Public Administration is Political: Highlights from the IIPP Forum 2024
This blog follows up on the event ‘Public Sector Capacities for Transformative Public Policies,’ a panel from the IIPP Forum 2024. You can watch the recording of the event above.
As we face the need to fight multiple crises and tackle long-term societal challenges such as the climate emergency, state-led structural change has returned to the centre of the debate. Green industrial policy is rising, after decades of the state retrieving from giving a direction to industrial, technological, and economic innovation.
But, are our institutions equipped for the challenges of the 21st century?
From digital transformation to state capacity building, the Public Sector Capacities panel brought together thought leaders to delve into the political nature of public administration and the urgent need for a new approach to public innovation.
The discussion was moderated by Rainer Kattel, Deputy Director and Professor of Innovation and Public Governance at the UCL Institute for Innovation and Public Purpose (IIPP).
The Digitization Dilemmas
During the COVID crisis, countries worldwide had to accelerate their digitization processes to guarantee basic service delivery. For countries in the Global South, public digital transformation is not just a necessity but also an opportunity to leapfrog and bridge the gaps in government capacity.
However, the opposite can also become true. Highlighting the digital transformation gap, Busani Ngcaweni, Principal of the National School of Government of South Africa, stated: “There are instances where those who must make decisions are left behind as the conversation on digital transformation remains primarily a conversation among experts found in universities and consulting organizations”.
In a world that’s evolving so rapidly, the question of how these technological developments might reduce or increase gaps between and within countries is yet to be defined.
A second challenge many countries face is the one of political instability. With far-right movements rising worldwide, and sometimes making it to government, strengthening state capacity becomes a significant struggle. “In many states where the institutions were dismantled, it’s hard to redo some works that took ages to build”, Francisco Gaetani said. Chico, as everyone in the Brazilian government calls him, is the Extraordinary Secretary for State Transformation.
Chico also pointed out a new challenge public servants face that wasn’t there 20 years ago. Politicians, nowadays, want everything to be Instagrammeable. “Politicians became 100% oriented by communications. Communication comes first, and content, strategies, policies, and programs come second. The attention competition became a war”. In this context, long-term capacity-building cycles become challenging.
In this context, how can governments secure quick wins, while also building the conditions for a longer-term structural change?
Looking into the organizational routines
Considering the size of the challenges, most of the public administration discussion has focused on the broader, structural institutional frameworks. However, Rainer Kattel pointed out that “we have given much less thought to organizations that are day-to-day trying to solve problems. How do we procure? for instance. This is not an infrastructural issue. For many public organizations, this is a day-to-day issue”.
Sometimes, looking into short-term gains might be the best approach to gaining long-term innovation capabilities.
Abeer Tahlak, Director of Innovation at Mohammed Bin Rashid Centre For Government Innovation, shared her experiences with innovation labs and a hands-on approach to public sector challenges in the UAE. Here, government accelerators put together front liners, users, and decision-makers to work together to solve concrete problems, using a 100-day approach.
This methodology ensures that innovation is not just theoretical but implemented in practical, impactful ways. Addressing concrete problems -such as improving the emission of a birth certificate for a newborn- can not only improve that concrete experience but also have positive longer-term spillovers in changing organisational routines and developing dynamic capabilities.
Multi-level innovation
What are organisational routines and dynamic capabilities?
Organisational routines are the established processes and practices embedded within public services, while dynamic capabilities refer to the skills and competencies that enable public organisations to learn, adapt, and reconfigure their key resources and processes in response to an evolving strategic environment.
This approach demands to constantly look into these three levels: developing long-term, structural state capacity, constantly renewing organisational routines, and enhancing dynamic capabilities to adapt to evolving challenges.
In other words, change is the only constant. As Ms Tahlak put it: “What got us here won’t get us there”, advocating for a dynamic and proactive mindset in public administration.
Mission-oriented innovation
Some organizations innovate constantly, while others innovate very little. Typically, these efforts are aimed at fulfilling the core mission of a specific agency more effectively and efficiently: a hospital seeks to reduce diseases in a community, a school strives to improve education outcomes, and a transport department works to enhance mobility. But what happens when mission-oriented innovation starts impacting institutions beyond their core missions?
This is the question Susana Borrás, Professor at the Department of Organization at Copenhagen Business School, asked herself when researching the interaction between governance and innovation for grand societal challenges. And for that, she looked into some specific innovation cases.
One of them was the transition from disposable to reusable surgery materials in a hospital in Denmark. One small change, that seemed instrumental, triggered the need for a series of process reengineering that mobilised the whole structure. These transformations were led from the bottom up. As she put it “capacity building is in the doing, in thinking about how to mobilize alternative resources that might not seem to be there but actually are”.
A second transition case she presented in the panel was in Norway, which has been taking place for the last 25 years. In that country, around the year 2000, they set the ambitious target of becoming net zero in the carbon emissions in sea shipping.
For that, they needed to replace oil with batteries for local ferries, and hydrogen for long-distance trips. But such change is not a walk in the park. On the contrary, this demanded technical adequation, regulatory innovation and patient capital from the state that would not see a quick return on investment.
Conclusion
As Susana Borrás emphasized, state-led innovation extends beyond delivering better public services. In some instances, the state must take on entrepreneurial roles such as orchestrator, lead user, investor, or gatekeeper.
As we move forward, two main questions remain: How can our institutions adapt to fulfill these roles and drive transformative change? And what’s the direction of that innovation going to be?
