The public bureaucracy's role in implementing international policies

Policy-makers and scholars around the world are aware of the problems that arise when public bureaucracies must execute the statutes approved by parliaments and follow the guidelines decided at the political level. The political system, economic development, geographical conditions, administrative culture and civic traditions are all factors responsible for the different levels of administrative performance in policy implementation within every nation (Pressman and Wildavsky 1984). From this general starting point, specific attention has been devoted to the following reasons for the failures in policy implementation in the Third World, namely the lack of qualified personnel and funds; insufficient direction and control from political leaders; resistance; corruption; and social indiscipline (Quah 1984).

Apart from the specific national context, rational choice approaches make clear why, all over the world, policy implementation is so difficult. Policy-makers, who are usually elected, act as principals, delegating implementation to expert agents, the bureaucrats. In every principal–agent relationship, principals suffer agency losses, because agents might drift in order to maximize their personal interests rather than perfectly accomplishing the mandate (Shepsle 1992; Horn 1995; Huber, Shipan and Pfahler 2001). If principals wish to reduce the risk of such losses, they must pay the costs of establishing and making effective a proper system of control, which usually is shaped by ‘administrative law’ (McCubbins, Noll and Weingast 1987; Mashaw 1990; Macey 1992; Posner 2001). This explains why the problem of policy implementation is also one of the key issues of political and scientific debate in the developed countries.

Public bureaucracies also play a fundamental – even if often neglected – role in implementing international norms and policies. Signing a treaty and then adopting coherent national legal rules in the execution of an international obligation is often insufficient for that purpose. And even when courts, at both the national and supranational levels, enforce individual rights arising from international agreements, as in the case of the European Convention on Human Rights, they do just a part of the work (protecting rights is not simply a matter of ex post enforcement on a case-by-case basis; it requires an active policy ex ante too).

In an international context, problems of policy implementation become harder to resolve because they also involve compliance and not just implementation.