The contribution of the Laboratorio de Gobierno to the legitimacy and sustainability of public policy

In this chapter, Juan Felipe López analyses the role Chile’s Laboratorio de Gobierno played during a period of public sector reform, and the tensions involved in creating institutions to promote innovation within today’s bureaucracies. Written from his experience as the Laboratorio’s Executive Director between 2014 and 2018, the text combines an analysis of public innovation with a candid look at the difficulties of putting it into practice.

The chapter is part of Apurando el paso: 10 experiencias de reforma y modernización del Estado en Chile (Picking up the pace: 10 experiences of State reform and modernisation in Chile), edited by Enrique Paris and Jorge Rodríguez and published in 2019 by Editorial Universitaria and FLACSO-Chile, with a foreword by former Finance Minister Rodrigo Valdés. The book brings together the protagonists of ten reform processes, including the Social Household Registry, the creation of the Financial Market Commission and the reform of the Senior Public Management system, to document what made these changes possible and what stood in their way.

Public innovation did not begin with labs

The chapter begins by dismantling a myth: innovation and experimentation in the State did not begin with labs. In Chile, they have existed since the return to democracy, with examples such as the AUGE health plan and ChileCompra. What was new was creating an institution with a mandate to promote innovation systematically. And that novelty created tensions on three levels. First, public innovation merges policy design and implementation into a single process, whereas traditional management separates those who decide from those who carry out. Second, it requires multidisciplinary teams in a State used to having policy made by economists, engineers and lawyers. Juan Felipe himself, a historian by training, faced resistance to his leading the Laboratorio’s design. Third, it sees design as an approach to transforming management, not as a phase within a linear process. The chapter acknowledges that the team did not always manage to explain this difference well, which created mistrust at the start.

Why a Laboratorio de Gobierno

Unlike other labs in the region, the Lab in Chile was created with a clear purpose, grounded in three imperatives: a more productive State, able to deliver better services with limited resources; the capacity to tackle complex problems by breaking down silos; and a new relationship with citizens who distrust their institutions. That is why the Laboratorio was conceived not only as a generator of solutions, but as a mechanism for building social capital and legitimacy. Its results bear this out: more than 114 solutions incubated, 9 new services operating nationwide, and 277 civil servants from 31 institutions trained through Experimenta. Perhaps its most significant result, politically, was that the following government decided not only to keep it, but to strengthen it.

Lessons for transforming the State

The chapter closes with three reflections for those seeking to transform public institutions or create new ones. The first is to ask when it is truly necessary to create an institution, rather than reorganise existing ones. The second is governance: collaborative models are simple on paper but complex in practice, and they force difficult questions about who leads, who funds and who is held accountable. The third is the cultural dimension of change. No transformation with real impact in the State has ever been achieved without the people who work in it, and that means recognising their talent and taking “institutional emotions” seriously.

The final question still stands: who takes care of the “state of the State”? As the chapter notes, governments have spent decades writing ideal states of affairs into laws, plans and programmes. The great contribution of public innovation has been to remind us that policies are only worth as much as the concrete difference they make to people’s lives.