Contemporary governance faces mounting environmental challenges, straining governmental capacity to achieve policy objectives. We extend Wu et al.'s policy capacity framework, arguing that systemic political capacity is grounded in political trust, itself conditioned by legitimacy. Applying this framework to proactive conservation under the U.S. Endangered Species Act, we analyze the failure of Colorado’s sage-grouse initiative. Findings suggest contested legitimacy surrounding coercive federal intervention diminished political trust in regulatory authority, constraining systemic political capacity and limiting development of enforceable conservation arrangements satisfying federal requirements. The analysis has broader implications for collaborative governance dependent on credible regulatory authority.
This study examines nonprofit sector capacity by integrating economic concepts of supply and demand with practitioner perspectives. Focusing on health and human services nonprofits in a midsize southeastern U.S. city, it combines community indicators with survey and interview data. Findings suggest that sector capacity depends not only on resource availability and organizational density but also on the strength of local networks and community context. Well-established nonprofits embedded in local networks differ from more loosely connected organizations, demonstrating how network position shapes perceptions of capacity and the ability to meet community needs. These findings advance research on nonprofit carrying capacity.
This study investigates how formal politicization shapes the turnover of senior public executives. Using a dataset of 138 CEOs across 79 Italian public hospitals between 2017 and 2021, it examines the relative influence of managerial competence and partisan loyalty on the likelihood of CEO exit. Although both factors affect turnover, partisan loyalty emerges as the primary driver. Political stability significantly lowers CEO dismissal risk, even with weak organizational performance or limited managerial human capital, which plays a secondary role. These findings suggest that NPM reforms have been only partially effective, with patronage practices persisting within a formally meritocratic institutional framework.
As cities become more heterogeneous and polarized, local governments face crises that challenge both performance and legitimacy. This study examines how social cohesion and social proximity are associated with satisfaction with municipal performance during the COVID-19 pandemic and the May 2021 intergroup violence in Israel. Using survey data from 944 residents across 23 cities and employing OLS and SEM analyses, we find that social cohesion is consistently associated with higher satisfaction, whereas proximity is associated with satisfaction primarily through cohesion. These findings highlight the social foundations of municipal legitimacy and distinguish between contact and cohesion in crisis governance.
In public and hybrid settings, substantial knowledge is often available, but its influence on decision making and implementation remains limited. Existing scholarship has shown that this problem involves more than a simple knowledge deficit. Greater analytical attention needs to be paid to how different standards for valid, useful, and authoritative knowledge operate simultaneously within the same decision situation. This essay develops a threefold claim. First, it distinguishes five knowledge logics: certainty, interaction, legitimacy, network, and influence. Second, it identifies four recurring dynamics among them: dominance, collision, decoupling, and productive combination. Third, it argues that their relative weight shifts across administrative phases.
This article examines how fragmented governance shapes access to digital public services, focusing on telemedicine use in the United States during the 2021 to 2022 pandemic recovery. Using U.S. Census Bureau Household Pulse Survey data combined with state-level differences in reimbursement policies, licensure rules, and emergency waivers, the study analyzes whether telemedicine access varies across policy environments, controlling for individual characteristics and health needs. Findings show that telemedicine use is strongly associated with intergovernmental policy configurations, along with personal resources. The study highlights how federal and state institutions structure access, producing uneven opportunities for digitally mediated care across populations and territories. JEL codes: I18, H77, H75
This study conducted a systematic literature review of 15 articles on local government reporting on sustainable development goals (SDG), published in Scopus-indexed journals between 2015 and 2025. The findings reveal that research on this topic is relatively limited, with most papers appearing since 2023. Research is predominantly grounded in institutional and legitimacy theory. Empirical studies focusing on Southern European countries dominate the literature. The studies report low levels of SDG reporting and inconsistent findings relating to its drivers. The analysis highlights the need for scholarship into the integration of SDGs in municipal reporting practices, offering guidance to researchers, regulators, and policymakers to enhance SDG reporting.
