2 results
Twele - Bureaucratic, market or professional control? A theory on the relation between street-level task characteristics and the feasibility of control mechanisms
- Edited by Peter Hupe, Katholieke Universiteit Leuven, Michael Hill, Aurélien Buffat, Université de Lausanne
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- Book:
- Understanding Street-Level Bureaucracy
- Published by:
- Bristol University Press
- Published online:
- 08 March 2022
- Print publication:
- 01 July 2015, pp 205-226
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Summary
Introduction
Street-level bureaucracy is two things: it is an effort to have policy implementation conform to general and abstract rules; and it is an effort to apply rules to specific and concrete cases. This central assumption informs our analysis of the managerial control of street-level action. The first assumes control of action through general regulation; the second assumes adjustment of action to specific case conditions. These are necessarily incongruent functions. Bridging the distance between general and abstract rules and specific and concrete cases requires action that cannot be fully defined by either. This is why, as Lipsky (2010) phrased it, street-level bureaucrats are policymakers. Street-level bureaucrats do not simply implement given rules in cases that can be fully understood on the basis of these rules, but instead translate rules into client-level decisions, building upon information (not fully defined in the rule) on clients’ conditions and upon expertise (also not fully defined) on client treatment.
There is an abundant literature on managerial and bureaucratic control over street-level bureaucrats. Meyers and Vorsanger (2003, p 246) argue that ‘the questions of whether, and how, policy making principals control the discretion of their implementing agents have dominated much of the empirical research’. Winter (2003) asks whether ‘bureaucrats [are] servants or masters, and to what extent … bureaucrats [can] be controlled by their political superiors’ and argues that there is ‘differentiated and limited control’ over street-level bureaucracies that varies according to the extent of information asymmetry. Meyers, Riccucci and Lurie (2001, p 165) argue that the achievement of ‘goal congruence’ between political control actors and street-level bureaucrats might increase ‘implementation fidelity and policy achievement’. The main thrust of the insights in this literature is that control over street-level action is limited and indirect.
These arguments conceptualise the issue of street-level control as placed on a single dimension of increased control versus increased street-level discretion. We disagree with this conceptualisation. Our central assumption is that street-level bureaucracy does not have one manifest function, but two: the control of policy implementation given existing regulations; and the translation of policy rules to clients given the street-level information on client conditions and expertise on client treatment.
Twelve - Decentralised integration of social policy domains
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- By Duco Bannink
- Edited by Kevin Farnsworth, University of York, Zoë Irving, University of York
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- Book:
- Social Policy Review 26
- Published by:
- Bristol University Press
- Published online:
- 07 March 2022
- Print publication:
- 26 June 2014, pp 221-238
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Summary
In the Netherlands, political conflict on the most effective and most legitimate location of social policy formation and implementation is more than a century old. In social assistance and social care, different conceptions of the nature of the policies have gone hand in hand with different preferences for the location of the legal capacity of policy formation and implementation. For instance, during debate on the formation of the 1965 Social Assistance Act, the Ministry of Culture, Recreation and Social Support held an integrated concept of social assistance and social care. In this concept, the municipality was the primary actor in integrated policy formation and implementation. The Ministry of Social Affairs, on the other hand, considered social assistance to be an element of unemployment compensation policy, of which the social insurance arrangements also formed a part. In this conception, the ministry and social partners were considered to be the primary actors in policy formation, while implementation was decentralised to the municipality (Rigter et al, 1995). The conception of the Ministry of Social Affairs won, leading to the development of two sub-domains of social policy: social assistance and social care. However, the functioning of each of these sub-domains and their interaction has never been absent from political debate.
In the 1990s a new wave of debate commenced. The New Social Assistance Act (nAbw) of 1996 partially decentralised budgetary responsibilities to the municipalities. At the aim here was the introduction of performance incentives into the municipalities. The nAbw was followed by the further decentralisation of social assistance arrangements by means of the Work and Social Assistance Act (WWB) of 2004. Budgetary responsibilities were now fully decentralised: the financial risk of policy failure was transferred from national government to the municipalities. In the case of social assistance, the design of the budget forces municipalities to define policy success in terms of re-employment, by providing a budget for benefit disbursal to the municipalities in advance and allowing the municipalities to keep the surplus when reemploying benefit recipients, but to supplement the budget when the number of beneficiaries rises.
The WWB was considered to be successful. The 2007 evaluation (Bosselaar et al, 2007) stated that the quantitative objective of the Act was attained. Following social assistance, decentralisation was subsequently implemented in the domain of social care.