Administrative policy and strategic discretion: Contextualizing UAE’s transitional bureaucracy
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Abstract
This article aims to address a lacuna in our understanding of the rationales why policymakers in developing countries usually wield greater discretion over public administration compared to their counterparts in institutionalized democracies. Drawing on theoretical scholarship, UAE-focused literature and available data, it mobilizes a strategic, non-normative perspective to examine the course of the UAE’s administrative policy in a transitional context, as outlined by Fred W. Riggs’ prismatic model. The article shows how UAE policymakers have managed to frame administrative reforms in terms of composition rather than transition. A key reason for this is that the conditions for the dichotomy model governing political-administrative relations cannot be met in the UAE bureaucratic context, which is strongly imbued with paternalistic ideologies such as developmentalism, entrepreneurialism and patron-client politics. The UAE public management landscape has undergone three successful cycles of transition: from the traditional Weberian bureaucratic model to the New Public Management (NPM) revolution of the 1990s and 2000s, and then to the current post-NPM era. However, despite the many institutional and managerial innovations introduced, the results indicate that the neoliberal reformist agenda is still struggling to penetrate the local governance system. As the privatization program shows, many fundamental aspects of the triangular relationship between the state, the bureaucracy and businesses have been strategically spared from change. From this standpoint, policy discretion and the resilience of the prismatic configuration should be regarded as part of an assumed strategic choice rather than as a simple cultural “path-dependent” effect.
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