Public management and policy failures under a systems approach Child protection in Chile

We reviewed and systematized the literature about systems approaches across various disciplines and—drawing from this research—proposed a conceptual framework to examine contemporary public management and policy phenomena. This analytical lens considers the identification and description of significant public systems dimensions and the potential relationships among them producing emergent properties. We then applied this conceptual framework to examine persistent failures of the Chilean government child protection from 1990 to 2019, which became publicly known and have resulted in several public scandals since 2014. We double coded 11 major policy reports comprehensively detailing the public management and policy problems of Chile’s child care system. Several system failures emerged, such as the lack of formal institutions and governance structures to regulate and standardize public servants’ decisions and practices; the deficient professional capacity in crucial areas for accomplishing childcare (e.g., pharmacists or psychologists); useless registries’ digitalization to trace children interventions across all the policy sectors involved in the system and overtime; and the work overload of judges, which usually lead them to superficial case analyses and uninformed decisions. Our results contribute to a more holistic and modern study of public management and policy phenomena, whereby some findings—not noticeable under traditional and more reductionistic conceptual frameworks—might emerge more easily.