The professionalisation of public employment in Latin America

The CIDOB Foundation’s Latin America Programme organised a seminar in which the professionalisation of public service was highlighted as one of the basic strategies for fighting corruption in Latin American public institutions. The co-ordinators of the seminar, Francisco Longo (ESADE) and Carles Ramió (Pompeu Fabra University), reported the conclusions, in which they recognised the professionalisation of public employment as being “one of the ways to achieve a strengthening of the public institutions in Latin America”. Longo and Ramió stated that this professionalisation of public employment must make the principles of merit and flexibility compatible “with the aim of achieving public institutions which are solid but also flexible and efficient”. 

The speakers affirmed that “it would be desirable for the Latin American countries to be able to establish some general bases for career civil service through a political pact that would involve both the Government and the main opposition parties”. In their conclusions, Longo and Ramió specified that this professionalisation process “must cover all public employees of a country and all specialised spheres of management”. Nevertheless, they did not discount, as a gradual implementation stragegy, “the adoption of professional models such as regulatory agencies or economic-financial spheres of management, for example”. In addition to the intervention by Longo and Ramió, the International Seminar, Professionalisation of Public Service in Latin America, featured the participation of such experts, among others, as Narcís Serra, President of the CIDOB Foundation; Koldo Echebarría, of the Inter-American Development Bank in Chile; Jacint Jordana, Director of the CIDOB Foundation; Manuel Villoria, Director of the Department of Government and Administration of the Ortega y Gasset Foundation; Regina Pacheco, of the Getulio Vargas Foundation in Brazil; and Rodrigo Lavanderos Werner, Deputy Director of Executive Public Management of the National Civil Service of Chile. 

>> See programme RESEARCH PROJECT This seminar is part of the set of activities linked to the research project, “Transformación del Estado en América Latina: nuevos diseños institucionales, servicio civil y políticas regulativas” [“Transformation of the State in Latin America: New Institutional Designs, Civil Service and Regulatory Policies”], a project which was begun in December 2004 and which will culminate in December 2007. This research project analyses the independence and institutional relations of the regulatory agencies in Latin American countries, from the point of view of the management of public institutions, public policies and analysis of networks.