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

This research addresses the question of how suicide prevention, intervention, and postvention policies have been defined in Spain in the last decade. Therefore, the current state of their development in the architecture of the autonomic State is evaluated. Using the World Health Organisation’s indicators as main framework, this text assesses the design of these policies from the deliberative approach of public policy analysis. Through an evaluation matrix of twelve indicators, this applied analysis checks the current degree of correspondence with these control measures, developed from the Mental Health Plans of the Autonomous Communities. The results of this evaluation reveal not only the notorious differences between regions, but also relevant shortcomings in the formal design of suicide control policies in Spain in accordance to international standards. These inaccuracies also reveal a lack of precision in the identification of national benchmarks in the design of such policies, despite formal improvements in their designs due to the COVID-19 crisis.

The austerity policies implemented in Spain during the years of the «great recession» (2008-2014) have had diverse effects on the socio-economic and vital conditions of children, young people and the elderly. In particular, the agenda of public policies and social spending applied during the crisis increased inequality between these social groups, privileging the interests of the adult population and the elderly, and calling into question7 the principle of inter-generational solidarity on which our familistic welfare system. In this article we describe this phenomenon and highlight the dominant narratives formulated by the main political actors when defining the rules of eligibility of the beneficiaries of public policies and attending to the specific needs of each age group. The statistical and documentary evidence collected points to the convenience of reflecting on the foundations of the inter-generational pact that organizes the redistribution of public resources in our country and that must ensure the sustainability of our social protection system.

The widespread perception of corruption and the correlative disaffection of citizens towards politics and institutions have generated the implementation of public policies aimed at tackling and preventing these inappropriate practices. The Administration of Castilla y León is no exception in this panorama, and in the absence of observatories or opinion studies that evaluate its situation, it is acuratte to carry out an analysis of the institutional integrity policy developed by the Junta de Castilla y León. This paper tries to answer the following question: do the instruments of democratic regeneration that the Administration of Castilla y León has adopted between 2007 and 2021 make up a true «system of institutional integrity»? As a main result of this research, it is concluded that in Castilla y León numerous measures of democratic regeneration have been implemented that can form a system of institutional integrity, but they are still in the process of formation and development, and there is a lack of a continuous evaluation system that provides the denomination of «integral».

Inequality is a problem that requires urgent responses. In the quest for solutions, researchers employ various indicators of inequality and different dimensions of e-Government (EG). Objective. Review empirical research that analyzed the contribution of income, socio-economic level (SES) and social status (SS) on the use, intention to use and adoption of EG. Method. We conducted a narrative review, selecting publications from 2015 to 2020. We described the inequality indicators and their measurement, the dependent variables used and the results obtained. Results/Conclusions. Income was measured in 70 % of the studies as an ordinal variable; we observed a predominance of the economic dimension as an indicator of inequality. SES was reported in 30 % of the studies using different measurement forms, and in no studies was SS measured. Dependent variables use, intention to use and adoption were employed as synonyms, ignoring post-adoption and appropriation of EG. The results found in the papers reviewed were inconsistent; inequality indicators were sometimes statistically significant, sometimes not. A possible explanation is the methodological difficulty in approaching the complexity of inequality, often measured unidimensional and quantitatively. A challenge is to combine theoretical and methodological approaches that consider inequality multidimensional and culturally anchored.

Research funding is a tool for governments to promote change in universities. Governments have tried to steer universities «from a distance» by changing the ways in which they are funded and enhancing evaluation. The article analyses a funding instrument for university R&D centres of the Xunta de Galicia, its rationale and the mechanisms through which change is promoted. It also analyses how the outcomes pursued are conditioned by the existing instruments and by institutional constraints. The study confirms that progress in the objectives pursued by one instrument may be limited by others instruments, in the absence of coherence in the instrument-mix; also that institutional constraints, derived from the university governance model, may hinder the transformation of university research structures. It is concluded that competitive funding schemes for R&D centres can have a transformative capacity, sometimes through changes not intended by public decision-makers; but the influence of the governance model, other instruments and actors are decisive in the intensity and direction of the changes.

