On the afternoon of 13 November, the Técnico Congress Centre hosted the lecture “Coordenação de Políticas” within the Engineering, Decision, and Public Policy curricular unit. Two members of the current government delivered the lecture: António Leitão Amaro, Minister of the Presidency, and Paulo Lopes Marcelo, Secretary of State for the Presidency of the Council of Ministers. This lecture was preceded by other sessions with Ana Fontoura Gouveia, former Secretary of State for Energy and Climate, and Adalberto Campos Fernandes, former Minister of Health.
For António Leitão Amaro, the event was a ‘homecoming’, since the minister used to teach Industrial Engineering and Management undergraduate students, at Técnico – Oeiras campus, as an Invited Professor at the Department of Industrial Engineering and Management.
‘Public decision-making is about trying to resolve or anticipate conflicts of interest,’ he explained. By way of example, he mentioned the debate around the tax burden – there is discussion about how high or low it should be and, depending on the amounts collected, there is also discussion about the priority areas in which to apply them. ‘Public decision-making is always a process of bringing into play, comparing and contrasting different interests and preferences for each dilemma, for each allocation of resources, for each public action or inaction,’ he added.
As a result of these debates, conclusions emerge on policies to be adopted, but António Leitão Amaro stresses: ‘it’s impossible to satisfy everyone’. ‘If any of you think that there is a holy book that has all the answers to public policy questions, that there is always a right choice, that it is possible to discover perfect rationality or the mathematical model that gives us answers to everything… that is false,’ he warned. He recalled that as humans, ‘we value problems and the importance of solving them differently’.
Challenging the students to participate, he asked whether they would prefer decision-making processes to be entirely confidential or whether, on the contrary, they should be entirely transparent, also giving examples of advantages and disadvantages for each scenario (the need for secrecy in matters relating to national defence, guaranteeing the public’s right to information…).
Speaking to an audience made up of Técnico students, the minister also made a point of emphasising the importance of engineers in these political decision-making processes. ‘By analysing the problem, you can help analyse the different cost-benefit ratios for different population groups,’ as well as proposing methods for decision support. ‘Engineers are very useful for public decision-making,’ concludes António Leitão Amaro.
Paulo Lopes Marcelo recalled the economic maxim at the start of his speech – ‘resources are scarce’. Faced with this scarcity, democracy emerges as a way of making decisions with existing resources. ‘Political decision-making is complex because our societies are increasingly complex,’ said the Secretary of State, also describing the processes by which a government reaches a consensus, with particular emphasis on decision-making at the level of the Council of Ministers.
The speaker pointed out that the debate within the Council of Ministers itself is very important, as its members are the representatives of the population’s interests. Consequently, the outcome of the discussion should reflect these interests through a final balance between the positions of the different ministers.
After clarifying some of the students’ doubts, and explaining the legislative processes (including promulgation or veto by the President of the Republic), Paulo Lopes Marcelo urged those present, as citizens, to take an active civic role. ‘Read newspapers, get informed, get to know the Constitution,’ said the Secretary of State – ’no matter how specialised an engineer may be in a specific field, he is never a complete citizen if he doesn’t know the system and the community he is part of.’
The Engineering, Decision and Public Policy curricular unit is part of the ‘Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences’, and aims to develop students’ critical thinking about how engineering and decision-support systems—including risk assessment, data analysis, decision analysis, statistical analysis, optimisation, participatory modelling, communication, and scenario planning—can improve political analysis and decision-making in a real context.
