Public services are delivered through complex bureaucratic systems. Research on service delivery often seeks to abstract from these complexities to identify special causal relationships, but this can lead to a focus on narrow questions of limited policy relevance and generalizability.

How can researchers take account of the systematic aspects of public service delivery without sacrificing methodological and theoretical rigor? While researchers have begun to take systems approaches in areas such as health, education, infrastructure, budgeting, and the civil service, this work has largely occurred within separate disciplinary and sectoral siloes.

The workshop is part of a series of events that aim to create an interdisciplinary community of scholars conducting rigorous and solution-oriented research on issues of public management, public finance, governance, and public service delivery, and is supported by the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation.

Outputs

The workshop papers and presentations are available to view below.

• Building PFM Capabilities in Africa
• When Does Transparency Improve Public Goods Provision?
• Policy execution: getting ‘stuff’ done
• Systems approaches in health
• Systems Approaches in Public Finance and Budgeting
• Performance management in Sierra Leone
• Monitoring the Quality of Care using Aggregated Patient Feedback
• Systems Thinking in the Government of Singapore
• Beyond Adoption: A New Framework for Nonadoption, Abandonment, and Challenges to the Scale - Up, Spread, and Sustainability of Health and Care Technologies (NASSS)
• Alignment of PFM and Service Delivery
• System Approaches in Education
• Open Government at the Subnational level: Implementation lessons from Tanzania
• Pay-for-performance mechanisms in the public sector. The case of the Program for Management Improvement in Chile
• Use of Systems Models in Infrastructure
• Systems Approaches to Public Service Delivery: Lessons, Questions, and Opportunities
• Information and Bargaining through Agents Experimental evidence from Mexico’s Labor Courts
• Background paper: Systems Approaches to Public Service Delivery: Lessons from Health, Education, and Infrastructure