Policy capacity in public administration

The majority of the policy work of government is done through the organizations that constitute the public bureaucracy . Even when administrative organizations act as agents for political leaders, rather than making policy on their own, they play a number of important roles in making policy and in making policies perform as intended by the actors who designed them. Policy capacity can be found in almost any public bureaucracy, but a variety of factors influence the capacity for public administration to shape public policy. This chapter discusses the policy tasks of bureaucracies and their “policy work” (Working for policy, Amsterdam University Press, Amsterdam, 2010) from the perspective of the organizational and structural characteristics of these institutions. The chapter also explores the different contexts in which bureaucratic organizations operate and discusses alternative patterns of policy roles for bureaucracies based on their own capacities and the capacities of other actors in the policymaking process.