Mega Hendra Waty

Coexistence of multiple governmental traditions: understanding dilemmas and practices of street-level bureaucrats

Within policy implementation process, street-level bureaucrats become pivotal actors in which they are discerned as de facto policymakers, the ones who create and re-create policy in practice (Hill and Hupe, 2002; Lipsky, 2010). The roles of street-level bureaucrats have received considerable attention, particularly in the context of social welfare policies due to the fact that they have capacity to decide ‘categories of eligibility’ of citizens, make judgments about ‘level of benefits’ that citizens can get and determine citizens who deserve to acquire particular services from government programmes (Meyers, Glaser and MacDonald, 1998; Brodkin, 2011).

With evolving and changing governance arrangements, street-level bureaucrats now frequently work between different modes of governance within which they might have to conduct their practice under hierarchy, performance-based oriented, and collaborative settings at the same time (Tuurnas, 2015; Aschhoff and Vogel, 2019). The routines of street-level workers in delivering public services are being challenged and day-to-day practice of street-level bureaucrats becomes even more complex and complicated due to the fact that process of shifting governance arrangements mostly does not occur in linear way, where one new mode of governance easily supplants the old one. 

This project aims to explore the way street-level bureaucrats perform their daily practice with competing demands from different modes of governance which coexist, and the way street-level bureaucrats respond to those demands and dilemmas.

Supervisors: Dr. Catherine Durose and Dr. Koen Bartles

Profile

Mega is a civil servant who work in Sukabumi City, local government in Indonesia. Previously, she worked as a policy analyst, focusing on the issues of women empowerment and child protection, for 3 years at Cabinet of Secretary of Indonesia and one of her main tasks is to provide policy brief for the President. She graduated from Gadjah Mada University, with master’s degree in public administration in 2014. Her research interests are mainly about role of front-line workers/street-level bureaucrats, policy implementation, interpretive study and practice-based approach.

Qualifications

  • BA of Public Administration (Gadjah Mada Univeristy, Indonesia)
  • Master of Public Administration (Gadjah Mada University, Indonesia)

Professional Memberships

  • Association of Indonesia’s civil servant 
  • Association of Indonesia’s government procurement

Research Interests

  • Street-level bureaucracy
  • Policy implementation
  • Interpretive study
  • Practice-based approach

Contact Details:

Email: mxw919@student.bham.ac.uk