Gender, Decision-Making and the Northern Ireland Civil Service - Theorising Post-Conflict Institutional Change
Scholarship which has looked at gender and post-conflict institutions has largely concentrated on the formal institutional architecture provided by consociational designs and the role of political actors within them (Ni Aólaín and Brown 2014, Byrne and McCulloch 2012, Hayes and McAllister 2012.) By contrast, much less attention has been brought to bear on role of elite bureaucrats and much less still on bureaucratic transitions to consociational governance (O’Connor 2017, Mengistu and Vogel 2006). This exists as dislocated from parallel scholarship in the field of public administration which demonstrates that as administrative complexity deepens, as in consociational governance, the role of elite bureaucrats in interpreting and applying public policies increases (O’Connor 2017, Anton 1980, Dogan 1975). Where fundamental bureaucratic values remain unexamined, then tension between reform efforts and applied civil service values may manifest as obstacles to democratic reform and development capacity. Notwithstanding the increased salience of bureaucratic discretion in the post-conflict institutional environment, elite bureaucracy remains distinctly under analysed in feminist scholarship. This research identifies bureaucratic discretion in power sharing administrations as an aperture through which gendered informal rules and norms may infiltrate the decision-making process with particular implications for redistributive and socially transformative policy in the post-conflict dispensation.