Where Are the Reformists?

Those of us who went through political science and public administration schools in the 2010s still carry new public management and the managerial model in our heads. We also witnessed the wave of governance-model implementation across every level of administration: governance as a step beyond the simple governing of things. Governance as an understanding of the multiple factors that influence public affairs, and from there the need to bring public and private stakeholders together into an endless map of committees, councils, forums, assemblies, and circles, institutionalized to a greater or lesser degree at every level of administration. We have institutionalized citizen participation in legislative decision-making and public budgeting, we have institutionalized transparency, the right of access to public information, and the protection of personal data. Any public management student can sketch you a model — as transparent, efficient, sustainable, and inclusive as possible — to solve the housing problem in their city.

I arrive at a public policy school in the second half of the 2020s and I don’t see much beyond the familiar model: know the public problem well, research it, make informed decisions while informing all parties, implement for results, monitor implementation and evaluate what’s been implemented. And yet, across the Western world, the cost of living keeps rising and the well-known public problems of housing worsen, along with the sustainability of our great strongholds — healthcare, pensions, education. Without even getting into the decline of democracy as the political system the world’s nations should be aspiring to. Coming out of the brutal global shock that was covid, and witnessing the senility of our public services, I ask myself: where are the reformists?

Is any model emerging from policy or business schools that proposes a new organization of available resources — one that would not only achieve the results large organizations are expected to deliver, but go further and prepare us to be resilient for the next crisis? I don’t see one. I do see interest in promoting new public policies or new approaches to known problems: all the innovation being attempted in long-term care, unwanted loneliness, early childhood education, homelessness, climate resilience, participatory budget, and more. But who is in the engine room? Who’s running the machines, and which machines are we even using? The paths may be new or different and the goals highly innovative, but where is the human and the machine? With what human and technological resources are we trying to tackle the problem of housing, education, or healthcare? My answer: the same ones as 20 years ago. Yes, many processes have been digitized — what used to be done on paper and in person has been moved onto PCs, mobile phones, and electronic government portals. Little else.

Are we making the most of all the available technology to devote our resources to what adds the most value for society? The answer is easy: no. We’re only using technology to do what we already did, faster. The lost opportunity is too big to let pass: so big it could become an unbridgeable abyss for modern bureaucracies in the next crisis. We’re becoming obsolete, and the customer — the public — is going to replace us. They won’t replace us with another democratic system if it’s proven obsolete: they’ll replace us with whatever else gives them value. The democratic crisis is, to a large extent, a crisis of institutional capacity (Beth Simone Noveck, Reboot: AI and the Race to Save Democracy, Yale University Press, 2026).

Let’s talk about AI. It’s going to be disruptive. Is all disruption bad? Which side of the disruption do public administrations want to be on? AI could be the technology we use to revolutionize 21st-century public management: to stop relying on armies of humans verifying documents and requirements, drafting regulations, filling out spreadsheets, running surveys, and processing paperwork, and instead have an army of public servants who spend their working time solving complex problems, managing exceptions, and exploring the future with the human creativity AI doesn’t have. That’s what agentic AI makes possible: moving from automating isolated tasks to orchestrating entire workflows from start to finish, shifting from “process digitization” to “outcome orchestration” (World Economic Forum, in collaboration with Capgemini, Making Agentic AI Work for Government: A Readiness Framework, April 2026). Reorganize processes with the best technology available.

The reformists are the technologists working hand in hand with public organizations to develop models and pilots that serve public ends, the public officials pushing internally to adopt the technology, the private organizations putting their data at the service of the public good, and the academics across every discipline who look at AI with optimism. I’m calling on public management academics to define the model: the public sector is genuinely eager to try it, and the public is eager to see how it works.

This post is inspired by Manuel Kilian’s second policy dialogue with Bridging Beyond, Wednesday June 24, 2026.

Views my own. Translated by Claude.

Laura Magallón