Varieties of Bureaucracy: Implementing Primary Education in Rural India

• In Event: Interpretive Approaches to Poverty, Participation, and Populism

Abstract

What makes primary education work for the poor? Moving past the well-studied terrain of social welfare spending, this paper investigates the mundane, yet critical, challenge of implementing social services for India's poor. Despite the enactment of major primary education programs by India’s federal government in the last three decades, the extent and quality of policy implementation varies remarkably across Indian states. Some states have registered significant gains in school infrastructure expansion and student enrollment, beyond what conventional theories would predict, while at the same time displaying egregious gaps in the implementation of primary education services. Other states have implemented services more effectively, yielding far better outcomes for students. These differences are not explained by income, urbanization, geography and other commonly cited factors. To understand the varying patterns of implementation across India, this paper demonstrates the significance of historically contingent differences in bureaucratic norms operating inside state agencies. Bureaucratic norms are the informal rules of the game that influence how state officials interpret public policies and what duties are required of them. Norms allow state agencies to define policy “problems” in a practical sense and determine how to “solve” them. Over time, bureaucratic norms condition citizen expectations for the state and collective strategies vis-à-vis public services. I construct an analytical typology of bureaucratic norms (legalistic and deliberative) and delineate the mechanisms whereby they generate divergent outcomes for policy implementation. Against conventional expectations, I show that deliberative agencies are more effective in implementing primary education since they can interpret policies in a flexible manner and adapt social services to the varying needs of local communities, thereby securing community support in monitoring services. By contrast, legalistic state agencies, which adhere strictly to formal rules and procedures, implement policies unevenly and tend to advantage local elites in the process of monitoring services, dampening the participation of underprivileged groups in society.

The argument draws on a multi-level comparative research design in rural north India, a region where conventional theories overwhelmingly predict the state to fail in implementing public services. The findings are based on 22 months of fieldwork conducted in four north Indian states (Uttar Pradesh, Himachal Pradesh, Uttarakhand and Bihar), using intensive field methods—participant observation inside the education bureaucracy, village and school ethnography, along with 524 interviews and focus group discussions with state officials, school teachers and parents— to trace the policy implementation process from the state political capital down to the village primary school. Notwithstanding the same national policies, political and legal institutions and formal administrative structure, my field research reveals how differences in bureaucratic norms account for the varying extent and quality of implementation across these states, with material consequences for how citizens experience and relate to the local state. The argument departs from an influential body of research that paints the Indian bureaucracy as weak, clientelistic or corrupt, and whose pessimistic predictions for policy implementation are rooted in the conceptual apparatus of the Weberian bureaucracy. Instead, I show that even non-Weberian bureaucracies in rural north India can, under certain conditions, implement public services effectively. By bringing the norms that bind frontline agencies into focus, the findings shed new light on how states in the developing world can secure (or deny) primary education for the poor.

Author

• Akshay Mangla, University of Oxford