Government Unstuck

2. Towards a Government Unstuck: What is the direction of change?

Abstract

This chapter presents the direction of change at the heart of the Government Unstuck agenda. It describes the characteristics of a government capable of delivering meaningful change for citizens while reinforcing democratic legitimacy and public trust. The chapter explores four mutually reinforcing objectives: building a new relationship between governments and citizens; simplifying government and regulation; restoring room for manoeuvre in public finances; and developing more prepared and proactive government. For each objective, it examines what becoming “unstuck” would mean in practice and the changes required to close the gap between current capabilities and this ambition.

2.1. Introduction

This chapter sets out the first part of the Government Unstuck agenda, presenting an aspirational direction of change for how governments can become “unstuck”, and thereby capable of unleashing their capacity to deliver meaningful change for citizens, while strengthening the democratic legitimacy and public trust on which sustained action depends. This direction of change, as it will be referred to throughout this report, contains four key objectives:

1. A new relationship between governments and citizens.

2. A significantly simplified government and regulations.

3. Restoring governments' room for manoeuvre in their public finances.

4. Prepared and proactive government.

Across these four objectives, a common pattern emerges: the systems within which governments operate reward too much the accumulation of rules, programmes and commitments, as well as risk aversion and reactive responses, compared to the review, consolidation, innovation or anticipation. This is the result of the pace of change and fast evolving citizens expectations and attitudes towards government. Closing the gap between current practice and the objectives set out in this section therefore requires more than incremental reform within each domain. It requires transforming the underlying incentives, structures and capabilities that keep governments stuck. This following chapter examines each objective in turn, sets out what an unstuck government looks like in practice, and identifies what closing the gap would require. Chapter 3 then turns to the concrete practices that show where countries are already making progress.

2.2. A renewed relationship between government and citizens

2.2.1. Why this matters now

The 2026 OECD Trust Survey points to significant democratic challenges, not because citizens have lost faith in democracy itself, but because many no longer believe they can meaningfully influence decisions between elections. While 68% of respondents from OECD Member countries believe voting influences what government does, only 31% feel that people like them have a say in government decisions (see Figure 2.1). This last data point emerges as one of the strongest drivers of trust in government - with a 47-percentage point difference in trust between those who feel people like them have a say and those who do not. Additional data points reinforce this message. Only around 40% of people feel confident in their own ability to participate in politics, while 39% believe that participating in a public consultation influences government decisions, and 32% think governments are likely to adopt the views expressed through those consultations. Similarly, only 39% believe governments would change a policy if a majority of people opposed it. The most commonly cited barrier to having an effective say in policymaking is the perception that political officials are out of touch with ordinary people. These findings also extend to representative institutions: almost half of respondents report low or no trust in their national legislature, only around one-third believe an elected representative would provide a meaningful response if contacted, and only around 40% believe legislatures effectively hold governments to account. Taken together, these findings suggest that citizens continue to value representative democracy but increasingly expect more meaningful opportunities to shape decisions between elections than existing democratic institutions and participation mechanisms currently provide (OECD, 2026[1]).

Figure 2.1. A vast majority of citizens believe voting in elections and referendums can influence government

Share of population who indicate different levels of influence of indicated form of civic participation on what government does, OECD, 2025

Note: The figure shows the unweighted OECD averages of responses to the question “In your opinion, how much influence can each of the following actions, when taken by people like you, have on what government does? By 'significant influence', we mean an action that is likely to lead to direct policy changes or serious consideration by decision makers.”

Source: OECD (2026[1]), OECD Survey on Drivers of Trust in Public Institutions 2026 Results: Navigating Rising Expectations and New Horizons, OECD Publishing, Paris, https://doi.org/10.1787/9eb63fec-en.

These findings from the OECD trust survey likely reflect the fact that governments today operate in societies undergoing profound transformation, and governments have been unable to keep up. Citizens are more connected, informed and vocal than ever before, and they increasingly engage, mobilise and form opinions in ways that many governments are often less equipped to understand or respond to. Public debate is moving from being shaped primarily by “one to many” systems (e.g. mainstream media, public broadcasters, and governments) to highly decentralised “many-to-many” dynamics, characterised by fragmented and personalised digital information ecosystems, and influenced by online communities, trusted individuals, alternative media and often leaderless social movements. This can weaken shared reference points and allow small but loud voices to dominate public debate. At the same time, many of the intermediary structures that traditionally helped governments channel and negotiate societal demands have weakened or fragmented, including political parties, trade unions, civil society organisations and traditional media (OECD, 2024[2]). As a result, governments are rarely the primary agenda setters in public debate, and perceptions of their actions are increasingly shaped by intermediaries such as peer networks and online influencers curated by online platforms algorithms. As of 2025, 21% of Americans (and 38% of those under 30) regularly turn to online influencers for news, while in the United Kingdom nearly 55% of 16-to-34-year-olds get news from influencers every day (Pew Research Center, 2025[3]; IPSOS, 2025[4]).

These shifts create a new situation in the relationship between governments and citizens. The traditional means for governments to understand societal views and build ownership for policies and reforms have lost some of their weight. While many new tools exist to ensure more meaningful citizen participation and help governments understand emerging concerns and anticipate societal reactions, they still struggle to anticipate implementation challenges, communicate credibly, explain difficult trade-offs in plain language, maintain support for complex reforms and demonstrate responsiveness in ways citizens perceive as meaningful. As a result, even technically sound reforms can appear disconnected from citizens’ realities and encounter opposition, mobilisation and legal challenges that slow or prevent well-meaning action in the public interest. This growing mismatch between how societies function and how governments operate contributes to a perception that governments are becoming “stuck”.

2.2.2. Renewed democratic engagement

The same technological and societal transformations that make it harder to govern also create opportunities to reset and strengthen this relationship. Digital technologies, data and AI increasingly make it possible for governments to develop more continuous, responsive and adaptive relationships with citizens through stronger societal understanding, more tailored engagement and richer feedback loops between citizens, policymaking and service delivery. These technologies also create opportunities to draw on wider sources of societal expertise, lived experience and collective intelligence to improve policy decisions and tailor public services. At the same time, digital technologies cannot systematically replace face-to-face interactions, and they can create new challenges related to fairness, social cohesion, information integrity, privacy and data protection. The direction set out in this section is therefore to use these new capabilities to improve both policymaking for long-term and complex public challenges, and day to day service delivery, in ways that strengthen legitimacy, responsiveness and governments’ capacity to act while preserving democratic safeguards, transparency and trust.

Reflecting society, shaped with citizens

Rather than relying only on elections, formal consultation exercises and traditional intermediaries to understand public priorities, governments are increasingly complementing these mechanisms with more continuous signals and input from society, often combining online and offline participatory methods. New analytical capabilities can open opportunities to combine participation with other rich forms of societal insight, drawing on new sources of real-time perception and behavioural data, service feedback and interactions with public administration, complaints and appeals procedures, social listening and analysis of societal trends to identify emerging issues and concerns, anticipate citizen reaction, and adapt earlier. These capabilities can also help governments distinguish broad societal sentiment from highly amplified online voices which often drown out the views of a less visible “silent majority” (OECD, 2026[5]). Some countries are already putting pieces in place. For example, France’s Government Information Service has developed an AI-enabled analytics capability that integrates social media, press and other information sources to identify emerging narratives and provide real-time insight to communicators and decision makers and its Service for Vigilance and Protection against Foreign Digital Interference documents and discloses online information manipulation campaigns publicly. Meanwhile, Finland’s National Dialogues provide a more face-to-face example of a structured and recurring model for social listening, where government, together with civil society, convenes facilitated conversations across communities to understand how people experience change, surface concerns and identify emerging issues. Insights are synthesised centrally and used to inform government understanding and agenda setting.

This deeper and continuous engagement can enable governments to govern with citizens as contributors to solutions. Drawing more systematically on citizens’ lived experience and willingness to contribute time, ideas, expertise and problem-solving capacity enables governments to further improve policy design and implementation. New forms of engagement, spanning from advanced democratic innovations such as deliberative processes, to the use of digital platforms enhanced by AI and other emerging technologies, can create opportunities to involve wider groups, including those who have been less engaged in public life (OECD, 2025[6]). One illustration of this is Brazil’s use of an online “Brasil Participativo” platform, combined with in-person engagement across all federal states, to involve citizens directly in setting priorities for the national Multiannual Plan (2024-2027), bringing participation into core government priority setting rather than treating it as a standalone engagement exercise. Approaches such as this can allow governments to access forms of collective intelligence that have been difficult to mobilise at scale, while making participation more continuous and embedded across the policy cycle.

