The discussion of the role of the State is on the table. The State exists to serve its citizens and they must review its positive capacity to legitimize an essential relationship of trust. When David Osborne tells us about the growing opportunity and need to put “reinventing the government“, is clearly placing emphasis on one of the central elements of the competitive modernity of nations. It is important, more than ever, to reposition the State as pivot central to the organization, monitoring and proper functioning of our Society and making citizens feel perfectly legitimated in a relationship of trust validated by a New Social Contract.
The strategic reinvention of the State, as a platform of centrality where the qualification dynamics of different social actors converge, has today gained a paradigm that cannot be limited to the operational specifications of more or less necessary Electronic Government mechanisms or organizational adjustments suited to certain cyclical internal organic positions. If it is important, as Francis Fukuyama never ceases to reiterate, the evidence of civil society’s capacity to lead leadership dynamics in processes of change, it is no less true that it is up to the State to model the strategic dimension of this change.
Therefore, choices must be made. Clear options in operational terms in order to speed up the procedural machine and through the mechanisms of efficiency and productivity guarantee stability and trust in all those who support the social fabric. Clear options around an objective model of compromise between qualified central governance, generating a stabilizing dimension and inducing territorial wealth through the innovative participation of social actors. Options assumed in the capacity to project in the future a logic of State intervention that is not limited to the classic role, deja-vucorrection in the extremes of the system’s endemic deficiencies, but know how, with creative intelligence, to emerge, with articulation and cooperation, self-sustained mechanisms for correcting the imbalances that arise.
More than ever in this complex time, a New State capable of projecting into the country a dynamic of permanent search for value creation and investment in creativity is required. In a time of change, in which only those capable of anticipating market expectations and managing in a network, in a logic of open competitiveness, survive, the New State cannot delay. It must assume itself as a “disturbing” actor in the system, inducing in society and the economy a capital of demand and innovation that will give it a desired status of centrality and above all of unequivocal leadership in the ongoing process of change.
A New State is a challenge to Portugal’s capacity for change. Because the New State is a possible decisive path in our social matrix, the success with which it is able to take on this new challenge that lies ahead will also, to a large extent, be the success with which the country will be able to face the demanding commitments of Globalization and Knowledge. The New State must assume a global dimension in terms of generating knowledge and value, but also imposing social and cultural standards. The New State has to be the major actor in the change that is desired for Portugal.
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