Public policies epitomize the projected course of action by a fraternity of people or government within a specified environment to bring presumably positive change in people’s wellbeing.
Broadly, acts, activities, rules, circulars, decisions of the government, and the commitment of the head of the government and the state are public policies that help the government to perform better and benefit the citizen.
Public policy cyclically follows the five-stage approach, which includes agenda-setting or problem identification, formulation, adoption, implementation and evaluation.
Both academics and policy analysts term the implementation as the most significant stage that mainly speaks about the success and failure of public policy. Implementation is the translation of the government’s decisions into action.
By implementing public policies, the government utilizes opportunities and overcomes impediments to achieve a goal or realize a purpose or objective. For doing so, it requires the interplay of multiple actors and their active engagement.
The deflection of goals results in implementation botch leading to policy flop as of pillion on that is the adding up more goals in the implementation process, up for grabs that policy mandate may have been the result of strong pressure on the government to do something without thinking the real need.
Policy implementation is the political process dealing with the decision-making process that includes bargaining, exchanging and compromising among the interest groups.
It is like a business game to reach an ultimate goal, which requires strategy and techniques from vision to implementation.
It is a social activity that requires measures to solve a social problem. However, public policies are criticized when they fail just because of implementation failure ignoring the other reasons.
And public policy implementation as a subject of study attracts the attention of academic scholars because policy implementation is being severely lambasted. Theoretically, there are some assumptions responsible for implementation performance.
Theoretical assumptions
Literature depicts that four key assumptions such as diversion of resources, the dilemma of administration, deflection of goals and dissipation of energies serve as the grouped independent variables to influence the implementation of public policies.
Resources are diverted through spending more taxpayers’ money, which the implementers think of as easy money to get and spend.
The management game of holding authority and power at the central and manipulating some issues like budget authorities, government auditors and accountants, and fiscal committees in the legislature leads to implementation delays thus making policy failure.
This free flow of money encourages involved people to spend for non-prioritized functions and eventually, it compels people involved to indulge in venality.
The budget game is an issue of resource diversion where project personnel thinks that they should spend all money, as they might not get more money next year if it is unspent.
Since project personnel are temporarily recruited and do not get salary and wages like other permanent employees with long and short-term benefits.
This compels them to take additional benefits by tailoring the environment. Moreover, projects have some flexibility in using resources, unlike revenue funds.
This is called an easy life game, which is more likely to be diffused among the public who must deal with the bureau as customers or clients, or objects of regulation. Pork barrel – public money used for political gain also leads to implementation performance negatively as the purpose and design of the projects are mismatched and resources are diverted for a particular community other than for benefitting all.
The deflection of goals results in implementation botch leading to policy flop as of pillion on that is the adding up more goals in the implementation process, up for grabs that policy mandate may have been the result of strong pressure on the government to do something without thinking the real need.
Deflection of goals also relates to keeping the peace which means the politicians want to be out of trouble. However, this eventually fails since the strong opposing groups fight against it.
Different issues of administration expose as dilemmas in the environment contributing to the implementation policies.
Tokenism is considered the most important one that appears to benefit a program element publicly while privately conceding only a small contribution.
Management games can be addressed by decentralizing, developing effective information systems, and assigning a role in an appropriate position based on capacity and competency.
It also serves as the procrastinating any contribution as the inferior quality. Massive resistance from the implementer hinders the implementation by withholding critical program elements, which is done by evading the responsibilities specified in the policy mandate.
It is the product of self-conscious coordination or numerous uncoordinated and independent derelictions that can often cause the control system to collapse entirely.
Social entropy is the impersonal force placed in a social nature that tends to lose energy or to be governed by the laws of entropy.
It lacks competency described as a relationship between an individual and a particular task or situation. The source of variability of discretion originated from the behavior of program administrators.
The management game of holding authority and power at the central and manipulating some issues like budget authorities, government auditors and accountants, and fiscal committees in the legislature leads to implementation delays thus making policy failure.
The dissipation of energies produces the outcome as the underperformance encountering mandated goals. Energies are dissipated because of tenacity, thinking as not their problem, keeping the most important and effective person as the odd man and personal reputation.
Tenacity is the game where all stakeholders such as bureaucrats, `legislative, professional associations, interest groups, communities, and organizations are eager to see the failure of the progress.
The tendency of thinking the issue is not our problem among the bureaus leads to failure, as they are the key performers of augmenting the budget and utilizing it.
