In most federal countries, the services that shape a citizen’s daily life are run by subnational governments. Health, education, and security sit in provincial hands in Argentina, which means the quality of provincial administration has a direct effect on how tens of millions of people live. When the conversation turns to digital transformation, however, attention usually flows to national platforms, and the level of government closest to those critical systems is often the last to receive coordination, funding, or a shared roadmap.
Argentina’s provinces decided to build that coordination themselves. FederAI brings together the country’s 23 provinces and the City of Buenos Aires around a common digital transformation agenda, convened from the third sector with academia, international organizations, and the govtech ecosystem at the same table. Its premise borrows the core logic of digital public infrastructure: the foundational systems for delivering services, identity, data exchange, and payments, work better and cost less when they are built to be shared, a thesis our own Ep. 9 with Manuel Aguilera explored at the regional scale.
In this episode of Sovra Podcast, Lucas Jolías speaks with Mauro Solano, Executive Director of Espacios Políticos and coordinator of FederAI’s technical secretariat. A political scientist who spent years inside the Buenos Aires provincial administration, directed Argentina’s INAP (the National Institute of Public Administration) for over three years, and led the Estado y Gobierno program at CIPPEC, Mauro has seen provincial capacity from the inside, from the national level, and from civil society. That triple vantage point is what makes his account of subnational transformation unusually concrete: he speaks in working tables, standards, and fifteen-day work cycles rather than in manifestos.
What You Will Hear
1. Why the provinces are where digital transformation matters most Mauro’s starting point is structural: the large public systems that most affect people’s lives, health, education, and security, are provincial responsibilities in Argentina. Whether those administrations work well or badly lands directly on citizens. His career kept returning to the provinces, from the Buenos Aires modernization secretariat that shipped the province’s first procedure guides and payment systems, to a federal training network built from INAP that connected innovation and public-employment officials across every jurisdiction. That network became the seed of what FederAI is today.
2. A coordination space with no primus inter pares Argentina once had federal councils where provinces aligned on modernization, first COFEFUP (the Federal Council of Public Administration) and later COFEMOD. When that space wound down, the provinces were left without a place to meet. FederAI recreates the function with a different architecture: convened from the third sector, every jurisdiction sits as an equal owner of the agenda, and the technical secretariat works behind the scenes so the provinces themselves define the priorities. The membership is also deliberately wider, including the University of Buenos Aires, UNSAM‘s laboratory on artificial intelligence and human development, CAF, CLAD, the private sector, and the govtech ecosystem. Multi-sector coordination of this kind remains rare in Latin America, and it runs on a working rhythm: meetings every fifteen days, concrete deliverables, quick wins.
3. Build what is underneath the AI The first three working tables emerged from what provinces actually asked for: interoperability and integrability, artificial intelligence, and administrative simplification. The sequencing lesson is the valuable part. Every government wanted to do something with AI, and the group’s first move was to look at the layer below it: data governance, interoperability, and the way procedures are designed. Two more tables followed, one fusing simplification with digital identity (where Sovra participates), and one on cybersecurity with Fundación Sadosky. It is the same dependency we mapped in What Agentic Government Requires: intelligence at the surface presupposes infrastructure underneath.
4. The warning: do not technologize the bureaupathology Mauro’s sharpest phrase names a failure mode every modernization veteran has seen. If a state adds technology to processes that work badly, it simply makes the dysfunction run faster. Simplification, in his framing, comes before automation: review how the state administers before wiring intelligence into it. The working tables treat the best and worst provincial AI experiments as shared learning material, so each jurisdiction can see when a use case is worth pursuing, and with which safeguards, before spending.
5. Reuse changes the budget conversation The classic objection to public innovation is that there is no money. The DPI answer is reuse. Today several provinces have each built their own digital identity systems, and a citizen validated in one province starts from zero in the next, an experience Ep. 8 with Gustavo Giorgetti traced at the level of data exchange. Shared infrastructure means province A’s investment becomes province B’s starting point instead of province B’s duplicate expense. Mauro frames the deeper argument constitutionally: Argentina’s federalism was founded on pre-existing pacts between provinces, and agreeing on minimum standards for digital identity, payments, and data exchange honors that original logic. The citizen should never have to carry the institutional complexity, because in every survey the conclusion is the same: for the citizen, the state is one.
6. The two tensions of the next few years Asked where the provinces are heading, Mauro first notes how heterogeneous their starting points are, then names two shared tensions. The first is transforming amid acceleration: provincial states accumulated layers of patrimonial administration, Weberian bureaucracy, and new public management, and now face citizens whose expectations were set by far more agile private and third-sector interactions. The second is the widening trust gap between citizens and the state, visible in every national and international survey. His case for optimism is that both tensions can be addressed with the same move, using digital public infrastructure as a diagonal, a catalyzer that upgrades capacity and rebuilds legitimacy at once. Beneath those, he flags the talent question: how provincial states attract, retain, and train people for a world where change is the constant.
Key Quotes
“The big public management systems that affect citizens’ lives, health, education, and security, are in the provinces’ hands. It is there that a large part of people’s fortunes is decided.”
“We would be doing nothing more than technologizing the bureaupathology: making what already works badly simply run faster with technology.”
“The provinces sit convened from the third sector with no primus inter pares. All of them on equal footing, all of them equally owners of the agenda.”
“For the citizen, the state is one. It is very hard to expect people to keep track of whether they are facing the municipal, provincial, or national state, and which credential to carry for each.”
“In that need to transform and to close the trust gap, digital public infrastructure is an enormous opportunity to take a diagonal, to act as a catalyst, and to begin resolving both tensions at once.”
About the guest
Mauro Solano is Executive Director of Espacios Políticos and coordinates the technical secretariat of FederAI, the forum that brings Argentina’s 23 provinces and the City of Buenos Aires together around a common digital transformation agenda. A political scientist, he spent years in the Buenos Aires provincial administration working on state modernization, directed INAP for over three years, where he created the federal public-sector training program, and led the Estado y Gobierno program at CIPPEC. His lens is distinctive because he has run the machinery he now helps coordinate: he reads subnational transformation as a question of capacity, sequencing, and trust between peers, grounded in what provincial teams can actually execute.
More from Sovra
🎧 [PODCAST] Ep. 9: Latin America Has Everything to Win at Digital Infrastructure (with Manuel Aguilera) — the regional version of this argument: DPI as shared rails the whole economy reuses.
🎧 [PODCAST] Ep. 8: From Estonia to Argentina (with Gustavo Giorgetti) — the interoperability layer in practice: how Argentine provinces federated through X-Road.
📖 What Agentic Government Requires — the dependency Mauro’s working tables discovered: AI at the surface needs infrastructure underneath.
📖 The Full Lifecycle of a Verifiable Credential — the mechanics of issuing once and verifying everywhere, the pattern provincial identity reuse depends on.
Continue the conversation
Explore the standards and building blocks behind these ideas at sovra.io/knowledge, our hub for digital identity and verifiable credentials. Sovra builds the layer this conversation keeps pointing at: SovraID for verifiable credentials that let one province’s validation travel to the next, and SovraGov for the service layer on top. Across deployments, that stack already serves 8M+ citizens with 1.5M+ identities across 20+ governments.
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The Identity Brief is published weekly by Sovra, the Digital Identity Stack for the Institutional World.
