Dictatorship still shadows the public sector, says leader of administration secretaries

Leader of one of the largest Brazilian congresses to discuss Brazilian public management, Fabrício Marques Santos, 41, believes that the country’s public service still suffers from shadows created during the military regime, which expanded bureaucracy and reduced transparency.

Secretary of Planning, Management and Heritage of Alagoas, Santos also presides over the National Council of Secretaries of Administration (Consad), an entity that organized this week a congress in Brasília that had the support of sheet.

With the participation of 1,500 people, the event brought together successful cases of the adoption of measures, in several areas, that optimized the implementation of public policies and improved the lives of citizens, among other strategic topics for government administrations.

Why is it still not believed that the State can be innovative? The difficulty of discussing and believing in innovation in the public sector still has its origins in the years of the military dictatorship, which interrupted a period in which the State was beginning to modernize and ended up transforming itself into an anti-democratic and favoritism black box.

We have recently started to unlock this, expanding the reach of public policies, seeking to innovate and promoting transparency. But the change in culture still suffers from a shadow of the dictatorship that is the way in which the public service is seen, which undergoes a broad change in the profile of its servers, today, much more engaged. The bureaucratic rubble of the past is not easy to overcome.

But doesn’t the political hand still weigh heavily in decisions to change? Yes, but this generation of current governors, for example, is already much more modern and focused on deliveries. Brazilian society has demanded concrete results in several areas and political leaders are aware of this and have been looking for ways to offer better services.

What I feel is a lack of technical leadership training that generates more results. There is a lack of knowledge of incentive mechanisms and good management practices that can mobilize the transformation. In education, for example, with more guaranteed application resources than all areas, there are still difficulties in making real changes.

Has the pandemic also forced governments to innovate? The pandemic brought a huge challenge for us to live and live with it, but it also brought the opportunity to rethink management models. I fear that with the backflow we will return to some issues, with the traditional teaching model, which would be to miss an absurd opportunity to test hybrid learning, for example. The pandemic brought a social laboratory and a huge space to innovate and transform.

But isn’t there a lack of mechanisms to legitimize the initiatives? Again, we need leaders and technical groups that can assess the quality of what has been done and, if necessary, maintain the changes. We also lack a dialogue of exchange of federative experience to, in a coordinated way, make transformations.

In my state, for example, Alagoas, we have municipalities with the best public schools in Brazil and others with the worst. We found it difficult to replicate what is working, unite people who have built good practices to help where the process is not going well and build cooperation models.

X-ray

Fabricio Marques Santos, 41

Secretary of State for Planning, Management and Heritage of Alagoas and president of the National Council of Secretaries of State for Administration (Consad). Master in Economics from the University of São Paulo (USP), he has already developed activities at the Brazilian Institute of Geography and Statistics (IBGE), with management work on the System of National Accounts in Brazil.