THE POST-PANDEMIC PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION: TRANSPARENCY 2.0; BLOCKCHAIN AND SMART CONTRACTS
Tags: Covid 19, Smart Contracts, Public Administration, Transparency, Blockchain

THE POST-PANDEMIC PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION: TRANSPARENCY 2.0; BLOCKCHAIN AND SMART CONTRACTS

Juliano Heinen, SJD[1]

Marcos Nobrega, SJD[2]

The pandemic caused by Covid-19 (Coronavirus) pushed all the inhabitants of the planet out of their normality. It created an extraordinary life situation — which seems to be a consensus. The impact on the most varied social relations was so intense that humanity tends to be no longer the same. So, the great current challenge is to know what this post-pandemic future will look like, in short, what the “new normal” will be. The pandemic has catalyzed transformations that had been started and will be strengthened in institutional and legal arrangements to be created after the crisis.

The Covid19 pandemic has created opportunities for several institutions, and the challenges for the public sector are especially tricky. Thus, in this crisis, there is room for organizations (including the State) to be more agile, accelerating changes that would have been considered extremely bold recently. It is essential, therefore, to rethink the organizational culture, establishing new rules and metrics of productivity and creating mechanisms that enable faster adaptations in future crises.

Nowadays, with the impact caused by Covid-19, the use of a “culture of digital and disruptive transparency” has become a perennial reality. In other words, State agencies began to disclose public data concerning the pandemic through (1) the use of various mechanisms to allow access to information, through the dissemination of statistics, forecasts, bulletins, etc. .; (2) and in a way that they made sense to the population — to be primarily useful — hence the disruptive movement.

Many public entities have indeed made significant advances in public transparency in the decades after the 1988 Constitution of the Federative Republic of Brazil. In the case of municipalities, for example, especially after the Fiscal Responsibility Law (Complementary Law 101/00), it was guaranteed that all tax data, namely information on revenues, expenses, bids and contracts, will be available on transparency portals of such municipalities, providing citizens with access to monitor and supervise the actions of the government.

However, in practice, almost nobody visits these sites to check public information, even during the electoral period. This “transparency 1.0” — let us call it that way- is static, not interactive and of little use.

Much more can be done, and the existing technology allows this. Imagine that the Court of Accounts of a given State decides a case on education expenses in a given municipality, but specifically on school meals. This decision is of direct interest to a group of parents whose children study in municipal schools. Thus, the Court of Accounts can send customized and personalized information to the parents’ social networks or, even more specifically, to their WhatsApp®. This is a simple example of “transparency 2.0”, which is much more agile, proactive and effective.

This is an essential determination in order to provide further access to immediate and pragmatic information. Administrative advertising has undoubtedly gained a better qualitative standard from the insertion of new technologies in the dissemination of information and administrative acts.

These new technologies cause an even more interesting phenomenon, an unprecedented way in how people relate to each other. In this case, a new way for the State to (inter) relate to citizens is created, establishing, in the same way, new ways of accessing information. Tools such as hyper-documentalnavigation, hunting for information through search engines, knowhots or agents programmed to reflect the user’s navigation, which allows contextual exploration, the use of dynamic data cards, etc. cause a significant transformation in any social relationship

Such development was gradual and has allowed greater and faster dissemination of information from public entities. It is no more. Nowadays, with a mouse click, it is possible to obtain useful data, such as opening hours of a given public office, the current number of infected people, characteristics of the services provided, etc. This conjuncture brings citizens closer to Public Administration and facilitates access to the services provided by them — hence, there is a disruptive and “2.0” transparency movement.

On the one hand, the pandemic experienced in 2020 also imposed a guideline in favor of expanding the digital public administration culture, fostering the “digital State” or the “e-public”. This expansion aims to provide greater social control over the acts of the Public Power, but, on the other hand, to receive public services quickly and easily. The most synthetic and pragmatic guideline of this “new Public Administration” is based on providing facilitators to the citizen. Then, the State acts as a facilitator to the life of the citizen.

This “culture”, like any metaphysical good of this nature, was gradually implemented. It is no more, and it cannot be this way anymore. To this end, the State must provide a healthy environment for the promotion of this new concept. See that various activities can be implemented for this task, such as workshops, courses, didactic material, training of civil servants who will directly participate in the processing of public services, etc. Finally, e-public consists of determining to public agencies the need to popularize a digital environment that is literally in the palm of people who hold a smartphone. Therefore, the impact of Covid19 showed us all that the relationship between the Public Administration and the administrators has changed.

The “digital state” can be seen much more as a final product of the “new normal”, that is, even greater social control will be achieved concerning state activities. This control is required by the democratic ideals adopted in Brazil based on the massification and facilitation of access to public data.

In order to understand the digital turnaround that will follow, we need to take some examples into consideration. The movements of buying and selling, transfer of possession and even validations, that is, transactions that will take place within the blocks on the blockchain can be considered contracts because it contains all possible information to carry out transfers of possession.

From all the above, it is clear that the pandemic caused by Covid19 determined substantial changes in behavior, culture, organizations, etc. Moreover, the State was not left out of this metamorphosis. The importance of understanding this panorama is nodal, insofar as it is possible to program the state organization and administrative activities to adapt to social, political and cultural changes.

Thus, the current and future perspectives redefine the many measures and forms of State intervention in people’s daily lives. The State must increasingly “make sense”, and aim, in one way or another, to guide or control the behavior of a company or individuals. The changes caused by Covid19 impact the structure of Public Administration (introverted perspective) and its relationship with the citizen (extroverted perspective), expecting different activities to be carried out in a supply chain or requiring access to infrastructure facilities provided for the use of new technologies.

The State is indispensable to modern life and will remain that way. Covid19 has proved this because significant public policies to fight the pandemic were guided and promoted by the State. It is just necessary to imagine a redefinition of its organization and activities, repositioning it in the social context, to become ubiquitous. We daily consume most if not all of the services discussed in this paper both directly, as retail customers, and indirectly, as from an intermediary.