Bureaucratic Capacity

Scholars of international development have developed a rich line of research around the notoriously slippery concept of “state capacity,” as an indicator of the state’s “capacity” to effectively govern and provide services to residents of its territory. Less work disaggregates this concept within a state, and no work we are aware of attempts to understand how the environmental state’s capacity has changed over time or undertakes this effort in the U.S. context. RESL is working on developing robust and empirically grounded indicators of U.S. bureaucratic capacity that can be used to trace how the federal bureaucracy has changed through time, including the environmental state, but also across all elements of the U.S. federal bureaucracy.

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