Outsourcing Bureaucracy to Evade Accountability: How Public Servants Build Shadow State Capacity

Abstract

The solution to weak bureaucratic capacity in developing countries is often presumed to be more accountability. This paper shows how accountability initiatives, intended to reduce corruption, can actually hinder the development of capable government agencies by making it harder for directors to recruit experts and spend their budgets. It further highlights a common way public servants escape the accountability rules that limit their effectiveness: outsourcing bureaucracies to nonstate organizations. This practice of outsourcing bureaucracy to avoid accountability rules creates what I call “shadow” state capacity and, paradoxically, it may help explain “pockets of effectiveness” among government social programs in developing countries. Drawing on in-depth interviews and descriptive statistics, I show how outsourcing was a critical factor in producing two of Brazil’s most vaunted social sector programs. However, I also suggest that outsourcing bureaucracy may ultimately limit state capacity, even if it helps to build capable programs in the short run.

To know is to act? Revisiting the impact of government transparency on corruption

“…High‐level bureaucrats might also resist knowledge about problems in project implementation at lower levels, as Buntaine and Daniels (2020) found in an experiment in Uganda. Alternately, even when high‐level bureaucrats try to use transparency policies to control lower‐level bureaucrats, their efforts might be thwarted by shifting strategies of lower‐level bureaucrats to avoid disclosure of sensitive information or circumvent accountability systems and requirements (Rich, 2023; Veeraraghavan, 2022). Even in more consolidated administrative systems with lower levels of corruption, bureaucrats can evade transparency requirements while still technically complying with transparency legislation, for example, by releasing troves of information that are irrelevant, confusing, or hard to interpret (Hood, 2007).…”