Professional public management: the omissions of the law

For some time now, professional public management (DPP) has been part of the reform agenda. There is a lot of literature that defines it and calls for a stable legal framework that will precipitate its irreversible implementation in our country. As we know, it is about subverting a flawed operation which consists of high-ranking public officials being replaced every time the political color of the Government changes. We need a regulation of the managerial function that will rehabilitate the damaged integrity of public institutions, and that will ensure that public management can only be entrusted to the most suitable, talented, and independent people. Well, as if the world were ending, in the last Government meeting, before putting on slippers and with Parliament on vacation, the bill for the DPP of the Administration of the Generalitat de Catalunya and its public sector was approved. And the norm invites more than one objection, although for reasons of space I will focus on what, in my opinion, might make everything end up as a failed exercise.The absurdity lies in the scope of positions affected by the regulation. Neglecting the condition of national government and acting as a mere manager of another autonomous community, the Government has approved a regulation applicable only to the Generalitat, its management centers, and public sector entities. That is to say, it refrains from extending the implementation of the DPP to all Catalan administrations, to management positions, executive directorates, and similar roles in local government and public universities, where for some time a legal framework has been needed to provide coverage and legal certainty for its deployment. This omission allows for the proliferation of haphazard experiments, such as the one recently carried out by the Barcelona City Council, and perpetuates a regulatory vacuum that can be corrected by the State, whenever it wishes, by issuing supplementary regulations. Apart from this, the regulation does include a segment that should not be covered, because it also affects more than 400 deputy directorates general, intermediate managers in the administrative hierarchy who are limited to executing predetermined functions. That is to say, they are positions that do not present the attributes of the DPP. And this distorts the form of this organizational figure. In fact, this project is not innovative, but rather emulates another of identical scope that the government of Artur Mas approved in 2015, in an initiative that was left without effect because it was launched a few days before calling elections, a trick to make people believe that it was thus fulfilling the commitments made. In both cases, the absence of ambition and courage is palpable. Without the omissions of this law, the legislative map relating to the DPP would have been simplified and not only a limited reform, but also a global transformation of our public affairs would have been favored. Instead, regulatory inflation is fueled by a law that, as it has been done, is perfectly avoidable, because due to its limited scope it could have been part of the legislative initiative that the Government is also finalizing on the organization of its administration and public sector. It is a text deliberately stingy when it comes to setting the regulation reserved for the law, only nine articles, which will allow any government to modify substantial aspects of the DPP at will, making its institutionalization impossible.It is good to promote laws that seek to achieve the objective they pursue. Toxic political practices that serve to assign strategic responsibilities to unlearned, clumsy, mediocre profiles with blind obedience to the governing party that appoints them must be eradicated, and the recruitment of the most suitable, expert, and independent individuals must be guaranteed, so that they exercise a leadership role that should be extended beyond the cycle of political mandates, when good practice so warrants. And in this regard, it is revealing to know that today there are measures to facilitate the recruitment of these profiles. I am referring to the possibility of making public, open to everyone, and competitive calls to attract talented profiles and facilitate the identification of the most capable candidates to occupy leadership positions. If the Government had used them, it would have sent an unequivocal message about its firm conviction and will to banish the pathologies described above. Instead, at the time this article is published, and just when we are at the midpoint of its mandate, the Government that wants to promote DPP has appointed 151 senior officials in the administration by hand, at its discretion and arbitrarily, 84%; it maintains 28 from the previous legislature, and it is difficult to know the degree of rotation of the 205 directors in the linked public sector. Quite a declaration of intent. In England, governments change, but senior officials always remain.