Government Office: Contributions for Strengthening the Process of Governing Public Organizations

In the last decades, the Latin American countries adopted democracy as a legal and legitimate way of government. Despite this, citizenship seems hopeless in relation to politics and its ability to transform reality. This article argues that we are facing a crisis of governance capacity, as well understood as the ability to lead or direct accumulated in the person of the leader, in his government team and the organization he leads. State reform plans in past decades did not recognize the need to strengthen decision-making processes in the higher level of government. However, millions were spent in the reform of administrative procedures and systems. The well-known "second wave of reforms" which focused on results oriented management models showed up as technocratic responses to the role of senior management in government. Little or nonexistent investment was aimed at improving the areas of decision-making of the leaders. This paper proposes a strategy to face the governance capacity crisis in Latin America through two components: 1) to strengthen the training processes in government management for political leaders; and 2) the develop and install specific tools and decision-making devices in the Government Office, in order to improve the planning, implementation and evaluation of government actions. In relation to government leader's education, the document shows the guidelines followed in the development of a Senior Government Officials Training Program located in the City of Knowledge, Panama. The program aims to train a technical-political stratum with the capacity to perform decision-making in governmental structures, political parties and social forces, in order to promote a democratic system based on citizenship participation. In connection to the Government Office, this work presents a conceptualization of this decision-making arena and its most frequent weaknesses: in the first place, the Government Office lacks an integrated system of formal advice based in an analytical method able to process both the technical and political impact of decisions and, secondly, there is a need for a set of rules that may inform decision-makers the relevance of problems, so that decentralization of matters is possible throughout the organization. In accordance to this analysis, the article explains a set of tools and systems that may contribute to strengthen the decision-making processes in this Office. Finally, as a conclusion, it analyzes the necessary conditions to generate a government system oriented to management quality.