This article examines how German street-level bureaucrats exercise administrative discretion in welfare provision, focusing on perceptions of deservingness and need. Based on 37 interviews in job agencies, we identify four types of SLBs (hardliners, administrators, pragmatic social workers, and altruists), each guided by distinct normative dispositions. These dispositions strongly influence decision-making and, ultimately, client outcomes and policy implementation. Findings show decisions are often value-based, shaping welfare practices. Our study contributes to public administration theory by linking discretion to justice principles and offers practical insights for fostering fairness and consistency in welfare services, particularly regarding need.
Public administrators play a distinct role in modern governance, responsible for ensuring that government actions serve the public good. As governance increasingly relies on nongovernmental actors, this responsibility has grown more complex. This is particularly true in open space policy, where land trusts have become major actors in private conservation efforts. While effective in preserving land, these efforts often fall short in serving broader public interests. Using Land Trust Alliance census data and propensity score matching methods, I find preliminary evidence that participation in formal landscape-scale collaborative initiatives is associated with greater public access to conserved lands, one measurable dimension of realized publicness.
This study uses the Collaborative Life-Cycle Framework to examine the challenges associated with developing a collaboration's structure. A process analysis of collaborations emerging in four United States watersheds identified three interrelated sets of rules that form a collaboration's social architecture: boundary rules (member and strategy rules); decision rules; and coordination rules. The analysis suggests that convergence on a structure is a path-dependent process where minor changes produce potentially large structural differences. It raises important questions about the evolutionary dynamics that create a collaboration's structure. Discussion concludes by examining implications for theory development and practice.
This research addresses the challenge of evaluating the socioeconomic impact of entrepreneurial activities within juvenile detention centers (JDCs), specifically through the lens of Social Return on Investment (SROI) methodology. Focusing on a case study at the Bologna JDC, in Italy, the study explores the constitutional mandate of rehabilitation in prisons, emphasizing the role of work with outside people as a key element in this process. Findings underscore the contribution of work within detention to the rehabilitation process. Given the political reluctance to prioritize these programs, the research advocates for structured approaches to underscore its critical importance.
Social bonds serve dual individual and communal goals as indicators of life satisfaction and capital for communities seeking to address collective challenges. In this article, we explore social bonds through an individual's sense of community and length of residence on philanthropic and civic behaviors. Specifically, we assess how sense of community influences: (1) donative and volunteering behavior in secular and religious nonprofits and (2) voting behavior in an upcoming election. Findings indicate sense of community and length of residence are associated with philanthropic and civic engagement, particularly secular volunteering and voting. The curvilinear effects of sense of community on philanthropic engagement offers useful insights for managers considering where to target their efforts, and, as importantly, where managers may see diminishing returns. For example, recruitment efforts targeting residents newer to a community - rather than longer-residing residents - are more likely to yield increases in secular volunteering, especially as newcomers build their sense of community.
Policy failure is often explained post-hoc through isolated theoretical lenses. This article proposes a unified meta-framework: the Administrative Friction Model. It posits that policy efficacy is inversely proportional to the cumulative resistance encountered across three dimensions: (1) informational friction (limited knowledge), (2) motivational friction (misaligned incentives), and (3) operational friction (implementation complexity). By synthesizing foundational theories, this framework provides a holistic diagnostic tool for predicting vulnerabilities during policy design. Its utility is demonstrated by analyzing Ostrom's polycentric governance as a system designed to minimize all three frictions. I argue that architecting low-friction systems is critical for improving policy outcomes.