The challenge with these mechanisms will be to first avoid a tick-the-box exercise for consultation, second to differentiate the consultation of citizens from those of stakeholders—the former having close to binding consequences on decision making while the latter remain purely consultative, third to avoid creating an unreadable ‘noise’ of consultation, and, finally, to give clarity on the results of how consultations have driven decisions.

Better day-to-day services that meet citizens’ evolving needs and expectations

This new relationship between governments and citizens can also make the experience of government in people's daily lives smoother, by anticipating and responding to their needs. Public services will become more responsive to evolving societal needs, changing expectations and rapid technological advances. This is particularly important today, as only about four in ten people across the OECD find it likely that public services are responsive to innovative ideas and complaints (OECD, 2026[1]). Rather than adapting slowly through periodic reforms, governments will increasingly build continuous feedback loops into service delivery and administrative interactions, allowing services to evolve more quickly in response to how citizens live, work and interact. Services then become more seamless across institutions and channels, easier to navigate and better able to respond to increasingly diverse expectations and circumstances. Citizens will also be increasingly involved in shaping services through co-creation and, where appropriate, co-delivery approaches that draw on lived experience and local knowledge to improve outcomes and strengthen responsiveness (OECD, 2011[7]).

This shift also requires governments to rethink how they communicate and inform citizens about day-to-day services. Governments will meet citizens where they are, including through digital spaces and platforms where people tend to place greater trust in individuals and communities that resonate with their experience than in traditional institutional voices. At the same time, information and services need to remain accessible and consistent across different entry points, allowing people to access them in whichever way suits them best. Governments therefore work more through trusted and human-centred channels, including frontline workers, local actors and trusted intermediaries who help citizens understand the support available to them. This approach can help governments reach citizens who are disengaged, distrustful or face barriers to accessing public services and public institutions. For example, the United Kingdom’s Government Communication Service’s New Media Unit was created in recognition that many citizens no longer engage with traditional government communication. It uses trusted frontline figures, localised storytelling and concrete demonstrations of government delivery to reach audiences who feel disconnected from institutions.

Over time, advances in digital technologies and AI may create opportunities for a more proactive and tailored model of public service delivery. Agentic AI systems (see Box 2.2) could increasingly help governments anticipate needs, personalise interactions, co-ordinate support across services and reduce the burden on citizens to repeatedly navigate administrative systems. Citizens may experience services that adapt to their circumstances, eliminate unnecessary interactions, provide support before problems escalate and reduce the need to repeatedly seek out information or initiate contact, ensuring that the information is only provided once. Realising this vision will require careful governance, strong safeguards and continued human oversight to ensure that more personalised and proactive services strengthen the relationship between government and citizens rather than creating opacity, dependency or concerns around privacy and autonomy. It will also require governments to grapple with questions about the relative value of digital delivery vis-a-vis interpersonal interactions, the ideal balance between the two, and associated accountability implications.

More meaningful participation in a thriving civic space

All together, these shifts can contribute to stronger accountability and legitimacy by creating clearer connections between citizen voice, public decisions and government action. The objective is to make engagement more meaningful and connected to outcomes. Governments will increasingly focus on the quality rather than quantity of participation, using different forms of engagement across a broader democratic spectrum, depending on the context and objectives – including participation, deliberation, consultation and representative decision making. Participation thereby reinforces representative democracy and strengthens governments’ capacity to act by improving decisions, building support and increasing legitimacy while enabling citizens to play a more meaningful role in shaping public action.

This new relationship also depends on protecting the conditions that allow citizens and organisations to contribute constructively to public life. Civic space becomes recognised not only as a democratic safeguard, but as governance infrastructure that enables societies to self-organise, articulate needs, contribute expertise and hold governments to account. Strong civic space supports democratic resilience and collective problem-solving, while helping governments remain connected to evolving societal expectations. From a citizen’s perspective, accountability becomes more tangible: people can better see how decisions are made, understand how their voice matters, and trust that institutions remain both open to society and capable of delivering results.

2.2.3. From intention to action: Closing the gap

The direction of change set out above implies a fundamentally different relationship between governments and citizens. Yet across many OECD countries, there is a gap between today’s realities and this future state. Many governments are not yet equipped to listen to and understand society in real time, despite growing access to behavioural, perception and interaction data and new tools to bring together insights from online and in-person channels. Public communication has also struggled to adapt to changing information environments, where citizens increasingly rely on personalised and decentralised networks, online communities, content creators and algorithmic ranking, rather than institutional messaging. At the same time, while governments have expanded participation opportunities, engagement frequently remains fragmented and insufficiently integrated into policymaking - too often treated as procedural exercises rather than mechanisms that shape policy choices or strengthen legitimacy - while newer approaches such as deliberative processes remain underused and difficult to scale, particularly at national level (OECD, 2025[6]).

Closing these gaps will depend on progress across several interconnected fronts that are further detailed in Chapter 3. For example, the defining practices on continuous societal listening (see Section 3.4.2 of Chapter 3) show how governments can build a richer understanding of citizens' experiences by drawing on a wider range of evidence and creating feedback loops that connect public insight directly to policy and implementation. The practices on public communication (see Section 3.4.4 of Chapter 3) show how the function can take on a broader role to unstick government, fostering constructive dialogue, building understanding and explaining difficult trade-offs in plain language. Meanwhile, practices outlining more meaningful and better-targeted participation (see Section 3.4.3 of Chapter 3) provide examples that can strengthen both the quality and legitimacy of day-to-day governance and complex decision making. Underpinning these changes are stronger leadership, incentives and co-ordination across government, outlined in practices throughout Chapter 3, including the section on public service culture (see Section 3.2.3 of Chapter 3) and the governance of AI (see Section 3.1.3 of Chapter 3).

2.3. Significantly simplified government and regulations

2.3.1. Why this matters now

Across OECD countries, governments have seen an accumulation of institutional, regulatory and procedural complexity. Faster pace of change in societies, more complex policy challenges, rising expectations for protections, heightened accountability pressures, increased public scrutiny, as well as a tendency to respond to crises through additional safeguards and controls have contributed to more complex administrative structures and a growing stock of rules and processes that can constrain governments’ ability to act decisively, allocate resources effectively and deliver results. To a certain degree, in countries which have attained a certain level of development with strong democratic requirements, a degree of complexity is expected. At the same time, rules and regulations are essential to protect public safety, maintain fair competition and deliver policy objectives. However, their excessive volume, inconsistency, layering and poor implementation can absorb administrative capacity and limit governments’ ability to respond effectively to emerging challenges, undermining the very goals they are meant to serve. Much of this accumulation is not incidental but structural: regulations designed to ensure competitiveness and fairness, internal controls introduced to prevent fraud, and institutional layers created to satisfy accountability requirements each serve a legitimate purpose individually but build up over time into a cumulative weight that no single actor set out to create.

Externally, governments have accumulated regulations, reporting obligations and compliance requirements that they themselves must administer, interpret and enforce. Regulatory requirements and compliance now rank as the top challenge for business across OECD countries, ahead of taxation (OECD, 2026[8]). Internally, institutions have also accumulated approval chains, co-ordination mechanisms and control processes governing the work of civil servants. Decades of institutional layering, overlapping mandates and redundant controls have produced administrative systems whose co-ordination costs often exceed the value of the specialisation they were designed to deliver. Half of civil servants report that existing rules and procedures hinder effective work, and government respondents from 72% of countries consider the level of regulation and bureaucracy excessive (OECD, 2025[9]; OECD, 2026[8]). The result is a public administration that devotes a growing share of its limited capacity to producing, administering and enforcing an expanding stock of external rules while simultaneously navigating its own internal complexity: co-ordinating across fragmented structures, complying with layered controls and reporting upwards. This tension can become self-reinforcing: when poorly implemented rules fail to resolve the policy challenges they were designed to address, the response is often further regulation, adding to the very burden that undermined effective implementation in the first place.

