Open research questions in Public Policy and Administration Research

What the literature leaves open

• 480), while boundary cases in Chile and Belgium reveal that partial institutional strength is insufficient to constrain decoupling without holistic governance capacity.

  Algorithmic decoupling and institutional asymmetry: a comparative analysis of platform regulation in OECD and emerging economies · 2026 · DOI

• extends participation TVET institutions in Gulu City should strengthen continuous monitoring systems to ensure that beyond stakeholder occasional inspection visits. Boards of Governors, PTAs, and institutional management need to routine monitoring develop structured and frameworks supported by clear tools and schedules. This would improve accountability in teaching and learning processes and address the current weakness in sustained oversight. and There is also a need to clarify and harmonise stakeholder roles within institutional governance structures. Differences in perception between principals that instructors participation is not uniformly understood across stakeholder groups. Regular orientation and sensitisation sessions should be conducted to ensure that all stakeholders share a common understanding of their responsibilities in planning, budgeting, coordination, and monitoring. This suggest 641 | This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License. East African Journal of Education Studies, Volume 9, Issue 2, 2026 Article DOI: https://doi.org/10.37284/eajes.9.2.5066 would reduce inconsistencies in participation and strengthen collaboration. To improve financial participation, institutions should strengthen community engagement and transparency in financial management. Clear reporting on how funds are collected and utilised would help build trust among stakeholders and encourage greater voluntary contributions. the economic constraints However, given study, government and the identified development partners should also increase financial support to TVET institutions to reduce over-reliance on household contributions. in The Ministry of Education and Sports should further institutionalise participatory governance by providing clear and practical guidelines for stakeholder engagement across all TVET institutions. These guidelines should emphasise not only formal inclusion in governance structures but also active and meaningful participation in implementation and monitoring processes. This would help reduce the gap between policy intentions and actual practice.

  Managing Together: Forms of Stakeholder Participation in Technical and Vocational Training Institutions in Gulu City, Uganda · 2026 · DOI

• The study recommends the following: IOASD Journal of Business and Management Studies | Published by IOASD Publisher | India | 138 citizen-centered governance 1. Establishment of behavioral insights units within key government ministries and agencies. 2. Training and capacity building for public servants on behavioral science applications.

  Behavioral Insights and Public Service Delivery in Nigeria: Rethinking Administrative Decision-Making Through a Behavioral Governance Lens · 2026 · DOI

• The recommendations of Public Sector Innovation in African Governments: Pilots, Scaling, and in African Political Dynamics: A Critical Examination examines Public Sector Innovation Governments: Pilots, Scaling, and Political Dynamics: A Critical Examination in relation to Ghana, with specific attention to the dynamics shaping the field of Business. This section is written as a approximately 357 to 547 words part of the article and therefore develops a clear argument rather than a placeholder summary. Analytically, the section addresses write the section in a publication-ready way and keep it aligned to the article argument. Outline guidance for this section is: Develop a focused argument on Public Sector Innovation in African Governments: Pilots, Scaling, and Political Dynamics: A Critical Examination; keep the section specific to Ghana; connect it to the wider article. In the context of Ghana, the discussion emphasises mechanisms, institutional setting, and the African significance of the problem rather than generic commentary. Key scholarship informing this section includes Exploring Bicameral Dynamics: Comparative Institutional Frameworks in the Islamic World ), A shifting yet grounded transnational social field: Interplays of displacement and emplacement in African migrant trajectories across Central America ), Organisation of African Unity (Organisation de l'unite africane [sic]) : its role in education. ). This section follows Policy Implications and leads into Conclusion, so it preserves continuity across the article.

  Public Sector Innovation in African Governments: Pilots, Scaling, and Political Dynamics: A Critical Examination · 2026 · DOI

• This study provides an insightful, empirically grounded overview of Slovenia’s corporate governance landscape. However, the view is not without its limits. Some are methodological, others conceptual—and all are essential for interpreting results and guiding future research. First, operationalising institutional logics required abstraction and reduction. The final subset of five indicators was selected from a broader pool based on theoretical relevance, statistical coherence, and data quality. This ensured conceptual clarity but inevitably introduced simplification. For example, Sustainability Signalling captured references to sustainability frameworks without assessing implementation depth, while Board Committee Complexity captured the number of committees rather than function or overlap. These proxies reflect observable governance signals but only partially capture lived organisational practice. Because the indicators rely on public disclosures, they may reflect reporting choices as much as underlying governance realities. Second, the use of exploratory factor analysis (EFA) on a small sample of 24 publicly traded firms across a ten-year period limits statistical generalisability. Although the design maximised within-firm variation, the small-N structure necessarily trades breadth for depth. These findings should therefore be treated as field-specific and exploratory, not generalisable beyond similar small, state-influenced markets without further validation (Gouvea, 2017; Mahoney, 2000; Smith & Little, 2018). This limitation is also partly by design. All firms in the sample are publicly listed, which shapes governance per se and regardless of ownership structure. Public listing imposes a shared baseline of disclosure, transparency, and procedural compliance that inevitably reduces variation in governance arrangements. As such, while ownership differences remain analytically meaningful, they occur within a uniformly regulated and visibility-driven environment—one that tends to amplify symbolic governance practices across the board. Third, while the factor model fit was adequate (TLI = 0.934; RMSEA = 0.113; RMSR = 0.01), the Kaiser–Meyer–Olkin (KMO) score of 0.64 indicates medijournal of contemporary management issuesmanagement, vol. 31, 2026, no. 1, pp. 1-30 21 ocre sampling adequacy—acceptable but not strong— consistent with small-N factor models. This suggests minor cross-loading and measurement noise, indicating the need for future research with larger samples and confirmatory factor analysis (CFA) to validate construct stability.

