The public sector it has become a fundamental actor in overcoming the crisis. Perhaps the novel element is in the fact that the State and the public sector are not only there to fix the errors and failures of the market, but also to co-create new economic models. This new conception of the public sector overcomes the conventional wisdom that the state is the problem and that its existence is justified basically to clean up disasters and correct market imbalances and that, once overcome, it must withdraw so that private enterprise can lead innovation.
Businesses, academia, and civil society themselves make innumerable appeals to the need for increase public-private collaboration and the new role of the State. I fully agree and share these appeals, but we cannot limit them to using only the traditional PPP models (Public-Private Participation Projects), in which the role of the public sector is ‘passive’, where the public sector contributes resources to be managed by the private sector, or the private sector builds infrastructures without assuming the risks inherent to the projects that they award it (example, the Madrid radio stations). These models, while valid, are insufficient. The question is how to transform private and public organizations so that their interactions are more symbiotic and less parasitic, as the economist rightly mentions Mariana Mazzucato.
The great uncertainties and challenges of society force the public sector to change, to be much more active and dynamic in their proposals, helping to define and build new economic models. This reality requires a profound transformation in the selection, training and skills of public executives. must exist less distrust towards companies and more business culture, less bureaucratization and more digitization. In short, a more relational and less hierarchical public sector.
This demand for change also exists in the private sphere. The conventional wisdom It had a decisive influence on the behavior and organization of civil society. His speech was based on the excellence of private actors in the face of an inefficient, obsolete and little innovative public sector. The legitimacy of the ‘Policy Maker’ was recognized but ‘Public Managers’ were not valued, as the Anglo-Saxons say. This civil society must ask itself what its role is in this new scenario in which public participation will be more active. How you can facilitate more company culture to the public sector and how it can reinforce the role that public executives should have in society.
Some organizations of the civil society were created from a combination of people from the world of business, academia and administration, this has not prevented them from maintaining their independence, but over time their initial spirit has been lost, currently suffering from a certain inbreeding. If a more open, more dynamic vision of what is public is demanded, it is also necessary that there is more porosity and openness between sectors, and here social organizations also have their transformation challenge.
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The symbiosis between the private and public sectors will require some understand and respect more what the company is and its culture, and that others understand that the role of the public sector goes far beyond the mere redistribution of wealth and control of public services.
Perhaps it is time for civil society and public sector actors to renounce the ‘conventional wisdom’, which John Kenneth Galbraith denounced in his work ‘The opulent society’ as that way of describing some ideas and explanations generally accepted by the public and that were considered indisputable at a given time, although later they were considered false, and let us advance in the construction of long-term programs that reinforce the capacities of society, ensure equity and turn knowledge into action.