Ismael Peña-López, lecturer and researcher
Information Society, Digital Divide, ICT4D
I am Ismael Peña-López.
I am researcher and lecturer at the School of Law and Political Science, Open University of Catalonia (2005-2018; 2024-).
I have been Director of the School of Public Administration of Catalonia (2021-2024) and Director General of Citizen Participation and Electoral Processes at the Government of Catalonia (2018-2021).
I have also been fellow director of Open Innovation at Fundació Jaume Bofill and senior researcher at Open Evidence.
My main areas of work are the impact of ICTs in society (e-Readiness, the digital divide), especially in development (e-inclusion, ICT4D), and educational (e-Learning, digital competence) and political (e-participation, e-democracy) institutions.
I here present my communication for the 4th Congress of Economics and Business of Catalonia 2025 organized by the College of Economists of Catalonia. The communication is titled New Public Governance in practice: a toolbox model for public policy in times of networks, uncertainty and complexity and proposes and applied model to transform public Administrations in order to face this new era of complexity, uncertainty and networks.
The theoretical background is that of New Public Governance that has been building momentum for the last 20 years approximately. The intended contribution of my paper is not to build up on theory, but how to bring all this theory into practice, how to provide something public managers can cling on to foster the much needed transformation of public ...
When working with the idea of the citizen participation ecosystem from the point of view of a national government, one of the basic questions is how the Administration should nurture and facilitate such ecosystem. There are, at least, two approaches that have been traditionally explored.
28/03/2025
I am collaborating with ParticipationAI on finding out what would be an ideal model of stakeholder engagement in the life-cycle of public procurement of Artificial Intelligence.
So far, I've put together a collection of works related with AI in public Administration, in a very broad sense. Here it comes. All suggestions are welcome.
2025-01-11 10:37:07 New Public Governance in practice: a programme for the Administration in times of networks, uncertainty and complexity
2023-08-22 12:49:44 Managing complexity for systemic impact: responses to VUCA and BANI environments
15/04/2025
El pasado 11 de abril, Teresa Morales, Andrea Cacciapalia, Pablo Rodríguez Maroto y Albert Mayol — todos ellos de NTT Data — publicaban La inteligencia artificial en el Sector Público: una oportunidad única para transformar los servicios públicos, un muy interesante compendio de 16 retos que la inteligencia artificial planteaba a la Administración y una lista de 30 posibles medidas para abordar esos retos.
Como digo, me pareció un ejercicio muy interesante sobre todo por su exhaustividad y su coherencia interna. Se me hacía — se me hace — muy difícil encontrar tanto puntos ciegos u omisiones, como inconsistencias. ...
2025-04-05 20:31:38 Eficiencia y pluralidad en el sector público: ¿cuántos actores son demasiados?