Author Meets Critics: Akshay Mangla’s “Making Bureaucracy Work”

Session Submission Type: Author meet critics

Session Description

This “Author Meets Critics” panel brings together a distinguished group of comparative politics scholars to discuss Akshay Mangla’s new book, Making Bureaucracy Work: Norms, Education and Public Service Delivery in Rural India (Cambridge University Press, December 2022). Primary education is a core governmental function and essential public service. Most countries have laws making primary education universal, free and compulsory. Yet, the implementation of education services is often uneven and poorly understood. Making Bureaucracy Work investigates the striking subnational variation in primary schooling in rural north India, an unlikely setting for public services to reach the least advantaged citizens.

What makes bureaucracy work for the least advantaged? Mangla advances a novel theoretical framework anchored on bureaucratic norms, the informal rules of the game that guide how public officials behave and relate with citizens on the ground. He develops an analytical typology, of “legalistic” and “deliberative” bureaucratic norms, and elucidates the causal mechanisms by which they generate varied implementation patterns and outcomes for primary education. The theoretical argument is built and tested through a multilevel comparative analysis in four north Indian sales. Based on twenty-eight months of field research, Mangla pries open the black box of Indian bureaucracy and traces the implementation process from state capitals down to rural districts and village primary schools

The study finds that while legalistic bureaucracies encourage compliance with policy rules, leading to improvements in school infrastructure and enrollments, they perform poorly on complex tasks involving coordination with society. Worse, they tend to undermine the participation of marginalized social groups in school governance. By contrast, deliberative bureaucracies encourage more flexible problem solving by public officials, who in turn facilitate more robust coproduction of services with society. Through deliberation, officials learn to adapt policy rules to meet the practical needs of local communities, thereby yielding higher quality education services. The book seeks to advance debates concerning education politics and policy in India, and it offers new theoretical insights on bureaucracy and its relationship to inclusive development.

The panelists are a diverse group of scholars who will critically engage the book’s substantive themes. The aim will be to connect those themes to a broader discussion on bureaucracy and education in the Global South. Mangla will present a new research agenda he is developing on education governance and reform, with an eye to exploring how education research can contribute to allied research themes in comparative politics, such as state capacity, social welfare, policy implementation and citizenship practices. The panelists have specializations in different regions (South Asia, East Asia and Latin America), allowing for a wide range of comparative perspectives. Each of the panelists has also conducted research on the state and various social policies, which will enable a rich conversation on primary schooling and how it relates to other social services.

Sub Unit

• Division 59: Education Politics and Policy

Chairs

• Aseema Sinha Claremont Mckenna College

• Jessica Rich Marquette University

Presenters

• Akshay Mangla University of Oxford

• Tariq Thachil University of Pennsylvania

• Ben Ross Schneider Massachusetts Institute of Technology

• Prerna Singh Brown University

• Atul Kohli Princeton University