One of the goals of the administrative reform that the Government has promoted The goal is to ensure that citizen services reach the entire territory. Therefore, throughout this legislative term, the executive will launch eleven Citizen Service Offices (OACs) across the country. The Government has also committed to reaching the smallest municipalities and, to this end, has designed five mobile offices. "One of the objectives of the administrative reform is to make life easier for citizens," stated the Minister of the Presidency, Albert Dalmau, in remarks to the media. The Government has estimated the investment in this boost to citizen services at 13 million euros. Until now, there were three citizen service offices located in Girona (Plaza Pompeu Fabra, 1), the Terres de l'Ebre region (the office is located in Tortosa, at Plaça Gerard Vergés, 1), and Central Catalonia (based in Manresa, at Plaça de la Salt). Since the start of the legislature, the Catalan Government has opened a new information office in Tarragona (Anselm Clavé Street, 1), with eight employees; and has expanded the existing office in Barcelona's Ciutat Vella district, on Sant Honorat Street, adding three information officers and a new digital agent. This is a temporary office until the permanent one, planned for the end of 2027 at Ciutat Street, 1, is completed, which will have eighteen information officers. Looking ahead to next year, the Government plans to open one in the first quarter of 2026 in La Seu d'Urgell (Alsina Passage, 3), with three information officers; and another in Vilafranca del Penedès (Vall del Castell Square, 2), which will have fifteen information officers and is expected to be ready in the fourth quarter of 2026. In Puigcerdà (Pic d'Eina Street, 2), which will have two information officers and will open during the fourth quarter of next year; and in Barcelona, ​​in the Eixample district, where a temporary office (on Gran Via) will be operational during the first quarter of 2026. This office will have twelve information officers and will operate until the permanent office opens in the Torre Muñoz building, scheduled for the first quarter of 2031, with 25 information officers. The Catalan Government also plans to open another office in Tremp in 2027. This temporary office, located at Sant Jordi Street, 2, will have four information officers and will provide temporary service until the permanent office opens at the end of 2029. The permanent office will be located at Passeig Pompeu Fabra, 19, and will have [number of information officers]. In two years, an office is also planned for Lleida (34 Pere Cabrera Street), which will have 25 information officers. With the deployment of these new Citizen Service Offices (OACs), Catalonia will have eleven distributed throughout all the Catalan vegueries (administrative districts) and will reinforce its staff by 162 employees. All of this will represent an investment of 10.5 million euros. Dalmau emphasized that all these offices will be "integrated," meaning they will operate as a one-stop shop where all procedures can be carried out in a single location without a mandatory appointment. "The goal is to prevent citizens from having to travel from department to department or from having to ask them for information that the administration already has," the minister argued. Mobile offices

The Government will complement these eleven new offices with five mobile units, which it expects to begin operating in the second quarter of next year. These vehicles will travel between 80 municipalities to serve areas without permanent citizen service offices. The vehicles will be equipped with "advanced technology and specialized staff," the Government states, to meet the needs of these more rural and less connected areas. In total, the Government will invest approximately €2.43 million between 2026 and 2027. A mobile office pilot program has already been underway, visiting some thirty municipalities in the Terres de l'Ebre region since June of last year. According to Dalmau, the goal is to guarantee "territorial cohesion," so that anyone needing to carry out a procedure doesn't have to travel to Barcelona. These mobile offices will offer information on services and procedures, support for completing paperwork, and access to a video consultation service with specialized staff.

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We face increasingly complex collective problems of all kinds, with overlapping and intertwined issues. It often happens that the public administrations responsible for responding have a division of powers and levels of government that frequently makes it difficult to know who is responsible for what. But if, in addition, the most relevant administration in Catalonia uses different maps and territorial divisions in each department, the situation becomes very worrying. Indeed, the various departments of the Generalitat of Catalonia operate with territorial divisions that do not coincide. It is true that this lack of uniformity stems from the specific historical and logistical needs of each area of government (healthcare, education, etc.), but it is also true that, as the effects of changing times make things more complicated, as we mentioned, we could begin to see a situation where "people have problems, the Generalitat has departments."

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The Catalan School of Public Administration is a century-old institution: founded in 1912, it is one of the oldest in Europe. It was established by Enric Prat de la Riba and is now the leading training center for Catalan civil servants. Now, however, the government wants it to go a step further. within the framework of the public administration reform that is underway. To this end, and according to sources within the Catalan government who spoke to ARA, the executive council will officially launch the drafting of the new law for the School of Public Administration this Tuesday, with the aim of completing it by the summer of 2026 through "maximum dialogue" with the public sector, municipal entities, and parliamentary groups. This is not the first Catalan government to attempt this: Pere Aragonès's government worked on a proposal that was ultimately shelved after the break with Junts; previously, in 2017, in Article 155, it overruled the reform that the then-director of the School, Agustí Colomines, now a Junts deputy, had been working on. The law for the School of Public Administration of Catalonia is the third component of the other two reforms with which the Catalan government intends to shape the future of Catalan administration: the public employment law and the law on professional public managers. The goal is for the School to be aligned with the changes that these laws will introduce. For example, by offering a mandatory selective course after the competitive examinations, which the Government wants to make less focused on memorization and more on skills, or by increasing its role in the selection process for public managers. The new model envisioned by the executive branch aims to eliminate the appointment of high-ranking officials through patronage and establish access via public competition. The School of Public Administration would be responsible for accrediting candidates and even for their final selection—although the appointment would ultimately rest with the Government. It would also assume the mission of designing a system for the standardization and accreditation of professional skills for all public employees, research groups, and researchers.

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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:

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Reforming the administration is, as acknowledged by the Catalan government, an "enormously slow" process. That's why the PSC (Socialist Party of Catalonia) began its work shortly after taking office at the Palau de la Generalitat (Government Palace). In October 2024, he created a group of experts The Catalan Institute for Transport (Cetra), commissioned by President Salvador Illa, has studied the necessary changes to modernize and improve the efficiency of the public sector. Now, the 68 experts at Cetra have completed their work, and its president, Carles Ramió, presented Illa with a report on Monday containing 50 proposals to revitalize the administration. Their objective is to improve the quality of public services while also ensuring their viability in Catalonia, which, according to their projections, will have nine million inhabitants and an aging population by 2040. The measures range from simplifying administrative procedures to a new proposal for regulating professional public management. The final report was officially presented at an event in the Palau de la Generalitat with Illa and the Speaker of the Parliament, Josep Rull. "This isn't about deregulation, but about simplification. A mature and modern society like ours requires rules," Isla emphasized, and Rull stressed the need to legislate at a faster pace to provide society with the tools it needs to manage today's challenges. Improving the quality of regulations is a shared objective of both the Parliament and the Government, which recently removed 800 provisions from the Catalan legal system that remained despite having been repealed. The executive branch wanted to make it clear that the starting point for this reform has nothing to do with the offensive against the public sector launched by Donald Trump in the United States or Javier Milei in Argentina. In this regard, the Minister of the Presidency, Albert Dalmau, warned that the goal is for the public sector to become more efficient and effective, but not to promote the emancipation of the administration from the citizens. It is the democratically elected political representatives who must dictate the roadmap for that public power, he emphasized.

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Bad times for Catalan, also in public administrations. A judge of the administrative court of Barcelona has applied a rigorous The proportionality test regarding the requirement of a B2 level of Catalan to work as a cemetery worker in Vic is problematic, even though it is an upper-intermediate (or advanced-intermediate) level, which, according to the Common European Framework of Reference for Languages (CEFR), means that you are able to express yourself fluently in everyday and professional situations without difficulty. This is the same requirement established in the terms of the call for applications for two multi-skilled driver positions at the Catalan Parliament, which are also being challenged.

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Working in the service of society through public administration is an increasingly attractive option for many people. It allows them to carry out work that impacts the lives of citizens and contributes to collective well-being. Furthermore, it offers stable working conditions that help with family and work-life balance, allowing for a diverse and enriching professional career.

