Sistema Regional de Información
en línea para Revistas Científicas de América Latina,
el Caribe, España y Portugal

Public policy has a normative and a causal character. On the one hand, it proposes a desirable state of affairs, determines which indicators ought to be changed and the direction of that change. On the other, it suggests how to reach that state, establishes the way to that goal. The economic approach has dominated public policy conceptually, loading opulence indicators with value. Quantitative statistical methods have dominated the study of causality, privileging exactness and the search for one model of best fit. As alternatives, to each, this article presents the Human Development and Capability Approach as a conceptual framework and Fuzzy Set Qualitative Comparative Analysis as a method of analysis. The former focuses on human beings and their quality of life. The latter allows the study of multiple conjunctural causation. Their combination in public policy analysis can potentially contribute to its effectiveness.

The Senior Civil Service (SADP) takes part on the selection to fulfill public management positions for the state public administration services. It has been 15 years since its implementation, and therefore, it seems appropriate to make a thorough analysis of its development and consolidation. Thus, it is of great importance to verify if the public managers selected though the SADP are complaint with the periods they have been elected for, and to identify the factors that are crucial for them to fulfill their terms. This analysis studies the permanence periods of the public managers of the 2° hierarchy level, elected through the SADP within the period 2006–2014, according to their origin.

This article summarizes the author’s reflections on the present challenges of the State. The author has worked more than 30 years in the Chilean State, and has vast experience in the reform and modernization processes of the public sector. Thus, this article summarizes the definition and origin of the State’s modernization processes and the pressing issues that give rise to this type of reforms from an economic, political, social and cultural perspective. In addition, it identifies reform initiatives that contribute to the internal management of the State, such as institutional strengthening, innovation, the installation of a center of government, and the strengthening of personnel management and development mechanisms in the State, with an impact on the coordination, effectiveness, efficiency and quality of public policies. It also identifies the need to build outward initiatives that respond to the citizens’ growing demands, and economic and social development challenges of our region. All of the above would be possible with the development of competences and new attributions, which must go hand in hand with the construction of governance schemes to achieve a successful implementation of State reform initiatives.

The program called “Juntos Más Seguros” (Together more secure), designed and implemented in the second government of Michelle Bachelet (2014–2018), sought to develop a security strategy in priority neighborhoods, based on participatory social intervention, with the aim of strengthening social cohesion and community coexistence. The methodology was developed through a qualitative design case analysis, focused on the intervening actors, in order to analyze the institutionalization of practices that have been developed in the community context, and its relationship with social participation and the development or strengthening of social capital, in the “Angela Davis” neighborhood + UV No. 5 of the Recoleta County. The main conclusions indicate that implementation of the program allowed to deliver participatory tools and resources to the participating leaders of the Neighborhood Committee, activating the social capital of the neighborhood, encouraging collaborative participation and opening channels of communication between the local and the institutional.

The present study performs analysis, diagnosis and proposal for improving the 24 Hours Program (Programa 24 Horas) from Chile’s Crime Prevention Undersecretary (Subsecretaría de Prevención del Delito), which belongs to one of the components in the 24 Hours Program network, from Chile’s National Service for Minors (Servicio Nacional de Menores, known as SENAME). This study is made from a citizen security public policy perspective, in its crime prevention area, focusing the analysis specifically in program design and implementation stages, accounting for its virtues, successes, deficiencies and difficulties in both stages, to conclude with a diagnosis, and finally offering an improvement proposal, to provide higher effectiveness, regarding public policy and/or programs, management and results.

In the context of reforms to the penal judicial systems, this article proposes an empiric view towards the Offices of Alternative Measures to prison, using Brazilian and Canadian cases as references. Even though these are countries with different socio-economic scenarios, data show that planning and integration of judicial system with the society are an important strategy to nurture the appliance of penal measures other than deprivation of liberty, to which it delivers the chance to the persons involved in criminal proceedings to do not break its bonds with their social environment. Offices of Alternative Measures are, therefore, not just an answer to the increasing ratio of overcrowding in jails, but specially the reinforcement towards a new paradigm of penal responsibilization.

We examine the Argentina’s social conditional cash transfer program, the Asignación Universal por Hijo, which has low organizational burdens for accessing the social benefit. However, we find that it still significant numbers of non-take-up. Specialized literature often attributed this to problems in the design of programs and procedures. Nevertheless, we state that these organizational factors do not, by themselves, explain why vulnerable people tend to have lower levels of participation and sometimes not even apply for programs targeted at them. We show that citizens’ vulnerability and negative policy feedback affect their capacity and willingness to apply.

Recently in Latin America an important number of programs focused on social reinsertion have been developed and carried out for people with conflicts with the Law. The present article covers a sequence of methodological considerations emerging from the evaluation carried out on a reinsertion program designed and applied in Chile. For that purpose, a group of conditions necessary to meet to achieve robust evidence of program performance is individualized. On the other hand, a group of specific requirements for the evaluation of reinsertion programs is pointed out, beginning with some definitions of reinsertions and different approaches that can be used to operationalize that concept verifying finally the applicability of different evaluation designs according with the specific characteristics of each evaluated Program.

The last three decades Mexico lack of a comprehensive police model, in particular, one that included the citizen security perspective. Currently, the incoming government establishes the creation of a new militarized corps. The National Guard will settle on the centralization and militarization of law enforcement. Civilian police institutions will be downplayed and, therefore, the focus on human security, citizen participation and democratic consolidation is put back in the background again. This work provides data that show the importance of taking a diachronic perspective on designing public policies in order to know precisely the strengths and weaknesses of the police forces, likewise, decisions must be based on current models of human security. So that it can be built a multicausal solution to violence and to the current criminogenic phenomenon in Mexico, addressing it in its complexity.

Crime prevention policies in Mexico seem to have been tackled by a “glass ceiling”. The theoretical core underlying crime prevention programs states that family relationships, the environment and deficiencies in government services can become high-risk environments that must be inhibited. The civilizatory approach allows understanding the mechanism of socialization of violence from sources not considered in the current model of crime prevention, such as corrupt behavior and impunity of the political class. This approach allows improve the causal relationship and offer a new vision for the formulation and evaluation of crime prevention policies.