On the fringes of formality : organizational capability in street-level bureaucracies in Brazil

Abstract

Middle capability countries have over the last few decades implemented a range of reforms to improve their service delivery systems - and yet have made only marginal progress. Despite better macroeconomic conditions, service delivery outcomes are still lagging behind. This is more than a puzzle, it has been a cause for revolt. Millions and millions have risen in protest-demanding improvements in the quality of basic services. When the state is unable to deliver on its core functions, then it highlights a fundamental crisis of the state in these countries. My dissertation aims to unravel a piece of this puzzle by examining variation in the implementation of a comparable type of reform across the policing, education and industrial policy sectors in Brazil. It does this in particular by looking at intermediate outputs of front-line service delivery units (police units, schools, and innovation institutes), using this as a proxy for bureaucratic administration, which has been shown to be associated with service delivery outcomes. My research finds that there is much variation in these intermediate outputs and that this variation cannot be easily explained by structural factors. For instance, while some schools do very well on these bureaucratic administration metrics in poor neighborhoods, others do poorly in rich neighborhoods. What lies behind this variation in bureaucratic administration in front-line service delivery units? Drawing on extensive fieldwork over the course of three years, I find that there is a particular behavioral profile among middle-tier bureaucrats - what I call the fringes of formality behavior - that is associated with more positive bureaucratic administrative- outputs in the front-line units. Middle-tier bureaucrats practicing this behavior exhibit three main characteristics: initiative, a focus on strategic functions, and an ability to identify and make use of bureaucratic zones of opportunity. I detail in the dissertation the different categories of action of how the fringes of formality behavior manifests itself in practice. I demonstrate how these categories are consistent across sectors, and then, drawing on case studies and surveys, I show the positive association between the fringes of formality behavior and bureaucratic administrative outputs both within and across sectors. Ultimately, I argue that the way the fringes of formality bureaucrats behave differs from the "best practices" often advocated by the development and public policy communities. My findings suggest that there may be an alternative path to building a higher capability bureaucracy that does not necessarily involve adherence to top-down rationalistic approaches. Rather, they provide support for identifying those behaviors that are already meeting the genuine needs of the local units on the ground - even if they do not seem to adhere to preconceived notions of effective bureaucratic administration - and then nurturing and promoting those behaviors. These findings will have significant implications for how best to improve service delivery by bureaucracies in middle-income countries.