Structuring expert knowledge in public policies: towards another local governance in Cuba

Abstract

In the new Cuban institutional design, the Territorial and Local Development Strategies are instituted as political and administrative instruments that contain and condense the fundamental core of public management. From this environment, the Cuban political system is opened to the possibility of designing and implementing public policies based on the governmental and state specificities of the nation. For the first time, public policies are considered in the Cuban socialist project as ideal instruments to develop government management, expand the democratic bases of the system and make viable the municipal economic potentialities from autonomy and decentralization. The article focuses the analysis on the role of knowledge actors, specialists or experts in the making of public policies. It provides a theoretical argument aimed at substantiating, or establishing logical foundations necessary for a future taxonomy of experts within public policies. It approaches the definition of the contents that singularize the practices of expert knowledge and the limits necessary for its exercise, always in tension with the conventional, rigid, unidirectional, and top-down forms in which the constituted power, the specialized knowledge of other experts and the traditional knowledge of the communities where they are located materialize. The objective of the article is conceived from the need to publicly institute expert knowledge as the most necessary of the resources available to public administrations for an efficient, effective, expeditious, agile, transparent and sustainable exercise of local and territorial government.