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The purpose of this paper is to examine the attitudes of street-level bureaucrats from different agencies and sectors of the Finnish welfare state, namely municipal social workers, diaconal workers of the Lutheran church, benefit officials of the Social Security Institution and officials of private unemployment funds.

The authors are interested in the following questions: What are the attitudes of street-level bureaucrats towards the labour market allowance? What is the impact of individual characteristics? The study utilised the unique national survey data of different groups of street-level bureaucrats from the year 2011 (total N=2,313). The dependent variables focus on legitimacy of the basic level of labour market allowance and sanction policies. Analyses are built around five independent variables which measure professional, personal interest and ideological factors.

There are differences both between and within groups of Finnish street-level bureaucrats with regard to their attitudes concerning the labour market allowance. Social and diaconal workers believe more often than officials that the level of labour market allowance is too low, and offer less support for the idea that an unemployed person should take any job that is offered or have their unemployment security reduced. The results show that the attitudes of bureaucrats are explained by length of work history, economic situation and ideological factors.

There have been very few analyses comparing attitudes among different groups of bureaucrats. The present study is intended to fill this gap in the literature.

This article suggests that leadership does not just occur in the higher echelons of a bureaucratic hierarchy, but is endemic throughout the organization and is present even at the basic rank and file level. Street-level leaders emerge when the need arises for quick decisions and responses to complex stimuli. These relatively "informal" leaders can exert a significant influence on how and what things get done. Many of these decisions involve transactional decisions between leaders and followers. However, to deal with more complex challenges, street-level leaders may need to incorporate transformational leadership strategies, similar to leaders higher in the hierarchy. To test this thesis this article reports the survey findings of a study of state agency of disabilities and their contractor provider organizations.

This paper aims to examine policy innovation among street-level bureaucrats at low-threshold services to people who use drugs during the COVID-19 pandemic in Denmark.

This paper builds on two research projects conducted during the first pandemic lockdown in Denmark. The first is a case study of how COVID-19 impacted on people who use drugs (PWUD) and services for PWUD at the open drug scene in the neighborhood of Vesterbro in Copenhagen. The second is an ethnographic study of how users of services at the intersection of drug use and homelessness were impacted by lockdown.

Drawing on Kingdon’s “multiple policy streams” approach, this study shows how lockdown opened a “policy window” for innovating services to people who use drugs. This paper further shows how the pandemic crisis afforded street-level bureaucrats new possibilities for acting as “policy entrepreneurs” in a context where vertical bureaucratic barriers and horizontal cross-sectoral silos temporarily collapsed. Finally, the authors show how this had more lasting effects through the initiation of outreach opioid substitution treatment.

In Denmark, the emergence of a “policy window” for street-level bureaucrats to act as street-level “entrepreneurs” occurred in a context of rapid government response to the pandemic. For crises to act as “policy windows” for innovation depends on strong, preexisting institutional landscapes.

This paper adds to existing literature on policy innovation during COVID-19 in two ways: methodologically by contributing an ethnographically grounded approach to studying policy innovation and theoretically by examining the conditions that allowed policy innovation to occur.

To examine the implementation processes and outcomes of collaborative governance initiatives through the lens of bureaucratic politics.

An in-depth single case study research design with 28 embedded cases to study the implementation of a collaborative governance initiative. This paper uses the analytical technique of process tracing to explicate necessary and sufficient conditions to uncover causal mechanisms and confirm descriptive and causal inferences.

This study finds that when street-level bureaucrats perceived the collaborative initiative as a health intervention (and not as a collaborative initiative), it resulted in low levels of stakeholder participation and made the collaborative initiative unsuccessful. This paper finds that bureaucratic politics is the causal mechanism that further legitimized this perception resulting in each stakeholder group avoiding participation and sticking to their departmental siloes.

This is a single case study about a revelatory case of collaborative governance implementation in India, and findings are analytically generalizable to similar administrative contexts. Further research is needed through a multiple case study design in a comparative context to examine bureaucratic politics in implementing collaborative initiatives.

Policymakers and managers need to carefully consider the implications of engaging organizations with competing institutional histories when formulating and implementing collaborative governance initiatives.

This study's uniqueness is that it examines implementation of collaborative governance through a bureaucratic politics lens. Specifically, the study applies Western-centric scholarship on collaborative governance and street-level bureaucracy to a non-Western developing country context to push the theoretical and empirical boundaries of key concepts in public administration.

David Farmer suggests that there are multiple ways of looking at social science concepts. No one perspective, or lens, is superior, but taken together, multiple lenses can be enriching and yield a clearer picture of complex ideas. The purpose of this paper is to illustrate Farmerʼs multiple lenses approach by looking at performance measurement in the public organizations that participate in the Tennessee Municipal Benchmarking Project (TMBP). Observations from the TMBP suggests that utilizing only one lens can be detrimental to the decision-making process, while employing multiple lenses acknowledges multiple factors in the decision-making process and aides decision makers in reaching a consensus.

