Abstract

Public administrations must adapt to the current needs and demands of society, characterised by growing complexity, increasingly rapid change, and greater density of the interrelationships between individuals. The intensity of the necessary organisational changes brings us to define the concept of public innovation, to designate the application of ideas and new practices in the field of public management with the aim to generate social value. This article gives account of the Plan of Public Innovation of the Basque Government, which is now in force, and gives special attention to its relationship with the management of information, highlighting the aspects of the Plan that are more directly linked with this organisational function.

Abstract

Budget visualization tools facilitate the communication of complex technical information. In this paper, we analyse the main technical, individual and organizational factors that affect its implementation and use. Through a questionnaire survey we have collected data from those responsible for the web application “Dónde van mis impuestos” (“Where do my taxes go?”) in 23 Spanish regional and local governments. Our findings show that these tools have a small number of users but that their main target are not citizens but specific groups, mainly media and political groups. Its adoption is neither a budgetary nor technological problem, although the free software license gives clear advantages. The impulse for adoption is mainly political with the main focus on financial and budgetary transparency but sometimes also on participatory transparency or microtransparency. Finally, we detect a serious risk of governance generated by the lack of clear transparency and accountability strategies in the administrations, as well as an absence of operational procedures to adapt to the changing budgetary structure.