The costs of complexity fall on all sides of the relationship between government and the people and businesses it serves. For citizens, unnecessary complexity in access to public services imposes direct and hidden costs: time, confusion and foregone entitlements. About four in ten OECD Trust Survey respondents believe their government would improve a poorly performing service even if many people complained (OECD, 2026[1]). For business, the regulatory stock has expanded steadily, contributing to a measurable decline in economic dynamism: the share of new and young firms in employment has fallen by 6 percentage points in selected OECD countries since 2004 (OECD, 2025[10]). Over three-quarters of business organisations report that administrative costs have increased over the past three years, negatively affecting competitiveness, investment and innovation (OECD, 2026[8]). The burden is compounded by fragmentation and instability: business organisations in 70% of countries do not believe that regulations are generally consistent with one another, and in 63% of countries they report facing high costs simply to keep up with regulatory changes; resources devoted to understanding and tracking rules rather than to productive activity (OECD, 2026[8]). Elected leaders, too, increasingly experience the weight of institutional complexity as a constraint on their ability to govern: ministers and heads of government report that when they "pull the levers", the machinery does not respond at the speed or scale their mandates require, and the relationships at the top levels between politicians and the senior civil service can face strain as a result.

This shared frustration with governments and regulations’ excessive complexity helps explain why an increasing number of governments in countries such as Canada, Denmark, Germany and the United States, have placed regulatory and administrative simplification at the centre of their political agendas. Similarly, these topics have emerged as a leading priority of public administration reform. Over three-quarters of respondent countries that have or are developing an overarching strategy/framework aimed at transforming the public administration include simplification of public administrative processes, streamlining of public administration organisations and regulatory simplification as a core priority (see Figure 2.2).

Figure 2.2. Simplification of administrative processes is the most common priority in public administration reform strategies

Thematic areas covered by PAR strategies

Note: Results based on 25 OECD countries, which responded to the Question “What thematic areas does the strategy cover?”. Countries could select more than one option.

Source: 2026 OECD Government Unstuck Survey.

This political momentum is reinforced by two structural shifts that make radical simplification of government and regulation not only necessary but also easier. Data, digital technologies and AI offer unprecedented capacity to automate routine tasks, consolidate back-office functions and identify outdated or overlapping regulations — though only 18% of countries deploy such tools systematically today (OECD, 2025[11]). And large-scale retirements across OECD civil services open a once-in-a-generation window to reshape operating systems and organisational cultures around impact rather than process compliance. Together, political priority, technological possibility and demographic renewal create conditions for simplification at a depth that previous reform cycles could not achieve. Nevertheless, simplifying the stock and the flow of regulations is a difficult endeavour, and both business organisations and government agree in their vast majority that past efforts at simplification have been only somewhat or to some extent successful

2.3.2. The objective: Moving towards a legible, coherent and responsive state

The transformation described here moves governments along a spectrum of three mutually reinforcing qualities, legibility, coherence and responsiveness. Legible governments make rules, services and structures understandable.

In policymaking, legibility means that the regulatory environment is navigable and predictable. The rules governing a given activity, such as market entry, environmental compliance or access to social benefits, are clear, consistent and proportionate to risk. A firm or a citizen can determine what is required without having to reconcile overlapping or contradictory requirements issued by different authorities. Businesses can rely on a reasonable degree of regulatory stability over time, thus encouraging long-term investment decisions (OECD, 2026[8]; OECD, 2025[12]). It also requires that the allocation of responsibilities across the machinery of government is clear enough for accountability to function. When citizens, parliamentarians or auditors cannot readily determine which body is responsible for a given outcome, accountability becomes diffuse and the incentives for performance weaken. The answer is not to assign every outcome to a single body, since most policy challenges require horizontal collaboration, but to ensure that the allocation of roles and the mechanisms for joint accountability are transparent enough for oversight to function.

Legibility also extends to the rules that govern how government itself operates. When the regulatory frameworks for public procurement, financial management or programme implementation are so dense, complex or ambiguously drafted that officials cannot readily determine what they are permitted to do, the rational response is to default to the narrowest interpretation and replicate past practice, thus freezing investment, discouraging innovation and undermining the very policy objectives the rules were designed to support. A legible state is therefore one in which internal rules are clear enough for public servants to exercise the judgment their roles require.

In service delivery, legibility means that citizens do not need to decode the internal map of the administration to access the services they are entitled to. Services are organised around life events – having a child, starting a business, losing a job, retiring – rather than around the departments, agencies and levels of government that happen to administer them. The "once only " principle is operational: information already held by government is not requested nor provided again for another purposes. Forms, procedures and eligibility criteria are written in language that the people they are designed for can understand and act on.

For businesses, licence applications, permit renewals and reporting obligations follow predictable timelines and formats, rather than varying frequently across time, jurisdictions or agencies. Licensing and permitting processes are a critical test of legibility: when a business seeking to open a restaurant, build a facility or connect to the energy grid must navigate permits issued by multiple authorities under different legal bases, with inconsistent documentation requirements and unpredictable timelines, the regulatory environment is experienced as illegible regardless of the quality of the underlying rules. For instance, in Greece, the National Registry of Administrative Procedures (MITOS) provides a central platform for both citizens and civil servants to easily access comprehensive details on various administrative procedures, including prerequisites, required documents, processing steps, associated costs and timelines. In a similar manner, the politis.gov.gr platform enables citizens and businesses to digitally track their administrative requests from the submission stage to their completion, and access information on the responsible administrative entity and predicted completion time. The OECD's best practice principles for licensing and permitting emphasise that predictability, proportionality and clarity at the point of delivery are as important as the regulatory design behind them (OECD, 2025[13]). Similarly, legibility is equally critical in public procurement, where stable, predictable rules and processes are essential for businesses to compete effectively in this market which accounts for 13% of GDP in OECD countries.

Denmark's digital-ready legislation principles illustrate legibility at source: all new legislation must be drafted in terms clear and precise enough to be translated into digital processes, eliminating the ambiguity that forces businesses and officials to invest in interpreting their obligations. Denmark is now exploring how to apply this standard retrospectively to the approximately 1 600 laws that pre-date the requirement, a recognition that legibility cannot be achieved through communication alone if the underlying rules are drafted in language that is difficult to understand and apply in practice (OECD, 2025[14]).

Coherent governments align authority with responsibility

In policymaking, coherence means that regulatory frameworks, institutional mandates and delivery responsibilities are aligned, both with one another and with the government's strategic priorities. When regulations designed by different ministries, agencies or levels of government overlap, contradict one another, or are implemented inconsistently, the cumulative effect is not merely additional cost but an inability to pursue major policy objectives, such as economic growth and innovation, at the scale required. Coherence requires closing this gap: considering how new rules interact with existing frameworks at the design stage, co-ordinating across sectors and levels of government so that simplification achieved by one authority is not offset by requirements maintained or introduced by another, and ensuring that the bodies responsible for delivering on government priorities have the authority, resources and information to do so.

Regulatory stewardship, as practised in New Zealand, points in this direction. Every agency has an explicit, resourced and accountable responsibility to look across the whole regulatory chain, from the rules on the books to the organisations that implement them and the outcomes they produce, as well as to keep that chain coherent, up to date and aligned with its intended goals.

Internally, coherence also requires that government is lean, efficient and agile in how it organises its own operations and that the bodies responsible for delivering on government priorities have the authority, resources and information to do so. Indeed, when mandates overlap, when delivery responsibilities are split without adequate co-ordination mechanisms, and when accountability for cross-cutting outcomes is diffuse, the result is not just inefficiency but an inability to act on the priorities that citizens vote for. Back-office functions, such as financial management, human resources, or procurement, that are replicated across dozens or hundreds of separate bodies represent a structural cost that diverts resources from front-line delivery. A coherent government consolidates these functions through shared services and common platforms, eliminates structural duplication where separate organisations perform substantially the same task, and concentrates institutional capacity where it generates the highest public value. Digital-by-design approaches are central to this: when processes are designed around interoperable data and shared digital infrastructure from the outset, rather than digitising legacy paper workflows organisation by organisation, the scope for consolidation and efficiency is fundamentally greater. A coherent government also adopts tailored institutional solutions: rather than defaulting to the same bureaucratic template for every task, it deploys a wider repertoire of organisational forms, such as time-limited delivery bodies, cross-cutting co-ordination units or shared-service platforms, that are matched to the nature of the problem at hand.

