Public administration and governance

Resumen

Without a doubt, the advances of western capitalist societies that we saw during the past decades in several areas of development were astonishing. Evidence of this is everything that has happened in terms of speed and scale in technology, communications and scientific research, just to mention some advances. However, the problems and challenges that these very same societies face in the present and the near future also have an unprecedented scale. One concern shared by all of us who work in the field of administration and public policy is that governments, and their public administrations, have not transformed with the necessary speed and depth to face these difficult challenges. The considerations I share with you in this document all point in the same direction: how to improve the performance of governments through their public administrations in order to face the present problems and future challenges, and to offer better solutions to the increasingly large, complex and diverse demands made by citizens. All of these considerations come from one basic premise: public administration must be understood, used and systematically improved as a key resource for governance. The central proposal for this promise to be fulfilled is that public administration becomes the best resource for governance. This would effectively translate into the handling of the economic and social aspects of the development of societies through policies developed in the realm of the public sector or through those that privilege the participation of one or more sectors of society (L. F. Aguilar, 2017). Under both assumptions, public administration is a mechanism that is very difficult to do without, together, in an indissoluble way, with the active, reactive –and even negative– role of public servants. In a considerable amount of specialized literature, this role seems to be limited in public policy to the stage of implementation, which we know to be crucial –as we have confirmed through empirical studies. But once governance is linked to public administration in a virtuous manner, the participation of public servants also appears at the design –and even evaluation – stage of policies. Public administration is key for governance in at least two different ways: first, because it favors good quality public policies; i.e., in order for public policies to be of good quality, they must be based on the agreement that they are not created in a vacuum, but taking contextual aspects into account as well as the existing historical and institutional arrangements in which public administration operates. Second, citizens receive collective benefits as the result of legitimate administrative processes over which they can demand accountability. (R. Ackerman, 2016, 1).