Local Bureaucrats

Bottom-up critiques view local bureaucrats as the main actors in policy delivery and conceive of implementation as negotiation processes within networks of implementers (Handbook of Public Policy Analysis, Ch7, p90). In addition, bottom-up theorists claim that if main actors, local bureaucratic, are not allowed preference in the implementation stage with respect to local condition state, thus the policy will be likely to face its failure (Matland, 1995, 148). The classical bottom-up researchers are: The American researchers Lipsky (1971, 1980) and Elmore (1980) besides Swedish scholar Hjern (1982), also in cooperation with other authors such Porter and Hull. Lipsky (1971, 1980) analyzed the behavior of public service workers (e.g., teachers,

Studies belonging to this strand of research typically started from the “bottom” by identifying the networks of actors involved in actual policy delivery. They rejected the idea that policies are defined at the central level and that implementers need to stick to these objectives as neatly as possible. Instead, the availability of discretion at the stage of policy delivery appeared as a beneficial factor as local bureaucrats were seen to be much nearer to the real problems than central policy makers. Hudson (1989) argues that the power held by street-level bureaucrats’ stretches beyond the control of citizens’ behavior. Street-level bureaucrats are also considered to have considerable autonomy from their employing organizations. The main source of their autonomous power thus stems from the considerable amount of discretion at their disposal. According to Hill and Hupe (2002, 52–53), Lipsky’s work has been widely misinterpreted as he did not only underline the difficulties in controlling street-level bureaucrats’ behavior. Still more important, Lipsky showed that street-level policy making created practices that enable public workers to cope with problems encountered in their everyday work. The importance of Lipsky’s work lies in the fact that his approach was, on the one hand, used as justification for methodological strategies that focus on street-level actors. On the other hand, it showed that top-down approaches failed to take into account that a hierarchical chain of command and well-defined policy objectives are not enough to guarantee successful implementation. The main concern of Elmore (1980) (Handbook of Public Policy Analysis, Ch7, p93) was the question of how to study implementation. Instead of assuming that policy makers effectively control implementation, his concept of “backward mapping” suggested that