They do not want to expand the work thinking that it will increase their workload or create difficulty to implement projects or bring controversy.
This evasion of accepting the challenge and keeping the extended work for others contributes to the poor performance of the policy.
However, if anybody works effectively and outperforms his teammates, he is treated as an odd man and others try to get him out of the project. As a result, the policy lacks a motivated and innovative person to carry forward the project.
Strategies for better implementation performance
Every issue of implementation failure should be carefully intervened to overcome those problems that remained within resource diversion, goals deflection, administrative dilemmas, and energy dissipation.
Assessing needs, developing an auditing system and sending unspent money back can reasonably minimize the easy money and budget game problem while an effective performance evaluation system of implementers is key to ensure accountability to address the easy life game.
In order to minimize the pork barrel problem, building public awareness, setting need-based allocation, establishing strong media and forming committees to use money are suggested.
Recruiting the best person, appointing competent staff, encouraging people’s participation, selecting the next successor, and maintaining accountability can keep peace in the administration of policy implementation.
Tokenism can be addressed with well-stated responsibilities and compliance with grounded theory. It is suggested that establishing collaboration, showing incentive, developing moral obligation, creating awareness, finding key external environmental actors, and creating citizen co-producer are key strategies to minimize massive resistance from all corners.
It is found that some 35% of the ongoing projects – 640 out of 1819- have gone through revisions one or more times over the last decade, ultimately making projects costlier.
Selecting and placing the right person in the right position is an antidote to the social entropy and odd man out of the problem.
Academics suggest that tenacity can be minimized by setting time-frame, guidelines and fixing the role and responsibilities.
Management games can be addressed by decentralizing, developing effective information systems, and assigning a role in an appropriate position based on capacity and competency.
These strategies are believed to address more than one problem at a time not only solve it but also contribute to better implementation performance.
Moreover, researchers suggest applying a deductive implementation model by incorporating rational factors, management issues, organizational development factors, bureaucratic approach, and political factors in order to get more theoretically strong implementation support and produce better performance.
How does policy implementation perform in Bangladesh?
Theoretical assumptions of policy implementation identified in the literature seem applicable for the project implementation in Bangladesh.
If projects are rigorously analyzed, it is found that easy money, budget game, easy life, and pork barrel contribute to diverting resources.
Maintaining peace and piling on has assisted to deflect the project goals. Regarding the dilemma of administration, projects implementation is delayed because of massive resistance, tokenism, social entropy and the management game.
Moreover, tenacity, odd man out, and blame game as not our problem have dissipated energies. All these factors highly influence the implementation performance of public policies in Bangladesh.
The study found that projects time extends or costs go up because of some vital reasons about the theoretical assumptions such as lack of efficiency of government agencies, no proper planning and survey before taking up projects, delay in appointment of project directors and subsequent project personnel, complications in land acquisition, frequent transfer of project directors, manipulated project approval process.
The dissatisfaction of the Prime Minister of Bangladesh on the implementation performance of projects indicates how the head of the government keenly observes the development activities and emphasizes better performance.
These factors lead to delays in implementation that eventually lead to an increase in the cost higher.
How does the poor performance happen? Usually, the effect of frequent revisions pushes project costs up.
It is found that some 35% of the ongoing projects – 640 out of 1819- have gone through revisions one or more times over the last decade, ultimately making projects costlier.
In the 2021-2022 fiscal year’s revised projects under Annual Development Programme, the budget escalated to Tk 18,779 crore which is thrice the annual budget outlay.
Railway, roads and highways, health, local government, and power-related projects are usually on the top list of revisions with higher expenditure.
A project of setting up Essential Drugs company (a state-owned pharmaceutical company) in a district has been running for more than a decade its cost increased from Tk31 crore to Tk800 crore.
The increasing cost does not only raise the financial inclusion but also brings suffering to people and dissatisfaction with the service of the government.
The dissatisfaction of the Prime Minister of Bangladesh on the implementation performance of projects indicates how the head of the government keenly observes the development activities and emphasizes better performance.
Her recent directives to identify the causes of project delays are also a matter of great concern. Despite these directives and concerns, the fact is that projects taken by the government are highly criticized because of their poor performance.
After LDC graduation, as Bangladesh won’t be able to enjoy some benefits and will face some challenges, the country needs to get the effective implementation of projects to be completed by the stipulated time to save money so that this can be used for other development purposes.
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