Developing administrative capacity: an agenda for research and practice

Abstract

Administrative capacity is necessary for achieving policy success and preventing policy fiascoes. However, a fragmented literature, sparse empirics, and a focus on developed countries have led to a gap in examining how such capacity should be measured and built; particularly in developing contexts. This paper assesses administrative capacity frameworks, indices, and reforms with a specific focus on the organizational-operational dimension that is crucial to effective implementation, in order to provide recommendations for advancing the theory and practice of capacity building. Our observations suggest that both scholars and practitioners need to be more cognizant of the fact that capacity building is a continuous process, requiring specific assessment and measurement of the components of the organizational-operational dimension. Such components include enhancing administrative autonomy and competence, and arrangements incentivizing coordination and collaboration, while safeguarding adequate control and oversight.

Introduction: policy integration and institutional capacity: theoretical, conceptual and empirical challenges

“…Far from the ambition of providing a comprehensive theoretical framework for understanding institutional capacity and its link with integrated policy designs, we adopt a new institutionalist framework (March & Olsen, 1989Powell & DiMaggio, 1991;Scharpf, 2000) with a two-fold objective: i) identify and systematise the various institutional capacity components that are relevant for integrated policy designs; ii) bridge these theoretical propositions with the practical implications provided by the broader research on capacity issues (El-Taliawi & Van Der Wal, 2019;Lodge & Wegrich, 2014).…”

“…Adopting a three-level perspective on capacity, which has been extensively validated by both scholarly research (El-Taliawi & Van Der Wal, 2019;Wu et al, 2015) and policy guidance (NEI 2002;European Commission, 2002), we suggest that institutional capacity for integrated designs materialises through the following characteristics, which are broadly underpinned by the criteria of coherence, constancy and coordination: This framework summarises and describes a range of institutional capacity components, covering both structure-and actor-related characteristics across the political and administrative domains of governmental institutions.…”

The COVID‐19 crisis and complexity: A soft systems approach

“…The crisis soon morphed into more than a public health problem. Disrupting economic, social, and political systems, it bores the hallmarks of complex policy problems: multifaceted within and across policy domains, elusive of full measurement and prediction, and exposing latent state‐society tensions (Hartley & Jarvis, 2020) and governance capacity limitations (Capano, 2020; El‐Taliawi & Van Der Wal, 2019; Maor et al., 2020). The pandemic also evolved into a global‐scale and intergovernmental crisis (Paquet & Schertzer, 2020), visiting uniform impacts on countries of all developmental and political contexts, eliciting initially similar policy responses, and exposing weaknesses in global coordinating mechanisms for crisis response.…”

When dialogue doesn’t work: school reforms and lessons from Denmark

“…School reforms are often an object of research (Blackmore and Sachs 2007). Frequently, a gap exists between what ministerial policy makers and administrators aim to achieve through reforms and how professionals and teachers as education professionals approach achieving those aims and meeting expectations (Saquin 2019;Lundberg 2019;Downes 2019;El-Taliawi & Van Der Wal 2019). The disparity between what policy makers envisage in terms of the results of a reform and what teachers imagine, whether they are involved or not, is apparently sizable.…”

“…New Public Management, which is seen as promoting managerialism and mistrust of professionals, is often viewed as a factor in understanding why reform efforts in educational systems do not work as intended (Yifey 2019). There is a gap between how policies are perceived to have an impact, and how the policies actually an impact in practice (El-Taliawi & Van Der Wal 2019). El-Taliawi and Van Der Wal suggested that more administrative capacity building is required if reforms are to succeed.…”