Repairing the State: Policy Repair in the Frontline Bureaucracy

Abstract

Research on street‐level bureaucrats has identified their role as policy entrepreneurs through the adoption and advocacy of policy innovations. This article adds to this research by underscoring how street‐level bureaucrats use creativity and improvisation to find contextual solutions for emergent local policy problems in response to scarcity. We suggest that these practices of policy repair allow frontline bureaucracies to deal with personnel, process, and material scarcity and maintain public service delivery even in resource‐scarce environments. Using ethnographic data from Punjab, Pakistan, we show that this repair work is collaborative, client‐centered, and motivated by compassion and kindness. Our research indicates that emergent and improvised policy repair allows frontline bureaucracies to be resilient and responsive to scarcity and changing service demands. Our findings further suggest that inclusion of street‐level bureaucrats in formal policy decisions can help develop context‐specific solutions to emergent problems of public service delivery. Evidence for Practice Street‐level bureaucrats (SLBs) face multiple types of scarcity during policy implementation—material scarcity, where they do not have enough equipment or space for their work; process scarcity, where officially sanctioned menu of routines or procedures do not account for local situations; and personnel scarcity, where they do not have enough workforce or expertise for their tasks. SLBs do policy repair—use creativity and innovation in their day‐to‐day work to find local and contextualized solutions for their localized service limitations, to overcome scarcity, and to deal with the vulnerability of bureaucratic systems. Allowing SLBs to use creativity and improvisation for local and emergent problems can create more robust and resilient public service delivery systems. Repair requires implicit and local knowledge of bureaucratic systems; inclusion of SLBs in formal policy decisions is necessary to develop context‐specific solutions to emergent problems of public service delivery.

A New Era and New Concepts in the Study of Race in Public Administration

“…Moreover, the sector people work in is highly relevant to reported negative stereotypes. Masood and Nisar (2022) investigate how street-level bureaucrats overcome resource scarcity with creativity and improvisation to find contextual solutions for emergent local policy problems. The policy repair they observe permits organizations to be resilient and nimble in response to changing circumstances.…”

The negative relationships between employee resilience and ambiguity, complexity, and inter‐agency collaboration

“…Responses to collectively experienced budget and other resource constraints may be driven by collective values. In times of crises and resource constraint, street‐level bureaucrats have been found to reconfigure state services for citizens, motivated by compassion and kindness, in ways that emulates the learning, adaptation, and use of networks that characterise ER (Masood & Nisar, 2022). The coping literature has also identified group‐level differences in how street‐level bureaucrats cope with limited resources, from rigid rule following to more expansive and constructive adaptive behaviours (Tummers et al., 2015).…”

“…In some cases, this can prompt employees to find structure and certainty (e.g. clear budget restrictions) (Marginson & Ogden, 2005), and to devise new and more efficient ways of working (Masood & Nisar, 2022). In most instances, however, resource constraints increase workloads and hinder staffing adequacy and teamwork, resulting in stress and turnover (Farr‐Wharton et al., 2021).…”

Nurse champions as street-level bureaucrats: Factors which facilitate innovation, policy making, and reconstruction

“…It helps them implement improvement initiatives and make sense of desired policy and organizational changes ( Nisar and Maroulis, 2017 ). Overall, it may lead to a more robust and resilient healthcare service delivery system ( Masood and Nisar, 2022 ). As local managers, nurse champions are critical about policies and organizational priorities, and they may not be ready to implement them.…”