P12 Street-level delivery of public services: where are we going from here?

Corresponding and review chairs

Marie Østergaard Møller,  associate professor at the department of Politics and Society, Aalborg University, Denmark.

Email: mol@dps.aau.dk

Gabriela Lotta, associate professor at the department of public management, Getulio Vargas Foundation (FGV), Brazil. 

Email: gabriela.lotta@fgv.br 

Co-chairs:

Anat Gofen, associate professor, Hebrew University, Israel. 

Description

Street-level implementation plays a fundamental role in the equity and fairness of public service delivery. The allocation of goods and burdens at the frontlines is inherently normative involving various, sometimes conflicting, values and different forms of pressure. Despite on-going interest, there is still scarce understanding of how micro-level aspects of decision-making, such as value tradeoffs, knowledge use, and street-level judgments are affected by the broader policy, organizational, political or societal contexts.

Call for abstracts

This panel invites papers focusing on how contemporary developments affect street-level implementation practices. We invite abstracts for papers that address (but not limited to) the following topics:

  • The impact of various governance paradigms, such as public value management, digital-era- governance and collaborative governance, on street-level bureaucracies and service delivery;

  • The enabling and constraining conditions of managerial reforms in street-level organizations, including the role of leadership;

  • How and why citizens see the state as they do (shaping factors in policy learning);

  • The organization of citizen outcomes in street-level bureaucracies and the role of

    professional autonomy;

  • How populism and democratic backsliding affect street-level implementation, street-level

    workers’ roles, and citizen outcomes;

  • How societal (dis)trust in government affects street-level decision-making and citizens’ encounters with the state.

    We welcome paper abstracts with an empirical and theoretical focus. The panel is open to empirical research based on a variety of research designs (case study; comparative designs; experiments; cross-sectional research; grounded theory; etc.) and methods of data collection (interviews; observations; surveys; vignette studies; etc.). We also invite theoretical works that particularly focus on conceptual and theory development, and/or on connecting different levels of analysis.

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