Why changing everything in government is a bad idea

By Sandra Naranjo Bautista

The only constant in our life is change. But when it comes to government, radical change can be damaging.

It’s an electoral year for Latin America. 9 countries hold elections this year, including 5 Presidential Elections in Chile, Ecuador, Honduras, Nicaragua and Peru. If you have experienced a change in government, you know it can be a challenging period for public servants that are caught in the middle. This is a short reflection about government transition and long-term planning.

If you’re wondering, “How does this relate to me?” Well, civil servants are the guardians of the State’s institutions and play a fundamental role, particularly in transitions and radical change in government.

The cost of lacking a long-term view

Latin America’s capacity for long-term planning has been weak. While we continue talking about “the Latin American decade”, Asia is thinking about how to reach the maximum potential of “the Asian century”.

As an example, Latin America’s long-term vision and strategy are for 2030, while Asia’s are for 2050. Perhaps more illustrative, the pessimistic scenario for Asia is to follow Latin America’s lackluster growth path of the past 30 years (sometimes referred to as the “middle-income trap”). The contrast in vision and ambition of the two regions has likely played some part in the great differences in productivity and growth they’ve experienced in recent decades.

While there has been some progress  in establishing long-term visions in Latin America, the quality of the planning process is still weak. There is still no public institutional capacity to generate long-term plans. In most countries, there is also a disconnect between medium- and short-term plans. According to CEPAL only a third of Latin American countries have a long-term planning document and only Uruguay has one that stretches out to 2050 (Table below).

According to the IADB, even for those countries that have a long-term plan, there is no guarantee of continuity from one government to the next and there are no mechanisms to fund projects beyond a single government term.

State policies vs. government policies

A long-term view is an intangible asset for a country. It establishes the vision of the nation, regardless of the government in power. It summarizes the goal towards which the country is heading. State policies go beyond a government. Mechanisms like the Sustainable Development Goals aim to provide a minimum agreement of what development looks like worldwide.

Government policies have a medium-term horizon tied to the length of the governing party’s mandate. If there was a long-term national vision, the government policies should explain how a particular government wants to achieve those long-term goals. In a democracy, when people vote for a government they’re also voting for a particular plan of development for the country.

The problem in Latin America is that policies aren’t longer than a government’s term, while development challenges are. The complications are exacerbated with weak institutional arrangements where the need to ‘break with the past’ can also mean breaking any past progress and making a change in government that undoes relevant processes.

Extending the planning horizon requires pragmatism and setting to one side an ideology in favor of a better future for the country and its citizens. It’s a pact for the country, where public and private sectors align, with contributions from academia, non-government organizations and citizens.

Civil servants, the heart and soul of public institutions, can contribute

Civil servants are the heart and soul of public institutions. In a recent blog, Lea Giménez talked about how solid institutions are the cornerstone of public policy. At the core of any institution are committed civil servants that can do a lot, even when the odds seem against them. People like you.  

The majority of civil servants consider themselves as politically neutral professionals, able to serve any government regardless of the alignment with their personal preferences. Plus, their time horizon is generally longer.  However, government changes bring the temptation to change everything, as a way to influence policy in the bureaucracy. Which only weakens the institutions even more.

A tiny step to help preserve the institutional memory of an organization

While it’s impossible to control how a new government will handle its rupture with the past, either by moving forward or breaking everything apart, there is a concrete action you could take today. It won’t fix the institutional challenges but it could help create a snowball effect of positive change.

Civil servants are the institutional memory of an organization. When a person leaves, the story leaves with them. You have more in your power than you realize. In fact, for countries with weak institutional capacity that might be the only way to use the lessons from past policies to move forward.  

Let’s record that memory!

Think of one important issue in your department. Start by writing a summary of what’s the problem at stake and why it matters. Try to list the actions that have been taken to address that issue, when were they taken, what were the underlying motivations and assumptions and what’s the current state. If it worked, what impacted the success; if it didn’t, what could’ve been done better, faster. For topics you’ve been working on, make sure to include your ideas and proposals of improvement. Ideally, this could be one or two pages with the main information.

Now imagine for a moment… If you did that, and so did everyone in your department. And then it was compiled by the head of the department, and so on. It might be a way to have a living file of the main issues of the organization. It would be hard to reject something as valuable as that if you were the new head of that organization.

I know that having such a document won’t guarantee it’ll be used, at least it helps to preserve the memory of the institution. One day it might just come in handy. Do your part!

Making progress one step at a time

Unfortunately, Latin America has lived the consequences of the lack of long-term planning. The prevalence of government policies instead of state policies, which persist regardless of the ideology of the government in power. Achieving such a vision requires non-ideological pragmatism in favour of the greater good. The transition to state policies won’t happen overnight. However, civil servants, as the heart and soul of public institutions, can take a tiny step today towards that transition. Try documenting the most important issue of your department in the hope it will help transfer policies from one government to the next. 

Photo by Bud Helisson on Unsplash