In early June, we took part in the Creative Bureaucracy Festival (CBF 2025) in Berlin—an event that has become a key space for those of us who believe innovation is not a luxury reserved for times of stability, but a necessary tool to navigate today’s institutional complexity. This year, we were implementation partners and brought our podcast to the heart of the festival, producing a special itinerant edition with live interviews and conversations featuring voices from across Ibero-America.
We posed three key questions inspired by the CBF2025 discussions: What does it mean to innovate from within a policrisis? What new rules are shaping public–private collaboration? Can public innovation sustain democracy when it begins to falter? The answers shaped this episode into a cartography of reflections and analysis on the possibilities emerging from our side of the world.
Learning to innovate from within the Policrisis
In Ibero-America, the term “policrisis” is far from new. What other regions are beginning to recognize as a systemic condition of overlapping crises has, for decades, been the everyday terrain from which we’ve attempted to sustain public life. It's a condition that ebbs and flows but never truly disappears. This ongoing instability has shaped a unique approach to innovation: one born in the cracks, with limited resources, formal and informal constraints, and yet an extraordinary capacity for ingenuity, functional adaptability, and institutional creativity.
As Sarah Chávez (Hertie School Policy Lab, Mexican in Germany), noted, this normalization of crisis has turned the region into a “laboratory of resilience.” In her view, this redefines the role of innovation -not as a way to anticipate crisis, but to inhabit it, to understand its rules in a volatile environment. Within this logic, public innovation in our region is not only about efficiency or improving quality of life; it is also about validating diverse visions of what development and well-being mean. There is no single model of public innovation, and the condition of policrisis demands that we recognize and act upon this diversity.
Along these lines, Tatiana Fernández (Generalitat de Catalunya, Spain) reminded us that many institutions remain trapped in silos, which make them dysfunctional in the face of complex challenges. And it is citizens and their well-being who pay the price. Her call to integrate systems thinking into local action echoed across the CBF2025, where the importance of community and territorial articulation stood out as an alternative to fragmented and outdated governance logics.
A two-way street: the new public-private pact in Ibero-America
Public–private collaboration in Latin America is undergoing a moment of redefinition. For many years, the relationship between these two sectors was shaped by mistrust, unclear regulation, uncritical outsourcing, or binary ideological positions. Today, however, the rise of GovTech as both an ecosystem and collaboration model, along with the emergence of new civic and tech actors, offers a renewed opportunity to rethink partnerships based on complementarity, co-creation, and shared impact.
This is not about simply opening the door to the private sector, but about redesigning the conditions for meaningful engagement -where the State acts as a strategic actor, maintaining its regulatory authority, safeguarding the public interest, and demanding public value. As Alejandra Díaz (Municipalidad de Camden, Colombian in UK) put it, the public sector must learn to ask better questions, set terms, and engage with discernment. Only then can we extract the best from the private sector while also challenging it to raise its standards.
Jimena Aucique (Colombian, GovTech Latam - BID Lab) emphasized the importance of building trust and creating relationships where both sides benefit. We must leave behind unilateral, extractive, and convenience-driven approaches and move toward frameworks of incremental co-responsibility where each party assumes its role in generating public value. Agustín Long, (Universidad de la República, Uruguay), contributed another key perspective: the university as an ally in the GovTech ecosystem -a space for experimentation, prototyping, and knowledge transfer. These institutions must also adapt to more experimental modes of engagement with the State, where startups, open solutions, and localized capacities can emerge. In this new pact, value isn’t measured by scale alone but by the ability to respond to real public challenges with contextual intelligence, a deep understanding of public–private operations, and the strategic use of technology to power those collaborations forward.
Innovating to protect democracy (and democracy to enable innovation)
One of the most powerful questions we raised in Berlin was about the virtuous cycle between innovation and democracy. Technological solutions and operational improvements may exist, but without democratic institutions -without transparency or legitimacy-there is a risk of reinforcing authoritarian logics, deepening inequality, and eroding the social contract.
We are at a critical moment. The latest Latinobarómetro shows a sustained decline in trust in democratic systems. In this context, public innovation has an urgent role to play: to rebuild the sense of belonging and dignity among citizens and all actors involved. Innovation must not only reach people, it must also signal: “We are here. We see you. We are delivering".
As Federico Vaz, (National Agency of Innovation and Research - ANII, Uruguay y Royal College of Art, UK): said, innovation is no longer optional. If the State fails to reinvent itself, it will lose its legitimacy and its ability to deliver value, leaving a vacuum to be filled by actors who may operate under less democratic logics. Mariana Lavín, (Chilean in Germany, Better Politics Foundation) emphasized the need to cultivate adaptive leadership, with differentiated capacities depending on the role and experiential background of public officials. As she put it: “You can’t expect the same from a career civil servant as from an elected politician, but both must be able to innovate from where they are.”
Luis Felipe Álvarez (Costa Rican in Denmark, Copenhagen Institute for Futures Studies) added a global perspective: if democracies fail to represent and protect, multilateralism will also falter -and with it, the ability to scale public innovations globally.
Five takeaways from Berlin
Policrisis is the context. In Latin America, innovation is driven by urgency, not by stability.
Public–private partnerships must be built on trust, mutual interest, and State leadership. Effective collaboration requires reciprocity and co-responsibility.
Public innovation must go beyond service delivery. It must reinforce the democratic message and help redefine the social pact with citizens and all stakeholders.
Local is a privileged space for institutional experimentation. But it must connect to larger scales. We need testing grounds within the public sector, in public–private settings, and especially within academia—which plays a key role in bridging and translating both dynamics.
The challenge ahead
The challenges our institutions face cannot be solved through linear approaches. Complexity has become a structural condition of the present, and public innovation must respond with long-term vision -not just with immediate reaction. Ibero-America’s experience navigating policrisis forces us to stop treating innovation as a merely technical tool. It is a techno-political strategy for democratic sustainability, aimed at improving well-being and restoring the promise of the public sector for all actors involved. That’s why the real challenge is not just to innovate, but to consolidate a resilient infrastructure for public innovation -one that can endure beyond individual projects, political cycles, or temporary enthusiasm.
