Street-Level Bureaucracy: Bureaucratic Reform Strategies Initiated From Bottom Level

Abstract

Abstract-This literature review paper discusses Street LevelBureaucracy and the right effort to reform the lower level bureaucracy in order to create efficient, effective and accountable governance. Street Level Bureaucracy is a government agency that deals directly with the public in providing public services. Street Level Bureaucracy also has a role as a mediator between community and policy makers. Based on the literatures, it is found that discursive discrepancies, service delays and street levelcorruption are the main issues of the lower level bureaucrats. Those issues are caused by various factors such as an incompetent implementing agency, poor organizational culture and weak supervision. Several problem solutions offered in this study i.e. improvements from the perspective of organizational capacity, implementing agencies and socio-cultural environment conditions.

Betwixt agency and accountability: re-visioning street-level bureaucrats

“…Such individual motivations also have a significant bearing on the use of discretion for personal gain. There is an extensive literature that highlights pervasive corruption among street-level bureaucrats, especially across several developing countries, and their collusion with clients or other intermediaries (Kencana 2017;Smart 2018). In the Indian case, such corruption and collusion even gets legitimised as jugaad ('flexible' use of limited resources for efficient problem-solving) which gives 'provisional agency' to clients in need of public services (Jauregui 2014).…”