The Government of the Generalitat has recently submitted to Parliament the bill on professional public management, an initiative that constitutes a critical and determining pillar for the transformation of our Administration. It is very possible that this reform will not have the media impact of other legislative initiatives. However, its rigorous application can significantly impact the efficiency of the institutional apparatus and the real improvement of public services. The principle that inspires this reform is to establish a clear line of demarcation between political responsibility and professional management responsibility.In any consolidated democratic system, it legitimately falls to governments to determine the country's political priorities and roadmap. The president and their ministers must be able to choose their main political advisors to define the government program, interpret society's changing demands, design public policies, and allocate budgetary resources to them. This political decision-making function is not only fully legitimate but also entirely indispensable for democratic functioning.A very different question, however, is who should assume the executive direction necessary to translate these political priorities into concrete results. Leading highly complex public organizations today, administering collective economic resources, leading multidisciplinary human teams, driving digital transformation processes, or evaluating the real impact of policies requires very specific technical knowledge, experience, and managerial competencies. For this reason, a very substantial part of the current management positions in the Generalitat and its institutional public sector should cease to depend on political trust or free appointment to be filled through public, transparent, and competitive procedures. The bill foresees that future regulatory development will set the criteria for delimiting which positions correspond to political responsibility and which should be strictly reserved for professionals. It is not about depoliticizing government action, but about professionalizing the management of the Administration in a stable and permanent manner.

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: