Most contemporary citizens feel that we are at a crossroads, at a time of paradigm shift at all levels: climate, environmental, public health, technological, economic, social and political. We live in the most absolute uncertainty, between fearful and expectant. Since the Second World War of the last century, most advanced societies have settled into a context of incremental growth of well-being in all its dimensions. With the beginning of the current century, this feeling has evaporated and the conviction has spread socially that everything is getting worse and that the major economic, social and institutional anchors are in decline. Some philosophers and economists claim that the combination of weak democracies, misguided capitalism and artificial intelligence is a dangerous mix. They are absolutely right, although they forget that institutions are also present and very relevant in this formula. If to this situation of uncertainty and even anxiety we add increasingly weak and poorer quality public institutions, we close an infernal circle from which it is very difficult to escape.
Public institutions are increasingly weak because of the anaemia of democratic systems that fail to ensure the well-being of citizens and flirt with demagogic political tendencies and perverse populist narratives. But public institutions are also weak due to the exhaustion and lack of modernisation of public administrations in the provision of services and security to citizens. Currently, the effectiveness of public management is highly questioned socially. This negative feeling has been brewing for some time, and the Covid-19 crisis was a turning point, perhaps a point of no return, in this disappointment with the way our public administrations operate. A part of the public feels abandoned by the administrations and is tense and belligerent in their attitudes. They consider, rightly or wrongly, that public administrations are outdated, that they are self-absorbed and that they lack the skills and motivation to be able to face new challenges. Citizens cannot help but compare, albeit inconsistently, how benchmark companies such as Google, Amazon or Inditex function and renew themselves with sclerotic administrations with autistic tendencies.
The academic literature in public management is also concerned about the misalignment between a complex and turbulent environment and public administrations designed to basically manage certainty. Public administrations with mechanical designs that will be unable to absorb the socio-economic and technological complexity of the present and the future.
It is part of the administrative tradition that public managers complain that in order to achieve their objectives they have to face an almost impenetrable bureaucratic wall. They have to abandon their functions as managers to spend precious time fighting, with little success, against these obstacles. Although this argument is sometimes used as an imposture as an excuse, it is true that public management is weighed down by obsolete and socially incomprehensible inertia and dynamics. In most cases, the impenetrable wall has little to do with the bureaucratic model, but rather with behaviours rooted in a feudal culture in which zeal for the defence of obsolete administrative jurisdictions and different and also antiquated professional roles predominates. Corporate logics in the worst sense of the term are deeply rooted, and between one and the other we build the odious bureaucratic wall. It is a paradox to observe a public employee who complains about the bureaucratic wall and who, at the same time, is enthusiastically reinforcing it. The proposed new organisational model aims to tear down this wall, or at least to make it much more porous and permeable.
In this environment of social, administrative and academic depression, a new paradigm called robust governance has timidly emerged in an attempt to respond to these challenges. We believe that it is right that public management models should bring together dynamics of stability and, in particular, dynamics of change and transformation. It is unavoidable to introduce in public management tensors or motors of renewal and transformation by increasing organisational learning capacities. The new model of robust governance is still in its infancy: its theoretical foundations are convincing, but its normative approaches are still too generic and even confusing.
Those of us in public management must always place at the forefront of our academic and professional work the sentence “those who have nothing have only the public administration”. We cannot fail society and, in particular, its most vulnerable. For example, it is unacceptable, in the case of Spain, that the government promotes certain public policies to contribute, according to its criteria, to social welfare and the targeted citizens cannot benefit from them due to the collapse of public administrations. This is what is happening now with the procedures to enter the Minimum Vital Income programme or with the procedures to be able to receive a retirement pension. These are the hot public services now, but in the past it was the processing of identity documents, aid to companies during the pandemic, large family certificates, etc., and in a while it will be other services that will be in the doldrums. In the event of any unforeseen crisis, the collapse of the administrative areas concerned is, unfortunately, a foregone conclusion. For these and other reasons it is now more necessary than ever to rethink the model of public organisation and management.