Navigation Chart for the Public Office Secretariat

Context

The course of Paraguay’s political history during the past 61 years, up to August 2008, was led by a single political party: the Partido Colorado that historically managed to control the State in all its organizations and institutions.  This cycle that implied the uninterrupted presence for more of half a century of a single political party has been broken by a majority demand for chance, expressed in the April, 2008 election, and by the coming into power of President Fernando Lugo in August of that same year. It is a democratic alternative that leaves, nevertheless, great challenges for the new government.

According to qualitative and quantitative studies carried out by the PAPEP in 2008 and 2009, citizens see in the Public Administration inherited from former political regimes, a paradigm of what they do not want their country to continue to be (authoritarianism, “buddy system”, graft, lack of transparency, inefficiency, absence of a sense of public service). For this reason, the Reform of the Administration becomes a strategic symbol of what can be done in Paraguay in terms of changes and transformation of democratic orientation.

The citizens have high expectations for change and great hope with respect to the possibility that with the opening-up process initiated by President Lugo, this change maybe achieved.  Paraguayan citizens demand an important transformation of their political-institutional structures, but does not expect the change, which it clearly appreciates as difficult, to happen immediately.  It expects, however, clear and conclusive signals that this change would have already been begun, and that the same will have a clear structural and democratic orientation.

With all this, the same studies show that the assessment of the change, the same studies show that the assessment of change and the demand for it, is balanced with the perception that these changes are difficult, that the Government does not have all the support or experience it requires to make them happen, that the Public Office Secretariat does not have the necessary political weight, in spite of its acknowledged technical expertise; that there will be great opposition when concrete interests are affected, and that, definitively, it will probably be a long process that will be completed by other governments.

In this regard, the Public Office Secretariat (SFP) presents three great challenges that will determine the different reform scenarios:  

1. The scope of the transformation that they want to achieve in public administration: This can vary from the maintaining of the del status quo to the attempts at making specific changes that do not have the capacity of modifying structural problems in public administration, to actions/changes articulated in reason of a structural transformation objective in the medium and long term.
2. The capability for generating support and agreements that will sustain the reformist effort (political management capability):  This may vary from a situation in which no agreements are reaches and support for reform is very weak, to the achievement of a more ample social-political consensus that will sustain and defend the efforts made.
3. The availability of economic resources for finance reform costs.