The problem of a hollowed-out requirement

Every year, Italy's municipalities draft and approve the DUP, the Documento Unico di Programmazione (Single Programming Document): the act that sets a local government's political and development objectives, and the mandatory formal precondition for its budget forecast. Taken together it is an enormous body of work, probably more than a million pages. Yet beyond resident population and basic profiling data, which information actually carries weight in investment decisions? The Strategic Section, the part meant to explain why a municipality invests in one direction rather than another, is where that potential most often goes untapped: a brief picture of the socio-economic context, a reference to public-finance constraints, and, more rarely, a structured comparison or a hierarchy of priorities built on comparable data. As we will see, this section is at its best when it can rest on a comparative method, which the law, however, does not specify.

The problem? The method is missing

Legislative Decree 118/2011 requires the Strategic Section to analyse the local government's external conditions (the public-finance context, the socio-economic situation of the area, and so on) and its internal conditions (available human resources, budget balances, and so on). On paper it is all clear. In practice, very few do it rigorously, a problem the case law of the Court of Auditors has flagged repeatedly: the DUP must be "flexible in content but rigid in principles", calibrated on the concrete reality of the local government. A DUP without data is weak, hard to defend before an auditor, and useless as a guide for investment choices.

What the regulation actually requires and what it leaves unspecified

The structure is familiar to anyone who works in a municipality. The DUP is split into two sections with different horizons: the Strategic Section (SeS), which covers the entire administrative mandate, and the Operational Section (SeO), which follows the three-year budget cycle. The SeO in turn has two parts: Part 1 sets objectives by Mission with their corresponding budget items, while Part 2 gathers sector programming, including the Three-Year Public Works Programme. Here is the crux: the law says what to analyse, external conditions and internal conditions, but not how to do it in a comparative, verifiable way. It does not indicate which sources to use, nor a method of comparison, nor a hierarchy of priorities. This space is left deliberately to the methodological responsibility of the local government. And it is precisely this space that, in most cases, remains unexplored.

The loop: how to build a needs analysis that holds up

Take a hypothetical municipality, which we will call Municipality X: 18,400 residents, an inland Apennine area. The figures are, of course, fictional. They serve only to make the method concrete.

The loop runs through five steps:

The chain is traceable from start to finish: from the contextual data to the public work.

The three benchmark levels: the distinctive feature

The real leap in quality is the three-level comparison:

• Territorial group: entities similar in size and socio-economic structure, not "all of Italy." Municipality X, when compared with its 38 similar municipalities, has a share of nursing home beds for the non-self-sufficient elderly (1.9%) that is lower than the group average (2.3%).

• National or regional average: used to understand whether the problem is local or systemic. Regarding the water network, the group (31% of the network in poor condition) is already worse than the national average (24%): it is not just a problem for Municipality X, it is an area-wide problem.

• Minimum service threshold, where it exists - EU targets, already defined LEPs, technical standards. For services for the non-self-sufficient elderly, a consolidated national LEP does not yet exist: the comparison therefore remains anchored to the first two levels.

By cross-referencing the three levels, a four-quadrant matrix is obtained: critical priority (below threshold and below group), relative gap (below group, threshold absent - Municipality X's nursing home beds), systemic national gap (in line with the group, but the group itself is lagging - the water network), and adequate. This is not just a statistical exercise: it is the basis upon which a Municipality can justify, before the Council and the Court of Auditors, why it chose one project over another.

With this method, the DUP is defensible

The typical findings of the Court of Auditors concern non-measurable objectives and three-year programs that cannot be explained based on mandate objectives. The described method addresses both: every objective has an indicator, a starting value, a target, and a citable public source; every project in the three-year program has, upstream, a measured and compared need. There is no longer any need to ask why a project is in the program: the answer is already written in the process that generated it.

The role of the Civiqa platform

Building this process from scratch, municipality by municipality, requires updated data, stable comparison groups, and parametric costs maintained over time. It is a burden that few entities can sustain every year.

Civiqa pre-builds all of this, municipality by municipality: diagnostic snapshot, territorial group, three-level benchmark, priority matrix, history of interventions, and candidate projects with parametric costs. The political decision remains with the entity. The method is ready.