progressively displacing the deliberately emergent character of the umbrella strategy. This cascade produces a double exclusion of peripheral actors and constrains the strategy's capacity to function as a boundary object, as financial accountability crowds out outcome accountability across governance levels. The article introduces three theoretically grounded propositions and a systematic five-criteria assessment of boundary object functionality, specifying the conditions under which shared indicator systems fail to activate inter-institutional collaboration in multi-level public programs. The findings contribute simultaneously to the rational versus emergent strategy debate, the boundary object literature and the study of inter-institutional performance management.