Vertebral Axes of Governance in Public Systems. A Framework of Analysis in Latin American Key

Governance refers the set of institutional arrangements through which public decisions are prepared, adopted and executed in a given social environment. Scholars frequently complement this descriptive notion with normative approaches that emphasise one or another specific interaction within the public sphere. Exploring the quality of governance necessarily requires identifying the formal and informal institutions which represent the system’s desired attributes. This paper thus aims to carry out said exploration, identifying the governance axes which will allow to determine if an advanced democratic system exists. The objective is to have a useful framework of analysis to be able to examine the type of governance actually in place, especially in Latin American countries.

As such, the central part of this article proposes and develops five content axes upon which basic institutional arrangements should be systematised to frame decision processes within the public sphere and which, taken as a whole, offer a full view of the type of governance in a given country. These axes are: 1) the country’s political institutions; 2) its legal institutions; 3) market institutions; 4) public management; and 5) civil society. It further explores the institutional framework elements within each axis which need to be considered in order to evaluate the quality of that governance model.

Lastly, this work faces the problems associated to measuring and improving governance. The first difficulty is that we cannot limit ourselves to measuring outputs, that is, the immediate result of a given actor's actions within the process. We have to aspire to measure the aggregate results of all the interactions included within said process. In other words, we have to measure the impact on reality, its outcomes, something which makes it more difficult to establish causal connections and, as a result, extract valid conclusions. In keeping with J. C. March and J. P. Olsen, this document proposes creating spaces for social and political consensus to improve governance, spaces which enable the experimental exploration of certain central public policies and which can maintain this consensus for relatively long periods of time. In addition, it also defends the compatibility between this basic consensus and a vigorous sphere of public deliberation. The latter has to be able to draw from reliable information and be capable of demanding accountability and managing political explanations regarding what is happening so that useful evaluation and collective learning processes are created.

Key words: Governance; Citizen Participation; Institutional Analysis; Public Administration Theory; Latin America