In service delivery, coherence means that public services work together rather than in parallel. A family experiencing multiple needs – housing, health, employment support – should not be required to navigate separate systems, repeat its circumstances to different agencies, or reconcile inconsistent eligibility criteria. For businesses, coherence means that permitting, licensing and compliance processes are co-ordinated across the authorities involved rather than managed in sequence by each one independently. The integration is organisational and informational, not necessarily structural: shared platforms, interoperable data and joint accountability frameworks can achieve coherence without requiring every function to sit within the same institution. The one-stop-shop model, when it works, is an expression of coherence at the point of delivery. Denmark's single window for energy projects and the Netherlands' consolidation of 26 planning and environmental regimes into a single Omgevingswet framework, illustrate what can be achieved when co-ordination is designed into the system rather than left to the regulated party to manage [GOV/PGC/SBO/SIP(2026)3/REV1]. Chile offers a complementary example in environmental permitting. Without changing agencies’ legal mandates, the Ministry of Finance built an AI-enabled shared management platform that turns public case files into daily information on pending responses, deadlines and responsible agencies. Shared visibility across institutions and regular senior-level monitoring helped reduce overdue pronouncements from 33% to 3% in four months.

Responsive governments adapt rules, processes and forms to changing evidence

In policymaking, responsiveness at the design stage, means that the stock of regulation does not simply grow. Responsive governments create the conditions to test and learn before regulating at scale. Regulatory sandboxes, pilot programmes and experimental clauses allow governments to assess impact in controlled settings, identify unintended consequences early, and adjust or abandon approaches that do not deliver the expected results. Equally important, ex post evaluation of existing regulations, that is, assessing whether rules are still fit for purpose, whether their costs are proportionate to their benefits, and whether they should be amended or repealed, becomes a routine institutional function rather than a one-off event.

At the implementation stage, risk-based approaches to regulatory enforcement allow governments to concentrate oversight resources where risks are highest and to reduce unnecessary burdens on compliant and low-risk actors. More fundamentally, responsiveness requires a shift in how government relates to the people and firms it regulates – and to its own officials. A responsive government shifts towards trust-based relationships, both externally and internally, in which oversight is proportionate, compliant actors face lighter requirements, and resources are invested in detecting actual risk rather than controlling for hypothetical non-compliance.

Beyond the regulatory sphere, a responsive government fosters a civil-service culture that rewards the judgment, initiative and collaboration needed to deliver on major policy challenges, not only compliance with established procedures. Career frameworks, oversight mechanisms and accountability structures are designed so that officials who identify better ways of working are supported rather than exposed, and so that simplification is recognised as a contribution to public value rather than a source of institutional risk. Achieving this remains the most difficult transition: in 54% of countries surveyed, internal resistance and risk aversion are still cited as a key barrier to simplification outcomes (OECD, 2025[12]). Overcoming this requires structural supports alongside this cultural change: sunset clauses that force periodic review, oversight bodies that highlight what works as well as what fails, and career frameworks that recognise the judgment required to simplify rather than to add. It also extends to the forms of organisation government uses. A responsive state also develops a wider institutional repertoire, including time-limited and cross-cutting forms, and mechanisms for closing or transforming bodies when the problem they were created to address has changed.

In service delivery, responsiveness means that the services citizens and businesses interact with improve continuously on the basis of evidence about how they are actually experienced and delivered. It is a government that treats user experience as actionable evidence rather than background noise. Responsive service delivery also means embedding simplification as a continuous discipline across the full lifecycle of a service: designing services to avoid building in unnecessary burden from the outset, and systematically reviewing them as entitlements evolve, eligibility criteria change and real-world use reveals friction that was not visible at the design stage. The Franco-German Barometer on Administrative Complexity, which measures burden as citizens experience it across life events, points in the same direction: toward governments that define the quality of their services rather from the outside in than from the inside out (OECD, 2025[14]).

2.3.3. From intention to action: Closing the gap

A government that is legible, coherent and responsive to citizens would require a fundamentally different approach to designing rules, delivering services and organising institutions. Yet across OECD countries, all three areas have developed their own forms of accumulated complexity: regulatory frameworks that add requirements more readily than they remove them, services organised around institutional mandates rather than around users' needs, and internal processes that have come to substitute for professional judgement rather than support it. The cost falls on citizens and businesses in the form of time, effort and frustration, compounded by limited understanding of why government works the way it does. The cumulative effect is a system that has become difficult to navigate from the outside and resistant to change from the inside.

Closing the gap requires governments to tackle three deeply interconnected areas of simplification at the same time (see Figure 2.3), which are described in greater depth in Chapter 3:

Figure 2.3. Three interconnected areas of simplification

Source: OECD authors’ elaboration.

• Regulatory simplification. the defining practices of genuinely considering non-regulatory alternatives before regulating; anchoring impact assessment in outcomes and alternatives rather than process; shifting to a risk-based approach to regulatory design and delivery to ensure that compliance with regulation is not excessively burdensome and only used where truly needed to manage risks; mandating periodic ex post evaluation with clear triggers and independent quality control; and embedding a concept of regulatory stewardship across government, show how governments can reserve intensive instruments for the highest risks, shape decisions with evidence before a preferred option hardens, and settle enforcement and digital-readiness questions at the design stage rather than after. Stakeholder engagement remains crucial when drafting or implementing regulation, but needs to be applied more strategically to avoid being both burdensome and ineffective in achieving society-wide outcomes (see practices in Section 3.4 on “Risk-based and future-proof regulations” of Chapter 3).

• Service-delivery simplification. The defining practices on integrated life events, the once-only principle, proactive delivery through data and AI, making good design mandatory, and closing the measurement loop show how services can be organised around what people need rather than which institution provides them, how government can act on information it already holds, and how user-experience data can drive redesign rather than serve primarily as a reporting exercise (see Section 3.3.7 on “Human-centred design of public services”).

• Internal administrative simplification. The defining practices on rationalising the agency landscape, building shared services for back-office functions, making beige tape visible, and steering from the centre show how governments can consolidate where overlap generates cost without improving outcomes, replace duplicated corporate functions with shared platforms, assign internal procedural burden an institutional owner, and steer simplification across boundaries without taking every issue from the centre of government (see Sections 3.3.2 on “Fit-for-purpose institutional architecture and tackling beige tape” and 3.3.3 on “Strategic planning, prioritisation and co-ordination from the centre of government”).

Box 2.1. Beige tape

Beige tape is an emerging term from practitioner and public-sector management discourse used to describe administrative burdens that governments impose on themselves in delivering policies and services. Unlike the more established concept of regulatory burden placed on citizens or businesses, beige tape encompasses internal rules, processes, controls, approvals, reporting requirements, governance arrangements, and procedural obligations that apply within government organisations. These can have a regulatory basis or not.

The term is not widely defined in the academic literature, nor has it yet been systematically incorporated into national and international analytical frameworks. Although it creates administrative effort and transaction costs, beige tape is generally linked to justifiable objectives such as accountability, transparency, integrity, risk management, financial control, legal compliance, or democratic oversight. In this sense, it differs from red tape, a well-established concept in public administration that refers to rules or procedures that impose burdens without effectively serving their intended purpose. Red tape has been the subject of extensive academic research, measurement frameworks, and government reform initiatives, whereas beige tape remains a comparatively novel concept. Contemporary government efficiency efforts increasingly recognise that significant administrative burdens arise not only from dysfunctional or unnecessary rules (red tape), but also from legitimate internal requirements whose cumulative costs may impede agility, innovation, or productivity (beige tape).

Finally, to be effective, simple government and simple regulation also require having the right foundation in terms of data, digital technologies and workforce capabilities. The section 3.1 on “Trusted and connected digital technologies and data” in Chapter 3 shows that proactive service delivery to citizens and making the once-only-principle a reality requires closing the gap between formal data interoperability commitments across government and their operational reality, as well as investing in the digital infrastructure that integrated services or AI-enabled simplification requires. Public servants also need to be equipped with digital and data skills and given the authority, judgment and career incentives to simplify rather than to add (see Section 3.2 of Chapter 3).

2.4. Restoring governments’ room for manoeuvre in their public finances

2.4.1. Why this matters now

Governments are caught in a structural bind: the architecture of the budget is oriented towards inherited commitments and past choices, while the demands of a fast-changing world require a very different kind of fiscal agility. Addressing this situation requires a renewed approach to how public finances are managed and governed.

Across the OECD, public budgets can no longer accommodate the scale of demands and priorities pressing in on them, from competitiveness, environmental challenges, defence, digital transformation and ageing populations. Indeed, governments across the OECD are navigating the fiscal legacy of decades of successive and sometimes overlapping crises. Public debt in advanced economies rose sharply from around 73% of GDP in 2007 to approximately 110% in 2024, reflecting emergency responses to the global financial crisis, the COVID-19 pandemic, and successive energy and geopolitical shocks (OECD, 2026[15]). Not all crisis-era spending has been wound back, producing a "ratcheting up" dynamic that expands the baseline while shrinking room for active fiscal choice (NATO, 2025[16]). The end of the low-interest-rate environment has compounded matters: debt-servicing costs are now among the fastest-growing items of public expenditure.

