Institutional improvements behind the backs of the citizens

For almost 15 years, we have been promoting improvements in the institutional quality of our public administrations with the aim of achieving greater engagement with citizens and, therefore, greater social legitimacy. This involves a set of organizational reforms such as transparency, accountability, open government, integrity and the fight against corruption, and internal systems of complianceetc. All of this was deployed judiciously, since these elements of institutional quality represented the perennial challenge for national administrations compared to those of the most advanced and mature democratic countries. Moving from rhetoric to practice has not been easy, and administrations have had to invest an extraordinary amount of resources to implement these strategies. The result of all this has generated two paradoxes. The first: surprisingly, ordinary citizens have greeted all these changes with complete indifference. The second: the organizational efforts to meet these new demands have been detrimental to the quality of public services, and currently, the social legitimacy of public administrations is surely at its lowest point in the last four decades. In short: we have promoted instruments to enjoy greater social support, and the result has been just the opposite. We offer some reflections on what has happened in recent years:

We have implemented A model of Good Governance, presented in a disorganized, complex, and confusing way, has stifled public administration. At a time when we wanted to streamline internal bureaucratic processes, we have incorporated new requirements that, hastily designed, have given rise to a Bureaucracy 4.0. Between the inefficient traditional bureaucracy, which has not yet been eradicated, and the new bureaucracy, public administration is more concerned than ever with its own internal workings and leaves citizens exposed and vulnerable.

The essence of public management It lies in the effectiveness of public services, without forgetting (it always tends to be forgotten) to guarantee legal certainty in the regulatory activity of the Administration (licenses, authorizations, and discipline in different sectors), which is what facilitates economic growth and collective well-being. What good is being transparent and providing open data if citizens find themselves immersed in increasingly slow procedures that are even inaccessible to some people? Organic reforms aimed at improving the institutional quality of public administrations cannot follow a zero-sum logic that is detrimental to the quality of public services.

We have implemented An open and honest administration (to simplify labels) with extraordinary administrative exuberance (many parallel initiatives and channels and various bodies responsible for them) that has generated unbearable internal costs and many questions about its efficiency.

In the same way While we have been hyperactive in promoting internal levers to support an open and honest administration, we have been stingy in providing citizens with access to these new developments (for example, barriers to accessing certain information).

These barriers Only a few actors, such as the media, a handful of scientific research teams, and individuals with malicious intent, tend to overcome these obstacles. Often, these "citizens" are public employees, frustrated by various internal conflicts, who exploit these channels to put not only the political team but the entire institution in a difficult position. This leads to a new administrative perplexity: public employees dedicating enormous resources to responding to other public employees disguised as citizens seemingly concerned about the integrity of the system. Recently, a new phenomenon has been detected: the use of these channels by retired public employees who, for various reasons (dissatisfaction with their pensions, historical grievances, corporate or political disputes, etc.), can overwhelm them.

Besides, internal integrity and safety channels complianceThese mechanisms, which are absolutely essential for the hygiene of the organization, are often overused by troublesome employees who transform their job dissatisfaction into serious complaints that cause headaches for internal processors.

All this We must add external oversight institutions such as Anti-Fraud Offices, which have generated high expectations among whistleblowers, but too often have refrained from delving deeper into corruption, arguing that the judicial system already exists for that purpose. Many complaints have been received for trivial matters, at best, and, at worst, for nonexistent infractions. If these complaints are processed rigorously and according to the demands of good performance, they end up creating situations of pressure for managers and public employees. The perverse effect of whistleblowing systems is that they carry significant risks in both the public and private sectors, and they must be addressed with protective mechanisms, also for those affected. Whistleblowers are still waiting for a good system of effective oversight and protection.

It is obvious that the principles of open and honest administration must be upheld, but they should also be streamlined and rationalized to prevent citizens from being neglected in their most basic needs because public employees are bogged down in bureaucratic procedures that have no relation to the public interest or good governance. To claim that more bureaucracy is necessary to ensure good governance, as the current director of the Anti-Fraud Office of Catalonia has argued, is to move in the opposite direction of efficiency. Public honesty begins with how we operate.