Bureaucratic Barriers or Administrative Actions: The Role of Bureaucracies in Successful Education Reform

On Tuesday, 01 December 2020 from 14:00 to 15:30 GMT (Greenwich Mean Time), RISE will hold a webinar on the role that bureaucracies and bureaucrats play in the implementation of education reforms and for overall system (in)coherence.

The event will feature panellists Yamini Aiyar, President and Chief Executive of the Centre for Policy Research in India, and Dan Honig, Assistant Professor of International Development at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. This panel will be hosted by Ritva Reinikka, Professor of Practice, Aalto University and Helsinki Graduate School of Economics, and former Chair of the RISE Delivery Board.

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Bureaucracies play a pivotal role in education systems. They transmit top-level decisions to the frontline, translating the words of policy documents into tangible action on the ground. Yet, scholars and policy designers often underestimate the impact bureaucracies and their internal dynamics can have on making or breaking reforms.

This webinar will focus on the importance of bureaucracies and bureaucrats for improving education in low- and middle-income countries. What is the logic of bureaucracies, how do they ‘think’ and operate? In which ways are bureaucracies a point of reform friction, and what is their contribution to overall system (in)coherence? And how can systems create bureaucratic will and accountability? The panel will bring together insights from public administration and development research to explore these questions.

Yamini Aiyar, president of the Centre for Policy Research in India and researcher on the RISE India CRT, will present findings from a new three-year ethnographic study of a large-scale education reform rolled out in Delhi in 2016. She will highlight the challenges that administrative systems have in adapting to reform and change, and discuss how resistance and acceptance can come about in public administration. Dr Dan Honig, Assistant Professor of International Development at the Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, will share insights from his research in the fields of development and public administration on how we should think about bureaucrats and how to motivate, support and capacitate them. He will also speak about how to create and measure accountability for bureaucracies in a meaningful and novel way, drawing on his research on Navigation by Judgement. Chairing the event will be Dr Ritva Reinikka, Professor of Practice at Aalto University and the Helsinki Graduate School of Economics, former chair of the RISE Delivery Board, and former director of Human Development in the Africa Region of the World Bank.

The panel discussion will be followed by an open Q&A session from the audience.