Artificial intelligence (AI) has revolutionized the public sector. However, AI adoption in the public sector remains underexplored, especially the factors that induce citizens’ acceptance of AI-powered e-government services (AAIPEGS) for efficient and improved service delivery. Utilizing the UTAUT framework, the study examines the factors associated with the AAIPEGS in Ghana to illustrate a developing country’s perspective on AAIPEGS. We applied structural equation modeling using SmartPLS-4 to 478 valid responses collected via self-administered online questionnaires from a cross-section of Ghanaian society (e.g., teachers, students, public sector workers, and other members of society). The results indicate that performance expectancy, effort expectancy, facilitating conditions, and security and privacy (SP) are notable drivers of people’s AAIPEGS. Yet, social influence failed to stimulate the AAIPEGS. The government regulatory framework for AI drives the AAIPEGS, performance expectancy, effort expectancy, and SP of AI-powered e-government services. Furthermore, institutional capacity significantly moderates the effects of both effort expectancy and SP on the AAIPEGS. Findings indicate that an efficient regulatory framework and vibrant institutional capacity are vital components for improving public AAIPEGS. The study underscores the direct impact of the government regulatory framework and the moderating role of institutional capacity on AAIPEGS. This study suggests adequate regulatory mechanisms to guide the rollout of AI-driven public services. The institutional capacity of public sector agencies should be strengthened and continuously adjusted to adapt to the transformation of public services through AI-powered e-government. Theoretical and policy consequences for the advancement of AI-driven public services are thoroughly discussed.
This study contributes to the literature on impacts experienced by stakeholders from a government reorganization. This research uses the case study of Puerto Rico, which underwent a central government reorganization in 2018. Thirty-five interviews were conducted with participants who worked in the solid waste sector. Immediately after the government reorganization, territorial government employees were more likely to be absent and the quality of work declined, which we call "government ghosting." As a result, stakeholders outside of the central government stepped into roles and responsibilities and, in many cases, were negatively affected.
Female representation in government has long been advocated for promoting good governance, and its potential effect on corruption has attracted sustained scholarly attention. Yet theoretical reasoning and evidence remain fragmented and contested. This preregistered meta-analysis, synthesizing 588 effect sizes from 57 quantitative studies, confirms a statistically significant negative association between female representation and corruption. It further shows that this effect is larger in studies using subjective corruption measures, descriptive representation, only one type of female representation, and excluding country-fixed effects. The results advance our understanding of how and when female representation influences corruption and offer insights for anti-corruption policies.
Scholars have expressed frustration that public policy formulation sometimes proceeds with optimism that lies in stark contrast to the evaluation literature. We present theoretical insights from the rules of evidence that cast greater light on why this might be so. We also conduct novel sophisticated empirical analysis - based on a natural experiment in New South Wales, Australia - to better measure the efficiency outcomes at the heart of most amalgamation proposals. We conclude with our thoughts on the important normative measures, derived from rules of evidence, that might be operationalised to avoid injustice and enhance accountability in the future.
This article addresses a research gap in conceptualizing ecosystem approaches to social entrepreneurship development and scaling social innovation. Towards that end, we performed analyses on 268 social startup projects in Hong Kong, examining target beneficiaries and social issues. Semi-structured interviews were conducted with 33 founders to collect information about critical incidents that took place after they received seed funding from an incubator. The interviews revealed distinctive struggles among social entrepreneurs including business modeling for blended value and for low-income markets as well as organizational field dynamics surrounding contested issues. We conclude by offering propositions for social enterprise ecosystem research with an issue field lens.
Human neurodiversity matters. Neurodivergence and neurodiversity are fundamental characteristics of the (human) population. The essential nature of this diversity means that the quality of government and governance is unavoidably affected by approaches taken to neuroinclusion in the cultural, political, and economic spaces of current societies. Public administration cannot avoid being both entangled with the construction of neuroinclusion and affected in practice by neurodivergence and neurodiversity. Using the case of autism politics and policy, this article explores selected examples of contestations in policy narratives, neuroethical policy gaps, and persistent myths surrounding neurodiversity and neuroinclusion affecting the practice of contemporary public administration.
This study examines how healthcare professionals and administrators experience and respond to volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity (VUCA) during digital transformation, integrating SWOT analysis to capture systemic strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats. Thirty-five semi-structured interviews with physicians, nurses, and administrators (2021-2024) were analyzed abductively within the combined VUCA-SWOT framework. Volatility reflected technological acceleration; uncertainty arose in decision-making and telemedicine; complexity involved fragmented infrastructures and workforce shortages; ambiguity appeared in inconsistent training, intergenerational digital divides, and reduced human connection. The VUCA-SWOT lens provides strategic insights to enhance resilience and guide sustainable healthcare delivery in evolving environments.
