CAPP-ODS “Empowering Portuguese public administration to achieve an effective impact on the Sustainable Development Goals”
Area and thematic line: Digitalisation, innovation and qualification / LT9 Professional training of public administration workers
Principal Investigator: Júlia Seixas
Co-Principal Investigator: Sandra Caeiro
Proposing institution: NOVA.id.FCT – Association for Innovation and Development of FCT
Despite the 2030 Agenda and the 17 Sustainable Development Goals providing a global framework to connect prosperity, social inclusion and ecosystem integrity, progress remains insufficient: the Sustainable Development Report 2025 anticipates that less than 20% of the targets will be achieved by 2030. This situation stems largely from governments’ difficulty in designing and implementing complex, long-term and cross-sectoral public policies, which are often hindered by “silo” logics within the Portuguese public administration (APP).
The CAPP-ODS project seeks to address this problem by designing a comprehensive capacity-building model for the APP, focused on developing competences in systems thinking, complex problem management and medium- and long-term planning, as well as in intra- and inter-institutional cooperation practices. The ambition is to construct a pedagogical, content and implementation model that can progressively reach a significant share of the approximately 750,000 public servants, adapted to different levels of responsibility, sectors of activity and territorial scales. The design of this model will be supported by a national and international benchmarking exercise, by workshops with public bodies and with the main entities responsible for training in the APP (INA and IGAP), culminating in the preparation of a policy brief to be submitted to the Presidency of the Council of Ministers.
The project falls within the “Professional training of public administration workers” line of the PT 2030 Strategy, bringing together digitalisation, innovation and qualification as drivers of transformation. It proposes a professional training model oriented towards sustainability, with cross-cutting impact on policy areas such as energy, poverty reduction, mobility, biodiversity, fisheries, agriculture and forests, promoting the transfer of knowledge into more effective administrative practices aligned with the Public Administration Competence Framework. The team brings together solid experience in training and in innovative methodologies, including approaches developed within the EIT Climate-KIC. Through partnerships with the Municipality of Guimarães, the Court of Auditors and CCDR Centro, capacity-building prototypes will be tested, with the aim of proposing to the Government a programme that, over a five-year horizon, contributes to a well-informed public administration equipped with the competences needed to steer national development in line with the SDGs.
