Centres of government (CoG) provide support to the head of Government (the president in most LAC countries) and the Cabinet of ministers. One of their main roles is to ensure that the policies proposed and implemented by line ministries are aligned with the government’s priorities, which are usually laid out in the government programme. To such end, at the time of designing strategies and policies, the CoG works with line ministries to set targets and action plans to achieve them, and aligns budget resources with such plans. At the time of implementation, the CoG monitors progress towards such targets and provides assistance to improve the performance of line ministries.
At the time of designing national strategies, the CoG identifies and defines whole-of-government strategic priorities in 10 out of 14 LAC countries, compared to 18 out of 33 OECD countries. The CoG co-ordinates the design of long-term strategic planning with line ministries in another six LAC countries. By contrast, this was the most predominant role of CoGs in OECD countries (24 of them). A similar proportion of OECD and LAC countries reported that the CoG mandates line ministries to develop long-term strategic plans in cross-cutting areas (13 out of 33 and 5 out of 14 respectively).
When implementing whole-of-government strategic priorities, the CoG monitors implementation in all LAC countries (compared to 28 OECD countries), and collects reports and carries out evaluations, except in Barbados (compared to 23 OECD countries). A similar proportion of CoGs from LAC and OECD countries ensure that proposals are linked to government priorities (11 out of 14 and 25 out of 33 respectively). Half of the CoGs in LAC co-ordinate the implementation of strategic priorities, a smaller proportion than among OECD countries (20 out of 33). Re-allocating resources to meet strategic goals is less common (5 out of 14 in LAC), although more prevalent than among OECD countries (4 out of 33).
In LAC, the most widely used mechanism to ensure that government policies are implemented by line ministries is monitoring their implementation: all LAC countries did this in 2017, compared to 29 out of 33 in the OECD.
Chile, Costa Rica, Honduras and Uruguay reported having performance targets in 2015 but not in 2018, decreasing the proportion of countries using them from 9 out of 11 in 2015 to 8 out of 14 in 2018. Performance targets are less preeminent among OECD countries, only 13 out of 33 set them. On the contrary, more LAC countries are using work-plans for the implementation of the government programme, for instance Guatemala, Paraguay and Peru. In 2018, 9 out of 14 LAC countries had such work-plans in place, compared to 18 out of 33 OECD countries.
In order to carry out strategic management and monitoring tasks, 12 out of 14 LAC countries in the survey had a specific unit or team responsible for tracking progress (such as a delivery unit). These units have been established in countries like the Bahamas, Chile, Colombia and Peru since 2013 with the functions of defining priorities, detailing implementation planning, generating continuous and reliable data to measure performance and providing spaces and incentives to intervene when objectives are not being met. They contributed to reducing crime (homicides and theft), and time and costs of infrastructure projects, improving learning outcomes, and improving health services, among others. Their value added was perceived to be higher for multidimensional priorities and in low institutional capacity contexts (Lafuente and Gonzalez, 2018).
