This article draws on health sector reform in Honduras to examine the mechanisms through which governance reforms shape the behavior of street-level bureaucrats. It combines insights from behavioral public administration with original data from lab-in-the-field workshops conducted with more than 200 bureaucrats to assess the relationship between decentralization and motivation. Findings show strong evidence that motivation, measured as self-sacrifice, is higher among bureaucrats in decentralized municipalities compared with bureaucrats in comparable centrally administered municipalities. Increased motivation is most pronounced in decentralized systems led by nongovernmental organizations compared with those led by municipal governments or associations. Additionally, the evidence suggests that higher motivation is related to changes in the composition of staff rather than socialization or changes among existing staff. Overall, this research helps move beyond indiscriminate calls for decentralization by highlighting the interplay between reform design and bureaucratic behavior, as well as the limitations of governance reforms in motivating more experienced bureaucrats.
Evidence for Practice • Decentralization reforms that include performance-based incentives have both advantages and challenges;proponents of such reforms should consider the interplay between changes in governance structures and the behavior of frontline staff when advocating for, designing, and implementing such policies. • To the extent that local intermediary organizations have power over staff selection, they may be better positioned to identify motivated staff and incorporate those staff into service delivery than regional or central administrators. • Different strategies are needed to value and draw on the experiences of long-term staff members, for whom structural reforms and performance-based incentives may be less motivating. • Administrators should consider and try to account for the unintended consequences of reforms that introduce large numbers of new, less experienced staff into systems that deliver social services. University and a faculty affiliate of the Purdue Center for the Environment. Her research focuses on human decision-making and behavior in the context of sustainable development, particularly questions of participation, deliberation, collective action, and public goods provision.
Sustaining positive attitudes toward refugees is a priority as refugee crises surge worldwide. This study draws on eighty-five in-depth interviews with citizens in four provinces across Turkey. We identified prominent frames from Turkish political discourse and asked individuals to recount their self-narratives of attitude formation about Syrian refugees. We find that most respondents’ narratives included multiple frames, confirming that attitudes are often products of contradictory factors. Furthermore, humanitarianism and shared religion, frames thought to support positive attitudes, did not have such straightforward associations here. Humanitarianism was a positive force early, but had limits as compassion fatigue set in, and respondents described polarizing differences in religious practices rather than shared religion. Our work highlights the importance of examining attitude formation in non-Western settings for understanding views about and supporting societal inclusion of refugees.
Public service delivery improves when civil servants work together effectively as teams. While decentralization reforms are common strategies for enhancing the delivery of health services in developing countries, most studies emphasize their effects through rational-choice mechanisms. Fewer studies consider the behavioral implications of decentralization and its potential to improve or hinder the day-to-day work environment for health sector staff. We use an incentivized behavioral game to assess the effectiveness of teamwork among civil servants in decentralized and comparable centrally administered municipal health systems in Honduras. We find that teams from decentralized municipalities are less effective at working together and that this is driven by the adverse effects of the reform among existing staff: new staff pairs are relatively effective, while existing staff do not work as well with each other and in mixed teams. Our findings suggest that policymakers should take measures to help ensure that governance reforms do not undermine the effectiveness of existing staff.Governments often engage in institutional reforms with the goal of improving public sector performance. These reforms commonly try to reshape governance, namely, the public decision-making processes through which socially binding agreements are created and enforced (Andersson et al., 2009; Root et al., 2020). For example, decentralization, which is one of the most widely implemented governance reforms of the last several decades, shifts power and responsibilities, and sometimes resources as well, away from central organizations and toward more local organizations (Faguet, 2014;Rondinelli et al., 1989). This is often done in an effort to improve accountability and thereby produce better public services for local communities (
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