Search

Street-level bureaucrats, confined by meager discretion, often find themselves reconciling the challenging terrain of inflexible policies with messy frontline realities. With a phenomenological lens, we examine how Indonesia’s frontline healthcare workers exercise discretion and improvise informal practices to adapt policies and deliver care despite scarce resources during the COVID-19 crisis. As formal emergency protocols lie encumbered under conditions of austerity, a grassroots motivation for communal action occurs from exchanges between peers mired in resource quandaries, encapsulating an improvisational “we” cohering frontline allies. Manifesting through focused responses drawing on unwritten collegial knowledge, these collaborative efforts embody the relational essence and defining contours of frontline policy repair, as opposed to isolated discretion. Probing further into these repair processes surfaces how shared struggles have the power to ignite collective capacity, empowering bureaucrats to govern complexity in concert, construct agency despite constraints, and promote equity in times of scarcity. Our findings champion tending to institutional receptivity and solidarity-anchored creative frontline initiatives, endorsing agile, adaptive processes finely tuned to situational realities that contests paradigms fixated solely on compliance.

The legitimacy of democracy and civil rights is based upon laws and administrative procedures. The presence of a legal framework and its application by bureaucrats in their daily decisions are prerequisites for the democratic rule of law. This explains why, in contexts of democratic backsliding, legal frameworks are under attack. Scholars observed the role of public administration in processes of democratic backsliding, but there is still a gap in understanding the disputes around the legal framework. Here, we analyze the conflicts between politicians and bureaucrats around the legal framework in a context of democratic backsliding. Analyzing the case of Brazil under Bolsonaro’s Government, we draw on 164 interviews with bureaucrats to understand how both bureaucrats and politicians dispute the legitimacy, uses, and interpretations of the legal framework to attack or protect democratic institutions and civil rights. On one side, bureaucrats defend themselves and their legitimacy through existing rules and procedures. On the other side, politicians change or reinterpret the rules to fragilize bureaucrats’ decisions. In this process, both politicians and bureaucrats learn how to improve their strategies around the uses of legal frameworks. These findings contribute to understanding how the dynamics around the legal framework explain processes of democratic backsliding.

•Community health workers could be important actors in facing the pandemic.•The pandemic led to a deterioration of working conditions of CHWs.•CHWs are exposed to disparities within the health workforce.•The situation experienced by CHWs reveals the struggles of Brazil’s vulnerable.•The pandemic has contributed to distancing vulnerable groups from the State.

This paper aims to understand the multiple strategies developed by frontline workers to deal with situations of violence in vulnerable territories. We analyze the micro-dynamics within which workers operate to understand how the State deals with violence. Empirically, we analyzed data from interviews with 140 frontline workers implementing different policies not directly related to violence in neighborhoods located in the city of Sao Paulo, Brazil, known for their populations’ precariousness and vulnerability. The results expand the understanding of the different ways in which violence expresses itself in these places and show that the reactions developed by frontline workers are more complex than those suggested by the existing literature. The multiple violence to which these workers are exposed is used and manipulated by them in various ways during policy implementation. Frontline workers can ignore, negotiate with, or combat violence. They use their agency to develop different reactions based on how they and the policies are embedded or disconnected to the territories.