Poster #35 - Embedded Bureaucrats and Policy Outcomes: Evidence from the Indian Forest Service

• In Event: Saturday Poster Luncheon

Abstract

Bureaucrats are central to the state’s capacity to implement policies, especially in low- and middle-income countries. A longstanding theoretical debate in political economy and public administration concerns the performance implications of bureaucratic embeddedness, i.e. the extent to which public officials are socially or demographically tied to the communities they serve. On one hand, embedded bureaucrats may be more intrinsically motivated, possess superior local knowledge, and enjoy higher community trust. On the other hand, they may be vulnerable to clientelism, elite capture, and reduced autonomy due to social obligations. Despite its theoretical salience, empirical evidence on how embeddedness shapes bureaucratic effectiveness remains limited – particularly in the domain of environmental governance. This study provides novel evidence from India’s elite Indian Forest Service (IFoS), where officer-state assignment rules create plausibly exogenous variation in embeddedness.

The paper exploits a home-state allocation policy for centrally recruited IFoS officers to identify the causal effect of bureaucratic embeddedness on forest policy outcomes. Since assignment to home states is determined by a rule-based system that is orthogonal to individual officer characteristics, this institutional feature enables credible identification. Embeddedness is defined as assignment to one’s home state and is instrumented using early-career postings (within the first four years) to the home state. Outcomes are measured using a combination of administrative and satellite datasets that capture village-level forest cover, deforestation, plantation works, forest clearances, conflict incidence, and measures of institutional trust.For this, I use a novel dataset spanning two decades (2001–2020), constructed from annual civil lists, executive record sheets, entry exam scores, and seniority rankings of IFoS officers. The environmental and development outcomes are matched at the village level using high-resolution data from the Socioeconomic High-resolution Rural-Urban Geographic (SHRUG) dataset, e-Green Watch platform, and Parivesh forest clearance database. The empirical strategy implements an instrumental variable design with village fixed effects, village-specific time trends, and state-year fixed effects, along with controls for key time-varying village characteristics.

This paper contributes to the literature on the political economy of public service delivery by advancing understanding of when and how implementer identity affects policy outcomes. It provides new theoretical and empirical insights into bureaucratic embeddedness in common-pool resource management and responds to recent calls in economics and political science for more precise mappings between institutional design and implementation efficacy. These findings have broader implications for the design of civil service assignment policies in federal bureaucracies.

Author

• Sanjana Kadyan, Duke University
  Presenting Author