Viewing school principals as street‐level bureaucrats, creative insubordination is the implementation of policies and programmes at the school level in a way that fits the principal′s values, philosophy, and goals. Focuses on school principals′ use of creative insubordination in relationships with the central office, their professional beliefs about discretion, perceptions of role conflict, and their locus of control. Creative insubordination was most frequent among veteran principals who value on‐the‐job competence over completion of degrees and certificates and are thought to be instructional leaders by central office supervisors. Social protection from negative sanctions from central office seemed to be associated with principals′ ability to show that their insubordination was justifiable in terms of the needs of their school, teachers or students.

In Michael Lipsky’s intriguing analysis of the performance of public bureaucracy – in his classic Street-level Bureaucracy (1980) – he shows, for example, the professional discretion they apply may not only involve adapting policy to the individual case, meet real needs in the population, prevent patients, clients, students or users from getting access, etc., but at the same time both have profound policy implications and take very ‘political’ forms. In this chapter, I argue that it is regrettable that Lipsky did not establish a comparative framework for his study. Based on my own ethnographic research in local politics and bureaucratic practice in the municipal world in Norway, I look more closely at the relative autonomy of street-level bureaucracy within the context of universalism – a hallmark of the Nordic welfare state model (Esping-Andersen 1998, 2009) – and explore how it is utilised. The Nordic welfare states are among the most ‘service intense’ states in the Western world, and the personnel working directly with patients, students, clients, etc., play a major role in linking ‘the state’ to the population (Papakostas, 2001, Vike et al., 2002). Thus, the role of the Nordic welfare state’s street-level bureaucracy as a key interface between the state and the population is hard to overestimate (Leira & Sainsbury, 1994). Moreover, as universalism also tends to stimulate what we may call a culture of strong claims (to services) among the population at large, street-level bureaucrats may be able to form strong alliances with other actors, and thus play an important part of the dynamics of power in local politics – where fundamental policy principles such as universalism is at stake.

In an attempt to tackle the incidence of poverty and social exclusion in the Ghanaian society, a number of social protection programmes including the school feeding programme is introduced. The programme is designed to cater for the extreme poor and as well encourage enrolment and attendance in the country. The purpose of this paper is to assess the intention or objective for which the programme is initiated and the realities on the ground. It looks at whether the current beneficiaries are the extreme poor described in the policy document.

The study explored the incidence of poverty in Ghana using the Ghana Living Standard Survey (GLSS6) and the Ghana School Feeding Annual Operation Plan (GSFAOP) with the help of the school feeding policy document to draw on actual beneficiaries and potential beneficiaries. The differences between percentages of poverty (2012/2013) and feeding schools was computed using GLSS6 and GSFAOP. The study also conducted a number of open-ended interviews with some stakeholders to validate the nature of recruitment of beneficiary schools.

The study concluded that there is a mismatch of potential beneficiaries and current beneficiaries using the referred data sources. It was found out that majority of beneficiary schools are located within areas of lesser incidence of poverty. This could be attributed to political interference in view of testimonies from respondents and the computerisation of GLSS6 and GSFAOP. The study therefore proposed that the allocation of feeding schools should be done to reflect the percentage of poverty situation in each region. This could be achieved when the district education office takes control. It will help minimise the level of politicisation and as well improve efficiency.

The study therefore highlighted the relevance of the school feeding programme and the inverse relationship it has with political interference. It again demonstrates the need to restructure the operations of the programme to meet the objective for which it was established.

The aim of this paper is to discuss the roles and competencies of boundary spanners in the context of collaboration. It aims to examine the problematic nature of these roles, and to consider the communalities between different types of boundary spanner. It then seeks to interrogate the extent to then seeks which managing in collaboration is different from managing in single organizations, and to question whether it should be undertaken by a dedicated cadre of actors or mainstreamed into all professional, leadership and management practice.

This is an exploratory paper that draws both on a critical review of the literature and contemporary research by the author.

The paper suggests that there are different types of boundary spanner pursuing different roles, but argues that there is a considerable degree of communality between them and the competencies required to undertake them especially in relation to reticulism, communication, co-ordination and entrepreneurial skill. Boundary spanners face considerable challenges in dealing with tensions and ambiguities arising from complexity, multiple accountabilities and governance forms. The question of whether managing in collaboration is different to managing in hierarchies remains contested.

The paper has direct implications for the training and development of boundary spanners either as dedicated actors or as an integral part of professional, managerial and leadership roles.

The value of this paper lies in its focus on the role of agency within collaboration, its identification of different types of boundary spanner, and its critical analysis of the competencies and challenges they face in contemporary public management.