Beyond technocracy: a systematic review of individual policy capacity in the Westminster tradition

Research on policy advisory capacity has expanded rapidly but has tended to focus on the system rather than the individual. This systematic review investigates what knowledge, skills, experience, and dispositions individual policy advisers in the Westminster tradition require. Peer-reviewed studies of Westminster jurisdictions published between January 2000 and December 2024 were searched in Scopus, combining the paired term “Civil Service” and “Skills” with “Policy Capacity”, “Civil Service Skills”, and “Policy Advisory Skills” (n = 75). These were thematically analysed, guided by Collins and Evans's (Collins, H., and R. Evans. 2007. Rethinking Expertise. London: The University of Chicago Press) categorization of expertise, to produce an integrated typology: three types of knowledge (specialized policy, general policy, and system); four skill domains (policy-making, relational, communication, and integrative balancing); two experiential dimensions (lived experience of users and occupational culture); and seven dispositions (political astuteness, creativity, judgement, leadership, adaptive capacity, risk-taking, and resilience). A significant limitation is the absence of the ministerial perspective from the literature, despite ministers being the pre-eminent consumers of policy advice. The article concludes that individual policy capacity is socially constructed, institutionally conditioned, and politically situated; that competency-based models cannot capture its relational character; and that it emerges from the interaction of technical expertise, political judgement, relational capacity, and organizational context.