LIST OF PANELS

This panel is organized by the OAS School of Governance and addresses how COVID 19 forcibly placed us in a huge global proof of concept.

Due to the pressure from external imposition, the digital transformation became condition of existence of a new reality. The use of video conferencing by public administrators, for example, showed that change was possible and that nothing more than a push was needed. Citizens and companies were ready for all interactions to be digital. This proves that crises are the best time to push us to make hard decisions and think about the future: the opportunity to radically transform the state, to reinvent it, to refound it. We need to meet the demands of the citizen of the SXXI, among which are the demands of another type of democracy.

Mobilizations of discontent are dragging around the world from the Arab Spring, to the 15th M de Madrid, Occupy Wall Street. Citizens who do not feel represented by the State were already occupying the streets and staging waves of collective indignation. The murder of George Floyd sparked a new wave of outrage in 2020. Only After the population expressed itself emphatically, the government took disruptive actions: disassociating all members of the police force and starting from scratch.

Why not to lead the transformation of the State in a disruptive way and think urgently about how to expand citizen participation in decision-making, construction, monitoring and supervision of the State?

We don’t need to continue to bear the brutal costs of inertial rigid structures, by whim or for corporate protection of positions and salaries.

The crisis of the State is not the effect of a conjuncture, but of a historical accumulation of wrong decisions made along the decades. In the last 8 years, public spending increased three times more than the population growth and much more than GDP increase.

In the private sector, the price of goods and services falls while quality improves, driven by the market's own competitiveness. In the public sector, there is an absolute and relative increase in the prices of services, which makes the equation untenable.

If the state is committed to maintaining the past, how does it think and execute innovative public policies? In general, it does not.

To grow, companies need to reinvent themselves every day. Even elderly people had to learn how to use Zoom in order to participate in birthday celebrations during pandemic. To serve the citizens, the State must do the same. The digital transformation of the State is an issue of the highest political priority. It's not a technology issue.

The institutional reinvention of the state may be difficult, but what is the alternative? To continue to suffer from an inefficient, costly and ineffective State?

This paper aims to expose the advances that took place in the years of the pandemic in solutions for citizen participation, social control, service delivery and increase of democratic capillarity, which shows that it is possible to react to the crisis of the contemporary democracies.

We would like to recieve investigations from Latin America. Papers will be used at OAS School of Governance.