Sustaining Jamaica's indigenous policy capacity in the social sector: The role of policy formulation styles in the bureaucracy

This dissertation explores the proposition that a bureaucratic unit's ability to provide innovative responses to policy problems is enhanced by institutional arrangements that stimulate individual and group learning and facilitate the generation of organizational knowledge. The research design seeks evidence of such institutional arrangements in six cases of bureaucratic advising in Jamaica's Ministry of Education and Ministry of Health. The study also seeks to identify contextual and other factors that can account for variations in the institutional arrangements observed. A third research objective explores the validity of several theoretical perspectives on policy formulation as representations of the advisors' behaviors.; Two analytical tools are developed and applied in the study. The Framework of Institutional Arrangements in Policy Formulation is used to disentangle the social and psychological processes of policy formulation within four elements: motivation, approach to information search, argumentation style, and decision-making style. The Typology of Policy Formulation Styles operationalizes sustainable policy capacity. It categorizes institutional arrangements for policymaking within the dichotomous dimensions of two of these elements---the approach to information search and the decision-making style---and posits links between each style, the generation of organizational knowledge and sustainable policy capacity.; The study finds that elements of the institutional arrangements are most frequently represented within theoretical perspectives that focus on the role of rationality and cognition in policy formulation. Three of the six episodes studied exhibit the transformative/continuous style posited to be most conducive to sustaining policy capacity: Advisors are exploring in their search for information and reach decisions through a process of reciprocal persuasion. In these episodes, the study finds that the advisors' familiarity with the technical aspects of the issue was low and the presence of local or foreign external experts with different worldviews and new knowledge influenced the institutional arrangements adopted. The study does not fully explore how policy formulation styles can impact sustainable policy capacity as neither Ministry has systems for institutionalizing learning and creating organizational knowledge. The dissertation discusses the practical implications of these findings and suggests initiatives that management can pursue to create environments conducive to sustaining Jamaica's policy capacity.