On 20 November, Alexandra Leitão, former Minister for Modernisation of the State and Public Administration and Assistant Secretary of State for Education, gave the lecture “State and Public Administration Modernisation Policies”, at Abreu Faro Amphitheatre, Técnico – Alameda campus.
Used to talk about public policy to students at the Faculty of Law of Universidade de Lisboa (FDUL), where she teaches a curricular unit of the same name, Alexandra Leitão confessed it was a challenge to decide ‘what to say to engineering students’. [Técnico students attending the Engineering, Decision and Public Policies Curricular Unit]. After thinking about ‘what could be interesting’, she shared what she knows: ‘public policies’.
‘Public entities are the ones who do it’ but there is an essential path in which it is necessary to “define needs, set objectives and prioritise them”. Policies must be transversal and reflect the equal importance of various areas. Only in exceptional situations – as an example, she mentions the pandemic – is it possible to format ‘a period according to a result’, in this case prioritising health over other areas such as the economy and fundamental rights. ‘But this only works for short periods,’ she warned.
As constraints that public entities face when making decisions, Alexandra Leitão highlighted the ‘lack of financial and human resources’ and the ‘rigidity of organisational models’ with ‘procedural complexity’ and ‘lack of diagnostic means’. There’s also accountability, which encompasses ‘control, measuring results and transparency’.
The Public Administration is the subject and object of Public Planning. In pursuit of this, the former minister shares – jokingly, ‘I managed to get some engineering in here after all’ – that she tried a few years ago ‘to have a platform in which if we entered the data of all the workers in the Public Administration – age, date of entry, etc – it would allow me, as a political decision-maker, to ask “in 2026 how many teachers, policemen are going to retire”? I couldn’t get this platform. There are too many variables.
In the 21st century, public administration ‘always tries to be based on science, to have experts from various areas’ even though ‘the political agent must make the final decision’. ‘We don’t want a regime of technocrats; we want democratically elected politicians to listen to experts but make the decisions.’ And she explains: ‘the expert can only see things through his lens, the political decision-maker listens to everyone [the experts] and makes his/her decision.’
Another difficulty in public planning is electoral cycles. ‘Often, before a public policy can produce its results, the political cycle changes’, she explains: ’when you look at social security, you have to look at it from an intergenerational perspective.’ ‘Certain things that are defined and give long-term results end up not giving advantages to those who develop them’, she says.
Regarding public policies with low media visibility, Alexandra Leitão says ‘what’s important is that politicians invest in these areas, even if they don’t have visibility’. ‘For example, science policy doesn’t have much visibility but it’s very important to invest in studies, in things that take a long time to have concrete results”, she defends.
Asked about the ‘low representation of engineers in parliament’, the current MP replied that this ‘is a legislative body, which is a political act’. Although she thinks it’s ‘important to have a diversity of views’, this representation tends to be influenced by the propensity and profiles of different groups. However, this reality changes when we think about the government, where ‘there is more diversity in decision-making, external appointments, particularly in academia’.
‘In political debate, it is not true that numbers are always right and objective’, she defended. ‘If it’s true that incorporating science and technology into political decision-making is fundamental,’ it is also true that “drying up politics in favour of technical decisions reduces political debate,” she adds. ‘Sometimes you hear from both right-wing and left-wing parties ‘oh because that’s ideological’, so what?’, clarifying that ‘Politics is ideology, that’s why there’s alternation (…) Some want to do it one way, others want to do it another way and both are right, according to their democratic legitimacy, and this is sometimes overlooked by technicians’, she adds.
The lecture took place within the Engineering, Decision and Public Policy curricular unit, as part of the Humanities, Arts and Social Sciences that 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.
This lecture was preceded by sessions with Ana Fontoura Gouveia, former Secretary of State for Energy and Climate, Adalberto Campos Fernandes, former Minister of Health and António Leitão Amaro, current Minister of the Presidency.