This erosion of fiscal space is further amplified by deep structural rigidities within public budgets (Barnes, Cournède and Pascal, 2023[17]). In advanced economies, roughly one third of spending is non-discretionary and growing, driven by a set of legally anchored, institutionally embedded commitments that are not within the scope of annual reprioritisation efforts (Luiz de Mello & João Tovar Jalles, 2026[18]). Social protection and health expenditure represent the single largest category of government spending across the OECD, accounting for half of total government expenditures on average in 2023 (OECD, 2025[19]). In many countries, the public sector wage bill is also hard to compress: it accounted for an average of 20.6% of total government expenditure across OECD countries in 2023 (OECD, 2025[19]) and, in many jurisdictions, the civil service framework limits both headcount reductions and the pace of salary adjustments. Multi-year legal commitments, from infrastructure programmes to defence spending plans, or legally embedded sub-national transfers, add further rigidities. In some countries, the constraints are becoming acute: Switzerland’s “tied expenditure” has grown by 10 percentage points over the last decade and is projected to reach 65% of the federal budget in the near term, while in the United States, mandatory outlays have risen from below 5% of GDP in 1962 to above 15% in 2023 (OECD, 2025[20]).

The consequence is that governments’ fiscal margin for manoeuvre is being squeezed limiting their ability to respond to pressures and priorities when it is most needed. The Draghi report estimates that meeting Europe's broad economic and defence ambitions alone will require additional investment of nearly 5% of annual EU GDP (Draghi, 2024[21]). The defence component is particularly stark: NATO members have committed to spending 5% of GDP annually by 2035 on defence and defence-related requirements — 3.5% for core defence expenditure and a further 1.5% for critical infrastructure, civil preparedness, innovation and the defence industrial base. Meeting the 3.5% core defence target alone requires OECD–NATO Members to increase defence expenditure by an average of 1.9% of GDP relative to 2023 levels (OECD, 2025[12]). Current environmental challenges also demand sustained investment in grids, storage, low-carbon generation and the decarbonisation of energy-intensive industries, while securing critical digital and technological input, such as critical raw materials or AI and cloud infrastructure, will absorb hundreds of billions more. Demographic pressures add a further layer: pension spending in OECD countries, already at around 8.8% of GDP in 2023-2024, is projected to rise to 10% by 2050 (OECD, 2025[22]).

Slower economic growth compounds the pressure. Across the OECD, growth has run well below its pre-pandemic pace, and there is little sign of a return to earlier rates, meaning that debt and spending pressures are rising against a shrinking economic base (OECD, 2025[23]).

The mismatch between what governments can fund and what they are being asked to deliver is the defining fiscal challenge of the decade, and addressing it requires a fundamental rethink of how public finances are managed and governed.

2.4.2. The objective: Rebuilding margin for manoeuvre through sustainable, strategic and democratic public finances

The transformation described here is about restoring the capacity of governments to make active, strategic, democratic choices about public resources; that is, to allocate funding where it generates the highest public value for society, and in particular creates the best opportunities for the future, and the economy, to invest in the priorities that matter most for citizens and society, and to do so in ways that maintain fiscal sustainability and public trust over the long term. This requires progress along three interlinked areas: promoting sustainable public finances; enhancing strategic resource allocation; and rebuilding the fiscal contract with citizens. These areas are mutually reinforcing. Sustainability efforts taken today generate the fiscal space needed to invest in long-term priorities and maintain buffers against future shocks. Strategic flexibility and the ability to reallocate funding enable better alignment between the budget and the policy priorities that citizens have voted for. And placing democracy back at the centre of public finance, by equipping citizens to understand the trade-offs being made in their name and by ensuring that budgetary choices genuinely reflect the political mandates that produced them, provides the democratic foundation that the difficult work of redistributing public resources ultimately requires.

Promoting sustainable public finances

Sustainable public finances are the foundation that allows governments to absorb shocks without passing their costs to the next generation, and that creates the room for manoeuvre needed to invest in the policy priorities important for citizens. Sustainability is as much a democratic objective as a financial one: it preserves intergenerational fairness and helps give each successive government the room to act on its electoral programme.

A first priority to get to a Government Unstuck is to revisit the continued need for non-discretionary spending through routine reviews of baseline spending, alongside ambitious, structural reform in areas such as health, pensions and the public sector wage bill. By doing so, governments protect public investment and other flexible budget lines that drive service quality and long-term growth, ensuring that consolidation does not come at the expense of future capacity (OECD, 2025[12]; Luiz de Mello & João Tovar Jalles, 2026[18]). The United States Pay-As-You-Go legislation provides one illustration of how procedural rules can institutionalise fiscal discipline at the point where commitments are created. Sweden's pension system also provides an illustration of how sustainability can be embedded directly into non-discretionary spending: its notional defined contribution scheme incorporates an Automatic Balance Mechanism that triggers when pension liabilities exceed assets, adjusting the indexation of both accumulated entitlements and current pensions until balance is restored; a 2025 amendment introduced a symmetric surplus mechanism to distribute excess funds when the system is in surplus (OECD, 2026[15]). Here, AI and advanced analytics offer an important opportunity to increasingly allow ministries of finance to subject baseline spending to systematic review at a scale and frequency that was not previously feasible, identifying duplications, modelling counterfactuals, and flagging programmes whose results have drifted from their stated objectives, and turning baseline review from a periodic exercise into a continuous capability.

In this scenario, governments are also equipped to absorb economic shocks without permanently expanding the spending base, preserving the State’s capacity to respond when the next crisis arrives. This calls for robust countercyclical frameworks and specific tools that prevent temporary emergency measures from becoming permanent entitlements. Switzerland's Structural Budget Balance Rule, which permits countercyclical spending during downturns but requires offsetting surpluses during periods of growth, illustrates how credible fiscal rules can reconcile short-term responsiveness with long-term sustainability (OECD, 2023[24]). The systematic use of sunset clauses, regular reviews of tax expenditures and legal entitlements, and accurate accounting for the fiscal costs of disasters together help contain the ratcheting-up dynamics that follow crises.

Looking further ahead, governments will need to embed structured foresight and long-term fiscal projections at the heart of their budget processes, anticipating and accommodating predictable pressures well before they become acute. Demographic change is the most pervasive of these: ageing societies will continue to drive up the cost of pensions, health care and social care, and budget frameworks need to fully account for these trajectories rather than treating them as recurring surprises. Advances in modelling with real time and high-resolution administrative data are expanding the technical frontier of this work: independent fiscal institutions and finance ministries are increasingly able to simulate the distributional impacts of policy choices, stress-test budgets against multiple shock scenarios, and update projections in close to real time as economic conditions evolve, thus improving the accuracy and granularity of the analysis on which strategic choices ultimately rest. The United Kingdom's Office for Budget Responsibility’s Economic and Fiscal Outlooks include projections of mandatory spending pressures, and the Australian Treasury’s Intergenerational Reports assess structural budget challenges over a forty-year horizon, - both demonstrating how forward-looking fiscal analysis can inform more durable policy choices.

Enhancing strategic resource allocation

Beyond sustainability, the public budget becomes a genuine instrument of government strategy: one that is actively aligned with priorities, capable of shifting resources to where they generate the most public value, and oriented toward investment rather than inertia.

When planning and financing functions are tightly connected, budget decisions can be organised around strategic objectives, and programmes reviewed systematically for continued relevance, with those no longer delivering value systematically redesigned or stopped. Reallocation of this kind is politically and administratively demanding, and tighter institutional design does not by itself dissolve the pressures that entrench inherited allocations. But it does provide the analytical foundations, incentives and institutional venues through which reallocation becomes feasible, gradually weakening the default pull toward historical patterns (Barnes, Cournède and Pascal, 2023[17]). Its architectural backbone is a credible medium-term budgetary framework: multi-year, top-down expenditure ceilings set before line-ministry requests are even considered, requiring governments to make explicit trade-offs between priorities at the start of electoral cycles, and extending the planning horizon beyond the annual budget so that the multi-year cost of today's decisions is surfaced rather than deferred. To work credibly, such frameworks need to be forward looking, transparent, sufficiently cross-partisan to survive changes of government and have public buy-in – reducing the short-termism that drives fiscal deterioration and creating the shared context needed for difficult choices. Finland's four-year expenditure ceilings, renegotiated by Parliamentary cross-partisan Working Groups when funding sources change, and Australia's Forward Estimates illustrate how durable multi-year architecture can anchor strategic discipline.

