Measuring Policy Success: Evaluating Public Sector Reform in Bhutan

Ugyel, Lhawang; O’Flynn, Janine

doi:10.1080/01900692.2015.1076466

Cited by 16 publications

(18 citation statements)

References 23 publications

Supporting

Mentioning

Contrasting

Order By: Relevance

“…Private sector studies show that much-heralded companies may go from good to great to gone (Rosenzweig 2014 ). We should construct time-series through multiple observations of public organizations, policies, and partnerships, gathering assessments across time (Ugyel and O’Flynn 2017 ).…”

Section: Conceptual Starting Pointsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Rising to Ostrom’s challenge: an invitation to walk on the bright side of public governance and public service

Douglas

Schillemans

Hart

et al. 2021

Policy Design and Practice

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

In this programmatic essay, we argue that public governance scholarship would benefit from developing a self-conscious and cohesive strand of "positive" scholarship, akin to social science subfields like positive psychology, positive organizational studies, and positive evaluation. We call for a program of research devoted to uncovering the factors and mechanisms that enable high performing public policies and public service delivery mechanisms; procedurally and distributively fair processes of tackling societal conflicts; and robust and resilient ways of coping with threats and risks. The core question driving positive public administration scholarship should be: Why is it that particular public policies, programs, organizations, networks, or partnerships manage do much better than others to produce widely valued societal outcomes, and how might knowledge of this be used to advance institutional learning from positives? ARTICLE HISTORY

show abstract

Section: Conceptual Starting Pointsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Rising to Ostrom’s challenge: an invitation to walk on the bright side of public governance and public service

Douglas

Schillemans

Hart

et al. 2021

Policy Design and Practice

Self Cite

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

show abstract

“…After the establishment of democracy in 2008, Bhutan started elaborating new laws and policies based on democratic values. In 1999, the government initiated major restructuring to ensure good governance (Ugyel & O'Flynn, 2017). Nowadays, the country is a democratic constitutional monarchy with a parliamentary government.…”

Section: Literature Reviewmentioning

confidence: 99%

Barriers to transparency in Bhutan's public administration: A new typology of opacity

Venard

Tshering²

2021

Public Admin & Development

View full text Add to dashboard Cite

In democratic emerging countries, transparency can play an important role in reducing corruption, but only if certain barriers are overcome. This investigation contributes to transparency theory by studying the barriers to transparency and proposing a typology consisting of five barriers that lead to opacity. With focus on the public administration tasked to control corruption in the mining sector of Bhutan, we conducted 98 semi-structured interviews within seven different stakeholder groups in different regions of Bhutan to determine the barriers to transparency in fighting corruption. A qualitative analysis technique revealed firstand second-order themes resulting in five forms of opacity: idiosyncratic (nature of the industry and corruption); systemic (adequacy of information management system); deliberate (willingness to exercise control); organizational (role and process ambiguity); and capacity (sufficient resources to control). This analysis of the mining sector, a high corruption industry, in a unique, low corruption democratic emerging country, Bhutan, provides practical implications to policy-makers attempting to improve transparency, and hence, reduce corruption. Policy and managerial implications of this research include paying more attention to the national control agencies that could be improved by heeding the five key factors that we have highlighted.

show abstract

“…This more faddish nature of reform starkly contrasts with the idea it is a planned and intentional phenomenon and means that it may crowd out evaluations of whether a particular approach to reform is sound and well-designed, with measurable outcomes. While there has, in recent decades, been an increase in the number of studies evaluating these outcomes, the results of reform remain under-examined by practitioners and academics (Ugyel and O'Flynn 2017).…”

Section: Reform Intensification and Impactmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…There is extensive work demonstrating that reforms are not necessarily suited to the recipient states nor has the evidence been developed to show that transfer actually works (Ugyel 2016;Ugyel and O'Flynn 2017). Instead reform transfer can create a range of challenges in practice.…”

Section: Reform Transfermentioning

confidence: 99%