Policy Design and Institutional Resistance to Reform: The Case of Institutional Governance Reform in Italian Universities

Abstract This paper examines the implementation of a New Public Management reform aimed at reshaping the internal governance of Italian public universities. It applies a policy design framework to analyse how the reform (Law 240/2010) interacted with the organisational characteristics and the responses of universities during implementation. While the reform sought transform universities into corporate actors, the nature of the policy design allowed universities wide discretion in its implementation. Consequently, many institutions maintained traditional decision-making structures, leading to an imbalance in the distribution of authority and persistent internal fragmentation. The findings show that the incoherent design of the reform allowed for a variety of organisational responses beyond compliance, as selective coupling and manipulation. The study concludes that governance reforms in higher education can be effective only when policy goals are matched with clear, non-discretionary instruments, and when the design anticipates the historical resilient nature universities.