Diez dimensiones para medir la gestión municipal por organización y servicios garantizados: la certificación de excelencia de Concepción, Chile

Abstract

The research explains the process developed during 2020, between the University of Concepción (Chile) and the local municipality, which culminated with a scrutiny of the management in ten key dimensions of the internal municipal organization -structure in form, tax collection, electronic government, maintenance policy, transparency, among others-. It also analyzes the specific impacts on the services provided by the municipality -such as social policy, green infrastructure, urban management, participation and cooperation- and on its partnerships with society and public and private entities. The piloting of the Municipal Certification of Excellence (MCE) required an interaction with data, national sources, but also the adjustment of the ten indicators per dimension in an autopoietic dialectic, where the interpretive scheme was corrected in interaction with the same organization, through the Municipal Administration team, comparing the reality of Concepción with other regional capitals of Chile. It also considered tests, being its sources of intervention the tradition of management evaluation systems and agreements of compliance with standards of the OECD countries, the proposal of guaranteed municipal services to break the banal autonomism without responsibility carried out by the State Commission for Decentralization (2014) and the emblematic case of “Bogotá Cómo Vamos”. The process culminated with the requirement of an improvement plan for each indicator, generating an x-ray of the management with six dimensions rated as “excellent” and four rated as “good, with structural challenges”. In this way, a process with open data on the qualification of municipal management was achieved in Chile, breaking a key resistance of the associations of municipalities for systems of greater monitoring of local management in Chile, accustomed to being accountable for projects in a generic way without dialogue with their planning instruments in real impacts. Such learning allows enriching the dominant approaches of quality management, focused on organizational processes and macro evaluations that look at territorial indicators that depend on socio-economic contexts and national policies, placing the emphasis on institutional dimensions that improve management with measurable results of local services that should be guaranteed to citizens.