Weaponizing Administrative Burden: Role of third parties in gendered administrative burden

• In Event: Lightning Session: Social Equity and Race

Abstract

How and why administrative burdens are created is an ongoing question in public administration research. The most common answer is that the burdens are created through state actions, as part of policy making by other means, to re/distribute resources, control access and limit citizenship. The second source which creates administrative burdens is infrastructural actions: burdens created through the actions of implementing infrastructure, including but not limited to frontline bureaucracy, material and physical structures, and non-human actors and processes. Finally, the last source of administrative burdens, which thus far has received relatively less attention in the literature are the third parties, non-state actors who may or may not be involved in the service delivery, but can never-the-less impact the administrative burdens experienced by the citizens. Based on this, we ask: How third party-actors can impact the implementation of public policies? What is the impact of this influence on equity and access to public rights and services?

Methods and Findings

We answer this question by examining the experiences of women trying to access various citizenship and state documents in Pakistan. The data is collected through in-depth ethnographic interviews with 30 women who were in various stages of divorce and custody proceedings.

Our research indicates that the administrative burden of many state documents including family registration, citizenship, marriage and divorce certificates is already gendered. Policy design and implementation architecture positions men as default heads of household, giving them overall control over access to several state documents. In our data, men especially husbands of the participants used this administrative burden to curtail women’s access to basic documents. Men can weaponize the compliance costs of documents by refusing to register marriage, obtain family certificates and legalize the divorce. They can also withhold documents like their own ID card, needed by women to apply for many state documents. Men can also weaponize learning costs by deliberately providing misinformation about documentation requirements. Lastly, they can also weaponize psychological costs by using the administrative processes to force women to stay in abusive marriages or to stay in contact with them when they do not want to. Similarly, they can also use their control and custody of documents to exert control over access to education and healthcare for their families.

Relevance

This research has multiple important contributions towards equity in public policy. First it provides an empirical investigation of gendered administrative burdens, and the role of culture in experience of administrative burdens. Second, our research also investigates how patriarchal gendered relations are written into the implementation structures, creating an almost invisible subtext of inequity in seemingly egalitarian policies.

Author

• Ayesha Masood, Lahore University of Management Sciences
  Presenting Author