This paper uncovers an interesting paradox that India’s senior civil service bureaucrats face in the implementation of development programs. The reality of India’s public administration in the 21st century is that the civil service bureaucracy is being increasingly called upon to engage in boundary-spanning work to meet India’s development commitments to its people. However, while the structures and institutions that have evolved profess to the values of collaborative governance, their administrative functioning does not reflect this ethos. I refer to this as the era of the collaborative bureaucrat, a term that captures the inherent contradiction within India’s development administration.
Research about how India’s civil service bureaucracy functions mostly focuses on the influence of colonial legacy, caste and class, and other socio-economic and cultural factors and not on issues related to bureaucratic leadership and goal alignment (i.e., to national or sub-national priorities), trade-offs, and incentives structures. This paper addresses this gap through in-depth case study of the implementation of a collaborative governance initiative (CGI), within a sub-national government in India to improve maternal and child health service delivery. The initiative focuses on improving interdepartmental coordination for improved health, nutrition, and sanitation services while underscoring the engagement of local community groups (specifically, women self-help groups) for better monitoring of service delivery. Specifically, this paper examines how and why the CGI emerged the way it did?
I primarily draw on elite interviews and use process tracing techniques to analyze data from 26 key informants within the Health, Women and Child Development, and Rural Development departments that were engaged in the implementation of this collaborative initiative. In addition, I draw from data gathered through direct observations (of three review meetings), review of 15 Government Orders, and nine interviews of subject matter experts. I use multiple lens from organization theory drawing from classical tenants of the rational model, the natural and open systems model, and the more contemporary political theory of organizations that draws on the new economics of organization.
Findings confirm the influence of bureaucrats as policy entrepreneurs who can shape policy due to their close proximity to external sources of power and authority vested in their own positions. In addition, this study sheds light on the administrative entrepreneur—who inherits a myriad policy directions, programmatic goals, and must deftly mesh through formal and informal organizational structures using their positions of power and authority to engage in implementation. This is particularly true in the case of India’s famed District Collectors and also relevant in the case of India’s administrative elite (the Indian Administrative Service (IAS) cadre) whose administrative goals are aligned at the sub-national level as department heads even as their formal goals aligned to the Central Government. As a result, then, the focus is not on decision making, action, assigning responsibility, or delegating authority, but on coordinating a laborious exercise of inter-ministerial cross-referencing and consultation. The study has implications for and offers recommendations to public sector and service delivery reforms in the context of India and other developing countries with similar structures.
B1 - Bureaucratic Leadership and Public Sector Management in Developing and Transitional C
