Illustrations by Jorge Ilieff.

Sunshine is the best disinfectant

Bureaucracies, like most large social units, don’t like to see their dirty laundry aired in public. In fact, an almost hermetic secrecy surrounds the inner workings of most public institutions in Latin America, and until recently Chile was no exception.

“Our public sector is relatively efficient,” says Mario Marcel, chief of the budget office in Chile’s Finance Ministry, “but it is also very inward-looking and closed off from the community.” Rosana Costa, a Chilean management scholar, puts it this way: “In the United States, the law says that all government information is public unless you can show that disclosure would hurt privacy or national security. Here the opposite is true.”

The problem with this kind of secrecy is that it discourages effort: if no outsiders are allowed to know which public services have received the best evaluations, what’s the point of trying? To combat that tendency, the Chilean government insists on publicizing the performance indicators and program evaluations described in the article above. “When we started putting this information online and informing the press, we shattered that sort of shell that used to surround public services,” Marcel said. “And once they were subjected to the public scrutiny, the services began to get concerned about showing how they were improving.”

In fact, some services actually sought the limelight. “Many of our public services had been stigmatized during the military regime, and they saw the publication of these indicators as a chance to vindicate themselves more than to show their problems,” Marcel says. Hoping to encourage that mindset, in 1999 the government instituted the annual National Prize for Innovation in Public Management that recognizes individual units within larger organizations that come up with outstanding improvements to efficiency or customer service.

In order to succeed, access to information policies must have resolute backing from the highest levels of government, according to Chilean officials. “Transparency can have its costs,” says María Teresa Hamuy, who heads the department in Chile’s Finance Ministry that publishes program evaluations. Politicians from opposition parties have used unflattering evaluation reports as ammunition against the government, for example, and senior public servants themselves often protest loudly when their service is being audited. “But the cost of dealing with those situations is much lower than the cost to society of covering up the deficiencies we’ve exposed,” says Hamuy.