The Adventures and Misadventures of Participation in Administrative Proceedings in the Light of the Italian Experience

Administrative procedures are very numerous and much varied. They follow different rules and the risk in studying administrative procedures is to see the trees while missing the forest. The role of participation is a good proxy to understand how differently administrative procedures may be designed. Participation in administrative proceedings has a long history in Italy. Therefore, it has changed its function a number of times or – more to the point – the involvement of private and other parties has come to answer to different needs, so that we might well talk of ‘participations’ in plural.