In Latin America, there are more than 16,000 local governments that face increasingly complex challenges every day: security, climate change, mobility, and health. They are the first point of contact between the State and citizens, and for that reason, the closest engine for transforming territories.
The problem is that, although municipalities have spent years developing new capabilities to adapt, that knowledge is rarely systematized. Lessons are learned but not shared. Efforts that others have already solved are repeated.
This report seeks to close that gap: between 2019 and 2022, Unit worked with 170 local governments across 17 countries, combining transformation programs, co-design processes, and strategic design. From that work —crossed with a review of academic literature— came this synthesis, designed to turn practical knowledge into something replicable.
170
local governments analyzed by Unit between 2019 and 2022
17
countries represented in the sample
This first issue is designed for four types of readers:
- People who work in local public services and seek to innovate in their day-to-day work.
- Public-sector leaders looking for a concrete path to transform their organizations.
- People and organizations that collaborate with local governments and want to better understand how to generate synergies.
- Funding agencies, multilateral organizations, and NGOs seeking evidence about local challenges from practice.
The central finding is that local governments, without coordinating with each other, develop very similar capabilities to face very similar problems. These capabilities —drawing on Rainer Kattel’s notion of "dynamic capabilities"— are grouped into three dimensions:
Learn
(1)how teams incorporate new knowledge into their daily practice, from "learning by doing" to the use of evidence and methods from other disciplines.
Connect
(2)how they connect with other actors in the territory, communicate in their audience’s language, and design honest and legitimate co-design processes.
Signal
(3)how they mobilize people, accelerate projects, and align resources and institutions around a common purpose.
Each pattern is accompanied by a real case —Bogotá, Hermosillo, Renca, São Paulo, Peñalolén, Marcovia, among others— that shows the capability in action, not just in theory.
The path to transformation is not in technology. It is in people and in all the actors who participate in the territory.
The report proposes three steps to put this into practice in any organization:
Socialize
(1)making the patterns known to the actors who participate in the territory.
Diagnose
(2)understanding the maturity level of the organization and its team, and identifying gaps.
Act
(3)charting concrete action paths to develop each capability.
The full report —with the 10 patterns in detail, the featured cases, and the final reflections— is available for download.
How to cite?
Unit (2023). Patterns of Transformation: the experience of local governments. Public Design No. 1, March 2023. Unit. Santiago, Chile.
