Minister Bonisoli: soon we will start talking about the reform of MiBAC

At a press conference with journalists from the foreign press, Minister of Cultural Heritage Alberto Bonisoli touched on the issue of MiBAC reform, one of the main planks of the program of the 5 Star Movement (the minister’s party) during the election campaign. Bonisoli anticipated that a discussion on possible reform is underway: “it seems obvious to me,” he explained, “that there are criticalities in the current organization of the ministry.” One of these critical issues “is due to the quantity and quality of personnel,” the minister continued. “There are some roles that are difficult to find: for example, the ministry is historically deficient in skills that have to do with administration or IT, and also trivially as a number because I have several situations throughout Italy where you can’t open in a complete way, in a total way, a museum, a library, or a garden because there is not the sufficient number of staff to allow it. That is one aspect, and that is the reason why in the budget we have been very careful about hiring. There is another aspect, however, that we cannot deny and that is related to the functioning from the machine, and this is irrespective of the number of people or the resources we put inside this machine.”

The minister went on to explain how he intends to proceed, “once we had awareness and knew how many resources we could discuss, and having shared a number of actions within the organization, we would begin to put our hands on the organization of the ministry itself, and that is what we are doing right now. We have set up a very small group of people with whom we are beginning to do a challenge, so to evaluate even from an external, almost disenchanted point of view, how the ministry is functioning, we are focusing obviously on the most important mechanisms and junctures (the role of the superintendencies, the articulation of the superintendencies, how many superintendencies there should be on a certain territory) and based on that we will make decisions that we will begin to make explicit in a few weeks.”

On why nothing has been done yet and the “operational” phase has been postponed to “in a few weeks,” Bonisoli explained that “unlike what has been done previously, I think and believe that in order to have an effective reform, this reform must be discussed, and we must then seek confrontation with those who will have to live this reform within the organization. This is the reason why last year we actually met with the regional secretaries, superintendents, directors of major museums, museum directors, archivists, librarians: we heard the different sensitivities, we already have a list of things that are not working and could be put right, we are finding a synthesis and this synthesis will be the advancement, the overcoming, a new phase of an organizational development that I think is physiological in all complex organizations like the ministry.”

Pictured: minister Alberto Bonisoli

Minister Bonisoli: soon we will start talking about the reform of MiBAC

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