Spending review processes complement MTBFs by supporting strategic reallocation. Spending reviews have been increasingly adopted in recent years. In countries with well-established spending review frameworks, they have evolved beyond a narrow focus on savings to become an important tool for challenging baseline expenditure, identifying legacy spending commitments, improving value for money and supporting the strategic reallocation of resources towards higher-priority objectives.

A third dimension of strategic public finances is a deliberate shift in the composition of expenditure toward growth-enhancing investment — the category of spending that yields the highest long-term public value through its effects on productive capacity, innovation and positive externalities. In this pillar, investment is understood under a broad definition, encompassing physical infrastructure, human capital, digital infrastructure, R&D, and the investment dimension of spending in sectors such as health and justice. This distinction is captured explicitly within the budget process. Canada's new Capital Budgeting Framework, introduced with Budget 2025, illustrates how this can be operationalised: by formally separating day-to-day operating spending from expenditure that contributes to public or private capital formation — covering capital transfers, capital-focused tax incentives, federal capital amortisation, support for private research and development, and measures to grow the housing stock — it makes the public-value composition of the budget visible and contestable (OECD, 2026[15]).

The strategic use of expenditure extends beyond how the budget is composed to how it is spent. Representing 13% of GDP in OECD countries, public procurement represents a further strategic lever: governments are not only buyers but market-shapers, and the way they purchase goods and services can multiply public value by supporting industrial policy objectives, promoting innovation and strengthening national economies, provided it is designed with sufficient care to avoid unjustified trade barriers or discriminatory criteria. Australia's commitments on procurement from small and medium-sized enterprises illustrate how procurement policy can be aligned with broader economic objectives (OECD, 2025[25]). Together, these instruments define a budget not as a residue of past commitments, but as an active, mission-oriented instrument in which the state’s budget policy generates public value and sets the direction of economic transformation.

Democratic public finances: Rebuilding the fiscal contract

This third area addresses the political and social conditions under which fiscal transformation becomes possible. Reform of public finances — whether through expenditure consolidation, reallocation or investment — inevitably creates winners and losers and requires governments to make difficult choices. The current environment affecting all policy decisions have commensurate effect on budget decision making and there is a need to rebuild the fiscal contract.

This requires governments to take public views, preferences and attitudes seriously, to design reforms perceived as fair, or that visibly mitigate negative impacts (OECD, 2025[26]), as well as to empower public understanding of fiscal problems, trade-offs and solutions through better policy communication and concrete mechanisms for citizen engagement (OECD, 2026[27]). Strong fiscal communication has the additional benefit of anchoring private forecasts and improving market sentiment about government plans (End and Hong, 2022[28]). Digital and AI tools materially expand what is possible here: interactive budget portals, personalised impact calculators that show citizens how budgetary assumptions and choices affect them in concrete terms, and AI-assisted summaries of dense budget documents in accessible language all narrow the comprehension gap that has historically kept citizens at the margins of fiscal debate. Country practice points to what this pillar can look like: the Netherlands Bureau for Economic Policy Analysis's forward looking, accessible public communication illustrate transparent fiscal governance in action, while Ireland's National Economic Dialogue, convening a broad range of stakeholders before the budget is finalised, shows citizens being treated as active participants in fiscal priority setting rather than passive recipients of government decisions.

Here, the revenue side of public finance is also treated as integral to democratic public finances and rebuilding the fiscal contract, not merely as a technical question of mobilising resources. The State of the future strengthens revenues in ways that reinforce, rather than test, public consent. Tax bases are broadened, tax expenditures rationalised, and the taxation of property, capital and digital activity modernised in ways that mobilise additional revenue without raising headline rates, while improving the agility and buoyancy of the tax system in the face of future shocks. Where new revenue is needed, it is raised through targeted instruments, such as top personal and capital income rate adjustments, sector-specific corporate surtaxes, or health and environmental excises, rather than broad-based rate rises (OECD, 2025[29]). Where citizens see that the tax system asks fairly of everyone and that the burden is shared equally across incomes and sectors, the political space to fund collective priorities expands; where they do not, even technically sound reforms struggle to find a majority. This fairness is matched by transparency: in this pillar, the State is significantly more open about how public money is raised and spent, including the full scope of public commitments such as tax expenditures and off-balance-sheet liabilities that have historically been less visible but can represent large aggregate sums. Such transparency is the foundation for more honest public debate about fiscal trade-offs, and the precondition for closing the credibility deficit captured in the OECD Trust and Tax survey, where only 30% of respondents in Western Europe and Latin America currently believe that tax revenues are spent for the public good (OECD/IFAC/ACCA, 2024[30]).

2.4.3. From intention to action: Closing the gap

A sustainable, strategic and democratically anchored fiscal system would mean managing public money very differently from how most OECD countries do today. The core problem is asymmetry: creating new spending commitments is far easier than reviewing or removing existing ones, since programmes and tax breaks build constituencies that make them hard to change. Electoral cycles compound this by favouring visible spending over long-term investment, and when savings are needed, they fall hardest on public investment. Citizens rarely see how these choices are made, and when they do not understand why a decision was taken, support for reform is hard to build and harder to sustain. The result is a one-way ratchet: budgets grow more rigid, room to respond shrinks, and the public consent needed to break the cycle is missing.

Closing the gap requires governments to act on three overlapping areas at the same time, which are further explored in Chapter 3. The defining practices on keeping mandatory spending in view show how governments can bring non-discretionary commitments into the frame they have often escaped, reviewing them routinely rather than only in response to crisis (see Section 3.4 of Chapter 3). The practices on making medium-term frameworks binding and on prioritising investment show how budgets can be organised around government priorities rather than historical line items, with ceilings that hold across changes of government and a definition of investment broad enough to capture human capital, R&D and intangible assets (see Section 3.4 of Chapter 3). Meanwhile, the practice on building fiscal trust and transparency shows how governments can make fiscal choices legible to citizens and give them a genuine voice in shaping priorities, supported by IFIS that provide credible, non-partisan analysis. These three fronts are interdependent: reforming rigid spending requires citizen consent, strategic reallocation requires frameworks that bind across mandates, and the fiscal contract itself depends on visible evidence that public money is spent on what people voted for.

2.5. Proactive and prepared government in a digital world

2.5.1. Why this matters now

Governments have always faced disruption and uncertainty. What is changing is the pace at which the gap between external pressure and institutional capacity to react is widening. Institutional systems designed for stability and predictability are not always well suited to rapid adaptation, a tension that has long been recognised, but whose consequences are becoming increasingly costly as the pace and scale of external change accelerates.

Three pressures are converging to make this moment different. Technologically driven change is accelerating faster than governance frameworks can track: the same digital infrastructure that extends what governments can do also creates new dependencies and vulnerabilities. Governments are increasingly concerned about how they can strengthen agency over their technology choices. This means being better prepared to surge in digital infrastructure demand, maintaining control over the digital supply chain, and directing investments towards digital technologies that deliver increased public value. Geopolitical volatility and environmental shocks are increasing in both frequency and speed, generating surges in demand for government action at scale and with little warning. And the expectations citizens bring to public services have shifted fundamentally and continue to evolve constantly: shaped by digital experiences in other domains as well as by expectations of fairness, transparency and democratic accountability, they expect government to know what they need, act on it without being asked, and do so without requiring them to navigate fragmented systems after the fact. The public value that citizens expect from government has changed significantly, but the institutional systems through which government delivers it have been slower to follow. At the same time, public confidence in government's abilities to use AI remains limited: only around four in ten people are confident that government use of AI will improve service delivery (43%) or reduce costs (42%), and confidence drops further when it comes to upholding fairness (35%), transparency (34%) and the protection of personal information (32%), a constraint that shapes the political feasibility of the transformation described in this chapter (OECD, 2026[1]).