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The artificial intelligence (AI) revolution has reached the administration. The public sector has been incorporating massive data processing tools for a few years now, but the acceleration of these technologies is now opening up new horizons: for example, to catch corrupt officials, detect tax fraud, help taxpayers file their tax returns, or fine those who don't have an environmental sticker on their cars by scanning their license plate. Some of these mechanisms are already part of the daily work of the State Tax Administration Agency, Social Security, and some city councils. Others are just beginning to gain momentum. This is an issue that is gaining importance in current politics, following scandals such as the Cerdán and Montoro cases, but also Spain's failure to comply with the anti-corruption commitments demanded by the Council of Europe.

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While we were trying to breathe in the heat that kept us awake, the smoke from the fires, and the Spanish political turmoil, which has now reached the level of saunas and brothels, a piece of good news slipped through the narrow bars of news that make headlines: the administrative reform promoted by the Government will soon go to Parliament.

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Artificial intelligence is generating extraordinary expectations, particularly in those areas where we have been stuck as a society for years. One of these areas is the clear obsolescence of administration: AI will cut the Gordian knot of inefficiency and ineffectiveness and, finally, put an end to the mess of bureaucracy and the headlong rush of administrative procedures. These hopes are not unfounded. At an unprecedented speed for the administration, we are already seeing proofs of concept and pilot tests that are far more than promising and with real impacts on both satisfaction and the time required to achieve that satisfaction. Without intending to overwhelm the wine, the question that must be asked is whether these improvements are palliative—and welcome—or are truly transformative—and consequently will have a multiplier effect on the entire administration and society.

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In the May 11th edition of ARA, it was published an article by the rector of the Autonomous University of BarcelonaJavier Lafuente, under the title "A Leap Forward for the Catalan Public Sector." I fully share Mr. Lafuente's desire to reform the administration to make it more useful to citizens. However, I disagree with the method he proposes. Mr. Lafuente states that the transformation of the public sector "must pivot on three fundamental pillars: digitalization, staff technical training, and recognition of those dedicated to it." I align myself with the thesis of economist Daron Acemoglu, when he states that the prosperity of countries lies in having good institutions. Without good institutions, and public administration is a fundamental one, better financing for Catalonia or the transfer of the commuter rail network will be of little use. Consequently, we have a lot at stake in the implementation of the reform, and therefore, we must get it right.

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In times of distrust of institutions, talking about citizen participation may seem like a risky proposition. But precisely for this reason, tools that strengthen democracy and bring citizens closer to decision-making are needed more than ever. Catalonia, in this regard, has a pending issue: passing its citizen participation law. (In the area of electoral participation, it also has another: passing an electoral law of its own.)

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In football, when a referee's performance has been accurate, it is often said that it "has gone unnoticed." The aspiration of public administrations should be this: that their presence is not noticed, but that their actions adequately develop public policies and allow citizens' lives to proceed without obstacles or injustice. So simple and yet so complex at the same time.

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More than 7,000 new positions for public employees of the Generalitat (Catalan Government). Specifically, 7,886. The Catalan government approved this new call for applications for 2025 on Tuesday, which is specifically aimed at positions for security forces, fire prevention and extinguishing, healthcare, teaching, prison, and administrative staff. Of the more than 7,000 positions announced, 1,102 are for internal promotion, and 7% are reserved for people with disabilities (392).

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The brutal attack that the new Trump administration and its techno-oligarchy allies are carrying out against everything that sounds public is so exaggerated that it may seem simply bizarre to us, and as such become part of what we discuss with our work colleagues and friends when we have a moment. But the matter is much more serious, since when public spending, public servants, taxes and all the so-called institutional chiringuitos are attacked, behind it there are essential public policies and services for a large part of the population. On the other hand, it is not just another eccentricity of the new Trumpian era, but in Europe (and in Catalonia) there are many supporters of applying the same logic a public sector that is accused of wasting resources, of caring only about those who take advantage of the system and of having grown in an excessive way.

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"I hope so," said the Minister of Finance and Civil Service, María Jesús Montero, just before entering the the Spanish Parliament to defend the decree law that seeks to end temporariness in the public sector. And so it was, though with not much to spare. The agreement was promoted by the former Minister of the Civil Service, Miquel Iceta, with backing of the main unions. However, it was opposed by other minority unions who say the reform will leave many workers without jobs. The reform has been ratified in the second round - it was tied in the first vote - thanks to the votes of the coalition government parties (PSOE and Unides Podem), ERC, Compromís and other minor parties.

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