The concepts of Public Accountability and Open Government are recurrent in the public sector analysis because of the new democratic demands. As polysemic concepts, their understanding and use admits different definitions, making analysis and research in specific social and political contexts more complex. Therefore, their materialization and operationalization in the management and public administration of local governments represents a significant challenge. In this sense, the research objective is to assess the value of the substantive elements of Public Accountability and Open Government. Both observed from the case of the in the actions performed by the government of the municipality of Guadalajara, Jalisco, Mexico, for the fulfillment of the Second Local Action Plan of Open Government Jalisco. For this purpose, the commitments made in the plan are analyzed, assessing the degree of public accountability that supported the evidence and identifying the pillars of open government worked on for each of the actions.

The paper focuses on the internal implementation process of the EU Recovery and Resilience Facility in Germany with special regard to the participation of the Länder in the development of the plan and its priorities. The course of the development and implementation process is exemplifying how the blindness of the EU and its treaties for federal systems can be used by national executives to pursue their objectives. The fact that the EU’s Recovery and Resilience Facility and NextGeneration EU were labeled by the EC as a “stimulus package” to combat the (short-term) consequences of Covid-19 made it easier for the German government to develop its own Recovery and Resilience Plan without major consultation. Concerning time constraints, there was no broader public discussion. Since the program and structure of the Recovery and Resilience Facility can also be interpreted as a new structural and cohesion policy approach of the EU, the lack of public discussion is of concern. Following this interpretation, a stronger involvement of the German Länder and municipalities in the negotiation process of the Recovery and Resilience Plan would have been indispensable. The analysis of the implementation of the EU’s Recovery and Resilience Facility in the Federal Republic intends to highlight exemplary aspects of multilevel governance that would need to be strengthened if the EU were to expand its range of economic policy instruments in the future.

The changes in political orientation of Latin American governments have become an interesting field of study to identify different types of reorganizations in public policies, especially in social welfare. The objective of this article is to analyze the reforms introduced in political administrations qualified as Left –or Progressive– and Right –or Conservative– in Argentina, Brazil and Uruguay from the beginning of the 21st century to the present in social assistance and labor protections policies. These two arenas of public policies have special socioeconomic and political relevance, to the extent that assistance is aimed at vulnerable populations with an electoral impact, and labor is aimed at organized groups with the capacity to influence public opinion. The sources of information that support this work are secondary, related to official documents of assistance and labor programs and statistics from public information systems, to which technical studies of both social policies are added.

Increasing interregional mobility within the Spanish national health system demands vertical and horizontal coordination mechanisms among the multiplicity of stakeholders and institutions providing health care in a decentralized health system. In this article, we analyze the mechanisms introduced in the Spanish health system to handle the mobility of patients to centers of excellence (CSUR) and between bordering regions (bilateral agreements and conventions), as well as the financial tools developed to deal with interregional mobility. This study combines a descriptive analysis of billing and health care in the 17 Autonomous Communities, as well as in Ceuta and Melilla, along with a review of documents and interviews with key informants. Throughout the text, the study highlights the existence of institutional, political and, above all, financial challenges to achieve effective coordination between public actors of the NHS to respond to the mobility of patients.

This article aims to analyse the impact of the National Recovery and Resilience Plan (NRRP) on Italian regionalism. After summarising the characteristic features of the Italian multi-level government model, the text analyses three significant issues of the NRRP: drafting, governance, and implementation. For each of these issues, an attempt will be made to define the role played by the regions and local authorities and their relationship with the central government, to identify elements of continuity and disruption concerning the trends present in the system of territorial autonomies prior to the adoption of the Plan. The analysis leads to the conclusion that the NRRP has given the system a shift towards centralism. If the reforms and investments envisaged in the Plan are successful, however, this could herald the opening of a new season for territorial autonomies in Italy.