By: Staff Writer
September 15, 2026
The Inter-American Development Bank said in a recent study that good practices for public asset in Latin America and the Caribbean (LAC) include having an integrated system.
The bank also said that one of the most persistent failures in the management of public assets is the institutional fragmentation of responsibilities and the lack of common criteria.
In the absence of system-wide governance, each entity tends to define its own management practices, which may lead to prioritizing institutional objectives over an integrated asset-management logic that applies a portfolio perspective. This may affect the ability to strategically rationalize real estate assets, reassign underused assets, or guide decisions with a long-term perspective. Institutional dispersion is also reflected in fragmented, poorly interoperable, or directly non-existent information systems.
The report also said that institutional fragmentation allows government to define, with limited central coordination or oversight, how assets are used, what maintenance priorities are assigned, what information is reported, and under what conditions their reassignment or disposal is decided.
Thus, these decisions may be based on institutional, administrative, or even personal logics, rather than on strategic asset-management criteria at the whole-of-government level.
“In all Latin American cases, the approval of reforms has shared a common feature: the impetus of a highly influential actor that supports the centralization and structuring of asset management—namely, the Center of Government (Presidency, Ministry of Finance).
However, this impetus has existed only under specific circumstances; when those contexts changed, the Center of Government’s involvement declined, and the approval or implementation of reforms faced stronger obstacles.
These obstacles came mainly from sectoral entities with large portfolios of physical assets, which were reluctant to relinquish control over the management of “their” assets.
In the absence of close oversight from the Center of Government, and even without explicit opposition, the bureaucratic delaying tactics adopted by those sectoral institutions were often sufficient to block effective reforms.
Thus, the interaction between the Center of Government and sectoral ministries and agencies with significant asset portfolios constitutes the main political economy dynamic that can anticipate the success or failure of a reform.
External actors to the Executive Branch appear to have more limited or context-specific influence, although in certain reforms the Legislative Branch is an actor whose approval is necessary