A vision for Denmark: an innovative public sector that promotes quality and shared responsibility
29 June 2012
The challenges that the public sector needs to face nowadays, including a combination of rising demands, continuing fiscal constraints, and a growing number of complex problems makes it difficult for them to solve with the same approaches and solutions. With this thought in mind, a broad circle of Danish government researchers developed a framework for a new Danish government policy. As outlined by the researchers, Denmark will need to find a new way forward with solutions that apply increasingly innovative approaches to the areas of public policy, public services, and public regulation.
The goal of the new policy (Danish language only) is to promote economic, social, political, and environmental sustainability within the country. It was created to strengthen and revitalize the Danish public sector, to make it more able to solve the central challenges of the country's welfare society, while also safeguarding social cohesion to ensure the private sector's future competitiveness.
The recommendation, as outlined in the new policy, is a broad solution consisting of market-based competition and utilizing private sector management practices to deal with the challenges of rising service expectations, limited resources, and increasingly complex problems overall. Among other researcher recommendations, I can mention better interaction between state, regions and municipalities; emphasis on the establishment of a partnership network and dialogue-based forms of contract and contract management; and internal rules and value-for-money systems must create meaningful and result-focused management and promote learning, motivation and innovation.
On this topic, Margrethe Vestager, the Danish Minister of Economy and the Interior, emphasizes that an increased effort on digitization throughout Denmark is one of the Danish government's primary focuses to promote growth and innovation-and the desire of the new government policy is to realize this effort in the public sector as well.
For my full views on the new vision for the Danish public sector, you can
view them here.
Looking forward to hearing your thoughts on this topic, as well as other good case practices of this sort that you might have come across.
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