Beyond the pace of change lies a significant and longstanding challenge for governments: they struggle to prepare for futures that depart from the past. Governments tend to be optimised for planning toward a single, extrapolated future, often the one implied by prevailing trends, and treat that projection as if it were knowledge about the future (Tõnurist and Hanson, 2020[31]). However, trends are lines drawn through past data on the assumption that the conditions which produced them will continue to hold, and the developments that often catch governments off guard tend to be the ones that this kind of extrapolation cannot see. In this sense, being stuck is as much a failure of foresight as of speed of early detection and response. This suggests a need for governments to build capacity to explore and experiment with the wider field of plausible futures within which today's choices must be made. Current OECD analysis of such foresight practice across Member countries finds that most efforts remain fragmented and confined to isolated units rather than embedded institutionally, and that foresight capacity-building itself is often too abstract or detached from practical governance needs to be taken up effectively (OECD, 2025[32]).

The result of this lack of foresight, proactivity and preparedness is a growing and costly gap. Governments are constantly pulled from day-to-day governing and, even more so, their reform agendas into managing the crisis of the moment, and that cycle is accelerating. A government cannot sustain a reform agenda over time if it cannot identify and prepare for multiple futures, anticipate building pressures, absorb shocks without losing function, or continuously learn from everyday experience and adjust accordingly. The costs of failing to prepare are rarely contained to moments of surprise. Signals that are dismissed or discounted do not disappear and sometimes surface as crises that must then be managed at great cost, consuming the fiscal flexibility needed for future strategic priorities. The damage is often beyond financial. Crises that catch governments unprepared tend to produce visible service or policy failures that erode public trust and convey an impression that governments cannot see what is coming and are perpetually reacting to a world they no longer understand.

Being proactive and prepared needs not only be framed in a defensive posture, treating emerging futures as shocks to be absorbed. Some futures and even some shocks open windows of possibility in which reforms long blocked by inertia, vested interests, or the absence of political attention suddenly become feasible. Shocks can act as focusing events that generate the legitimacy and urgency to advance standing priorities. Articulating a preferred future can itself become a tool for governing complex, contested problems by surfacing what different groups value, revealing where interests align, and opening options.

Being stuck, in the context of this pillar, means operating with an institutional architecture that systematically returns governments to reactive mode regardless of how much reform they have attempted. Closing that gap requires more than making the existing architecture faster. It requires shifting its underlying orientation: from governing the past to governing the future. This chapter describes what that shift involves, and what it takes to achieve it.

2.5.2. The objective: Developing capabilities to be prepared, resilient, adaptive and proactive

The transformation described here moves governments along four complementary capabilities, each enabling a way of acting under uncertainty. These capabilities are mutually reinforcing rather than sequential: a government does not need to master one before pursuing another, and many of the most effective examples in this section combine several at once. A prepared government acts before disruptions occur: it identifies emerging risks, and opportunities, invests in foresight and translates anticipatory analysis into policy and budget decisions before trends become emergencies. A resilient government absorbs shocks when they arrive and restores essential functions even when disruption could not have been foreseen. An adaptive government treats experience as evidence: when a service fails, a policy underperforms or a new technology creates an unexpected risk, it updates how it operates and embeds that learning systematically. A proactive government goes further still. Rather than assuming that the future will repeat the past, it builds the capacity to explore a range of possible futures, uses that exploration to anticipate needs before they arise, and acts on what it already knows or anticipates — before a citizen has to ask for support, or a policy problem becomes a crisis. This requires acting on signals rather than waiting for conclusive evidence: in fast-moving circumstances, delaying a response until evidence is definitive often means acting too late to prevent harm. Each capability reinforces the other; together they define a government oriented toward the future rather than the past. Proactive represents the furthest point on this spectrum: the most demanding and most transformative capability. While governments need not progress through the others in sequence to reach it, the distance most governments still need to cover toward proactive government, in particular, remains significant. Even in the social protection space, where the case for proactivity is clearest, most OECD countries still rely on citizens to identify themselves as eligible for support rather than acting on the administrative data they already hold: linked data are used to enrol beneficiaries automatically in only a handful of programmes, such as some child benefits (OECD, 2024[33]).

Figure 2.4. Four mutually reinforcing capabilities for government in a digital world

Source: OECD author’s elaboration.

This is not primarily a technological transformation. Digital and data capabilities are powerful enablers of all four dimensions, but the transformation is fundamentally about public governance: it requires institutions with different incentive structures, different ways of organising knowledge, different ways of working to turn knowledge into action, and a different relationship with time. What follows describes what each capability looks like in practice, both in how citizens experience day-to-day services and in how governments handle long-term and complex policy challenges.

Prepared governments turn anticipation into institutional routine

In a prepared government, foresight is not an occasional exercise conducted by a specialist unit. It is built into the institutional machinery: horizon-scanning findings feed into budget processes, legislative programmes and ministerial planning cycles on a regular and accountable basis. Early-warning systems correlate signals across policy domains and translate them into actionable decisions before trends become emergencies, consistent with OECD guidance on horizon scanning as the foundation of anticipatory decision making (OECD, 2026[34]). Strong signals such as complaints and appeals – channeled through complaints mechanisms, administrative justice bodies and ombudsman institutions – are systematically analysed to understand the experiences and expectations of people and businesses, and to convert individual cases into structural improvements rather than one-off remedies. For example, in the United Kingdom, Citizens Advice used data drawn from the millions of people it helps each year to detect the emerging cost-of-living crisis earlier than official statistics, informing a UK government support package in 2022 (data.org, 2022[35]).

For service delivery, preparation means that government can see a household approaching financial difficulty, a surge in demand for benefits or services, or a cohort of young people at risk of long-term unemployment, and act on those signals before the situation has deteriorated into crisis. For policymaking, it means that complex, slow-moving challenges, such as demographic change, environmental adaptation, fiscal sustainability, are governed through structured anticipation rather than reactive adjustment. Interoperable data infrastructure is what makes this possible in most cases, letting different parts of government exchange and act on a shared, accurate picture. Finland's parliamentary foresight cycle – which embeds long-term scenario analysis directly into the legislative programme – illustrates what this looks like for policymaking. Japan is applying the same logic to a demographic constraint rather than a legislative cycle: facing a projected 20% decline in its working-age population between 2020 and 2040, a pilot with the OECD Observatory of Public Sector Innovation (OPSI) had the Ministry of Internal Affairs and Communications (MIC) and the Digital Agency build horizon-scanning and scenario-planning capability, developing four scenarios for the future of public services to 2050 to identify priority investment areas and build consensus on the future scope of government services. Estonia's X-Tee data-sharing infrastructure illustrates the institutional layer this depends on: because agencies can draw on a shared, real-time view of people's data, they can act on early signals of need across the system rather than waiting for a citizen to approach any single agency - turning shared infrastructure into an anticipatory practice rather than a passive data layer. Colombia's Digital Employability and Talent Study 2025-2030 illustrates the same anticipatory logic applied to workforce policy: by projecting the gap between supply and demand for digital talent through 2030, it generates evidence used to steer training investment and align it with industry and academic partners before shortages materialise.

Resilient governments design continuity in, rather than retrofit it after disruption

Resilience to shocks is already a stated priority for nearly half of OECD countries developing overarching public administration reform frameworks (OECD, 2026[36]). But recognising resilience as a priority and building it into institutional architecture are different things. A resilient government does not wait for disruption to reveal its vulnerabilities. It maps its critical dependencies in advance, for example on critical digital infrastructure, AI systems and key suppliers of digital technologies; maintains alternatives where single points of failure can exist; and builds the human and technical capacity to restore function quickly without waiting for centralised authorisation at every step.

For service delivery, resilience means that when a cyber-attack occurs, a disaster strikes or a sudden surge in demand hits a public service, essential functions continue without prolonged gaps. For policymaking, it means that the institutional capacity to govern does not degrade under pressure: decision making frameworks, scalable digital infrastructure such as cloud technologies, continuity plans and intergovernmental co-ordination mechanisms holds even when the conditions under which they were designed no longer apply. Furthermore, resilience brings into focus the agency governments can exert over their technology choices so they can both invest in and manage digital technologies in ways that maximise public value and benefits realisation (OECD, 2026[37]; OECD, 2025[38]). France, Germany, and the Netherlands are working together to increase the adoption of open-source technologies by co-developing open-source workplace tools (LaSuite, openDesk, Mijn Bureau) under distributed national governance and cutting reliance on closed platforms and retain control while still sharing code across borders (OECD, 2026[37]). Singapore's approach to deploying AI on secure, isolated government infrastructure, designed to maintain essential functions even under active cyber threat, each point toward what this can look like in practice: the former through governance-led management of software dependencies; the latter through technical architecture designed to preserve operational continuity under adversarial conditions.

