People interact with public institutions through essential, day-to-day use of public administrative services (PAS). PAS are the administrative processes which members of the public undertake in order to access or use publicly provided goods or services, comply with laws and regulations, and/or assert or use their rights. Examples of PAS include registering a birth or death, obtaining identity documents, registering to vote, applying for government permits and licences, and requesting benefits. Public services which require additional professional competences and skills are not PAS: for example, classroom teaching, medical treatment, or policing. However, it is often necessary to use a PAS to access these types of professional services: for example, registering for a primary healthcare provider or enrolling a child in a public school. Public administrative services can be provided by any level of government, and in some cases, are provided by private agencies on behalf of the government are included.
How people experience PAS affects many aspects of their lives and their perceptions of – and trust in – public institutions. While two-thirds of recent users of PAS in most OECD countries report feeling satisfied with their experience, rapid technological advances have raised expectations that PAS become more accessible, efficient, simple, proactive and digitally enabled. At the same time, tight public budgets make it imperative that governments deliver public administrative services better while spending less.
In this environment, public administrations are increasingly mainstreaming “human-centred” yet efficient approaches to PAS design and delivery. This implies moving to better design services around users, supported by shared platforms and responsible data use. Being human-centred starts with understanding service users' needs, constraints and journeys, and then working across the service lifecycle - from design through delivery - to improve services, including through the smart use of data and technology.
This first-ever stocktaking of human-centred PAS approaches across OECD countries – based on the 2024 Serving Citizens survey of governments – finds many good practices are already well established. Most countries have a vision and strategy for improving PAS; the vast majority have begun undertaking some form of PAS user surveys; users’ rights are well protected across countries; and the concept of the “Life Events” approach is well established to support people at important moments in their lives.
Yet there is also significant room for improvement. Some challenges can and should be actioned immediately to ensure key tenets of a “human-centred” approach are in place: governments should ensure the public are consistently consulted on PAS reforms and ensure that information from user surveys is systematically used to inform improvements in public services.
Most importantly, governments have significant distance to cover in integrating different public administrative services and making them more pro-active. Given the cross-national prevalence of the life events approach and regular use of digital tools, it might be considered disappointing that governments integrate PAS for only around 20% of the life events covered in the Serving Citizens survey. Successful PAS integration will require deeper investments, development and reinforcement of critical digital infrastructure, including digital identifies, secure data sharing and interoperable systems – thereby enabling information sharing across government siloes and (ideally) reducing time and application burdens on users. Related to this, it is important for governments to support further the civil service through better workforce planning and training tools to improve critical digital skills, as well as linking performance targets to performance incentives.