Policy interpretation and enactment within the everyday practices of frontline education bureaucrats in India and its impact on the quality of service

Frontline officials are expected to perform a range of tasks, with differing levels of complexity. This project will draw on existing scholarship on bureaucracy and accountability to understand why frontline officials prioritise certain tasks over others, and how they perform some tasks effectively, and not others. By providing a greater understanding of the everyday practices of frontline bureaucrats and their implications for service delivery, this project will contribute to the fields of bureaucracy and public service delivery.
This project will attempt to expand the theoretical understanding and framing of implementation issues beyond the scope of 'capacity' and 'accountability'. By viewing frontline education officials as cocreators of knowledge, the project will attempt to highlight key principles of effective implementation despite the constraints of a dysfunctional system that prioritises rule-following over responsiveness. In doing so, the project will also provide a 'thick', descriptive account of the everyday implementation of policy at the sub-state level (Geertz 1973). Lastly, the project will contribute towards a greater understanding of how bureaucracies (focused on public services) function in practice in low-capacity environments, making the findings also applicable to other low and lower middle-income countries.