Adaptive governments treat every failure as evidence for improvement

An adaptive government treats every service interaction, policy outcome and operational failure – or unexpected success - as potential evidence. When a service fails, a policy underperforms, or a new demand emerges that existing systems weren't designed to meet, it updates how it operates, closes the feedback loop between experience and design, and embeds that learning across the organisation rather than within the team that encountered the problem.

For service delivery, this means that the gap between how citizens experience public services and what government knows about those experiences narrows continuously. A service that fails for one person becomes a signal that improves the service for the next. For policymaking, it means that evaluation is not a retrospective exercise but a standing institutional function: evidence about what is and is not working feeds into ongoing decisions rather than periodic reviews. Portugal's Gov.pt virtual assistant illustrates the principle at the point of delivery: analytics drawn from citizen interactions feed directly into content improvements across the national services portal, pointing toward what closing the feedback loop in near real time can look like. Azerbaijan's ASAN e-visa system applies the same logic to a single high-volume service: the responsible agency analyses applicant feedback to monitor satisfaction and detect service gaps close to real time, feeding improvements back into the platform continuously rather than through periodic review. Korea's open digital services model, which routes government services through commercial channels citizens already use, applies the same adaptive logic at the level of service architecture.

Proactive governments act before the need is expressed

Proactive government is the most demanding of the capabilities described in this section, and the most transformative. It requires not only that government can imagine what is coming and maintain function under pressure, but that it acts, in services and in policy, before a citizen has filed a request or a problem has forced a response.

In service delivery, a proactive government contacts a citizen who is about to become eligible for support rather than waiting for an application. It identifies a household at risk and responds in the way the situation calls for — disbursing a benefit automatically where speed matters most, or initiating a conversation where judgment and context are needed before acting. In the United Kingdom, general practitioners and other primary care staff identify patients whose underlying difficulty is financial, social or practical rather than medical, and refer them to a social prescribing link worker who connects them to debt advice, benefits support or other services – addressing the household risk directly rather than treating only its symptoms (United Kingdom Government, 2022[39]). This reaches citizens through the channels they already use rather than requiring them to navigate government systems. When government already holds the data it needs, the trigger for action no longer has to be a citizen filing a request. It can be a change in circumstance that government itself detects - an approaching eligibility threshold, a shift in household income, a cohort entering a new life stage. This is what the once-only principle looks like when fully operational: not merely a commitment not to ask for information already held, but an active institutional posture of anticipatory service. Austria's Automatic Family Allowances illustrate this in practice: when a child is born, the registry office forwards birth and parental data directly to the tax authority, which verifies eligibility and pays the allowance automatically - with no application required unless information is missing.

In policymaking, proactiveness means acting on what the data already shows before a trend becomes a crisis. Rather than waiting for a fiscal pressure, a demographic shift or an environmental risk to force a legislative response, a proactive government uses modelling, scenario analysis and predictive analytics to bring future consequences into present decisions. The Netherlands' Delta Programme illustrates this at scale: decades of environmental and hydrological modelling feed directly into infrastructure investment and land-use decisions taken today on the basis of conditions projected for 2050 and beyond. New Zealand's Long-Term Insights Briefings require central government agencies to publish regular analyses of emerging trends and their policy implications, creating a structured institutional obligation to govern beyond the electoral cycle. Australia's Intergenerational Reports apply the same logic to fiscal sustainability, projecting the long-run consequences of current spending and demographic trajectories to inform budget decisions in the near term. What these approaches share is not just analytical sophistication but an institutional commitment to letting future evidence shape present choices, which is precisely what proactive government means in the policy domain

Agentic AI systems – capable of carrying out complex, multi-step tasks with a degree of autonomy – represent the frontier of this shift. A government equipped with such systems can scan continuously for emerging risks at a scale no human team can match, draw together information already held across the administration to deliver services proactively, before a citizen has to ask, co-ordinate responses across agencies in real time, and adjust service delivery as evidence accumulates, compressing the time between signal and action to a degree that fundamentally changes what anticipatory government means in practice (Box 2.2).

Box 2.2. Exploring agentic artificial intelligence in government

AI agents are systems that can perceive and act upon their environment with a degree of autonomy, using tools as needed to achieve specific goals and adapt to changing inputs and contexts. Agentic AI generally refers to systems composed of multiple co-ordinated AI agents that can break down tasks, collaborate and pursue more complex objectives over time with limited human intervention. While generative AI (GenAI) systems answer, agentic AI systems act.

This distinction is important for government because the implications shift from what an AI system says to what it does. Conventional machine learning (ML) or GenAI tools may support analysis, drafting or interaction. By contrast, agentic AI systems may retrieve information across databases, trigger workflow steps, route cases, initiate transactions or update records within defined permissions. This creates opportunities to reduce administrative burden, improve responsiveness and simplify services, but it also raises the bar for legality, accountability, traceability and human oversight. Governments therefore need to govern not only the model, but also the action space granted to the system, the approval points in the workflow, and the mechanisms for oversight and redress.

An early public sector example is Estonia’s Bürokratt, an early-stage interoperable network of government AI solutions that, from the user’s perspective, functions as a single channel and unified gateway to government services. In the envisioned (and early) user experience, a user can request a complex service such as ordering a new passport, and an AI agent orchestrates the interaction across the relevant authority. The broader aim is to move service complexity into the background through system-to-system interaction while allowing the user to validate key actions where needed.

The OECD Working Party of Senior Digital Government Officials (E-Leaders) is exploring how governments can use agentic AI responsibly, including its public sector use cases, readiness requirements, and the enablers, guardrails and engagement needed for trustworthy adoption.

Source: OECD (2026[37]), Digital Government Outlook 2026: From Foundations to Transformational Impact, OECD Publishing, Paris, https://doi.org/10.1787/0496b2bc-en.

Early deployments point in this direction: governments are beginning to pilot AI-based disaster damage assessment tools that compress a traditionally multi-day process into minutes, enabling faster resource allocation in the critical first hours after an event.

Realising this potential at scale, however, depends on governance conditions being in place before deployment: interoperable data infrastructure that allows systems to act on a shared picture, the legal clarity, accountability frameworks and human oversight arrangements that determine whether autonomous public action generates public value or undermines the trust it depends on. Public trust is an equally critical precondition. The OECD Trust Survey indicates that most people remain sceptical of public agencies adopting AI, with concerns centred less on efficiency than on whether government use of AI will uphold core public-sector principles - fairness, transparency and privacy. Notably, citizens are relatively more accepting of AI in service delivery than in other government functions, though confidence remains far from high in absolute terms even there, pointing to a sequencing logic for deployment that responsible AI governance frameworks should reflect (OECD, 2026[1]). Almost all governments are still building these foundations, including their readiness for a second shift already underway: citizens themselves increasingly using AI to interact with government, from drafting applications to contesting decisions.

2.5.3. From intention to action: Closing the gap

Most OECD governments already have much of the data and many of the tools they would need to develop the capabilities discussed here, what is missing is the governance to make them work together: the institutional authority to co-ordinate across organisational boundaries, the incentive structures that reward anticipation over reaction, the data infrastructure that connects what government knows into a coherent and actionable picture, and the accountability frameworks that make anticipatory public action legitimate. Underlying these gaps is a more structural problem: prevention and preparedness are often underprioritised when their costs are clearly visible while their outcomes are much harder to ascertain. When resources are constrained, it is difficult to justify distributing them across multiple uncertain future risks, each of which may or may not materialise. The result is a predictable and well-documented bias: resources flow toward reaction, planning horizons shorten around electoral cycles, and the cost of not preparing becomes visible only once it is already too late.

The practices outlined in Chapter 3 show how many governments are taking steps to close the gaps outlined above. For example, the practices on building advanced digital and data foundations (Section 3.1.2 of Chapter 3) show the importance of strengthening data interoperability and standardisation, closing the gap between data availability and active data use. Similarly, practices on governing AI in the public sector (Sections 3.1.3 and 3.1.4 of Chapter 3) show how governments are building the institutional capacity to direct and oversee AI responsibly by establishing clear accountability frameworks for algorithmic and anticipatory government action, ensuring human oversight is built into deployment, and actively engaging citizens in decisions about how AI is used in public services, building the public legitimacy that responsible deployment depends on. Additionally, practices in various sections throughout the chapter show how governments are strengthening organisational capability and leadership for transformation (Section 3.2 of Chapter 3), building the cross-government authority and mandate, governance structures, investment management, incentive structures and skills and career frameworks that allow digital and data expertise to work across institutional boundaries rather than within them.

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