  Signals and structures · 2026 · DOI

• Several limitations suggest important directions for future research. Our cross-sectional design cannot establish definitive causal relationships, though the negative complementarity finding is difficult to reconcile with reverse causality explanations. Longitudinal research examining how capability configurations evolve and their dynamic effects on performance would strengthen causal inference. Natural experiments, such as policy changes that differently affect capability development across organizations, could provide quasi-experimental leverage. The binary thresholding approach, while standard in complementarity research (Ennen & Richter, 2010; Mohnen & Röller, 2005; Ichniowski et al., 1997; Whittington et al., 1999; Massine & Pettigrew, 2003; Massine et al., 2023), necessarily compresses variation within capability categories. Future work could examine whether continuous measures yield similar patterns and explore threshold effects - at what point do partial capabilities become counterproductive? Multi-level analysis could also investigate whether complementarity effects vary across organizational contexts or environmental conditions. Our focus on hospital trusts, while providing analytical advantages, limits generalizability across public service domains. Testing the functional-adaptive-positional framework in other professional public services (education, social services) would establish broader theoretical scope. Cross-national comparisons could examine how different institutional arrangements affect capability complementarities. S. N. Seabra, A. M. Pettigrew1 3 Conclusion This study advances public administration theory by demonstrating that organizational capabilities function as complementary systems in determining public service performance. Moving beyond traditional approaches that examine organizational factors in isolation, we show that only the simultaneous presence of functional, adaptive, and positional capabilities enhances performance, while partial combinations provide no benefit or may harm performance. These findings challenge conventional wisdom about performance improvement in public organizations. The common practice of implementing isolated reforms appears not just ineffective but potentially counterproductive. Instead, performance improvement requires coordinated development of mutually reinforcing capabilities that address the complex demands of political-administrative environments. Rather than searching for single solutions or isolated best practices, public management research and practice should focus on understanding and developing the complementary capability systems that enable public organizations to achieve and sustain high performance. The path forward requires acknowledging the inherent complexity of public organizations and developing more sophisticated approaches to capability development that recognize the interdependencies shaping organizational performance. For policymakers and practitioners, the message is straightforward: reforms should be bundled, sequenced, and authorized, not implemented piecemeal. Strengthening one domain of capability while neglecting others risks triggering precisely the kind of negative complementarities we identify. The path to sustainable improvement lies not in isolated initiatives, but in building balanced capability systems that combine operational competence, adaptive leadership, and stakeholder legitimacy. Farazmand (2009a) argues that effective public sector improvement requires coordinating governance, institutional, policy, and administrative capacity domains rather than implementing piecemeal interventions. Organizations must develop these capacities as integrated systems, since “traditional administrative capacities, important and valuable as they may be, are not good enough to meet the new challenges ahead” (Farazmand, 2009a, p. 1007). Building comprehensive administrative capacity through balanced system development is thus “a prescription for survival, not a luxury anymore” (Farazmand, 2009a, p. 1017).

  The Perils of Partial Reform: Capability Systems and Public Organization Performance · 2026 · DOI

• Within the East African Community (EAC), governments have increasingly institutionalized participatory mechanisms; however, the extent to which these initiatives translate into measurable development outcomes remains unclear.

  Bridging Participation and Development Outcomes: Citizen Engagement as a Governance Strategy for Sustainable Development in the East African Community — A Systematic Review of Institutional Dynamics, Public Financial Management Reforms, and IPSAS Integration (2019–2024) · 2026 · DOI

• Collaborative design, characterized by iteration, shared interpretation, and responsiveness to complexity (Ansell and Gash 2008; Bason 2014), was largely absent and remained unsupported by existing governance structures. Learning remained fragmented and reactive, and modest attempts to reframe processes were marginalized due to structural and procedural constraints. These findings underscore the importance of studying policymaking in context: governance mechanisms operate as an interrelated web that shapes how problems s s e r P y t i s r e v i n U e g d i r b m a C y b e n i l n o d e h s i l b u P 0 5 9 0 0 1 5 2 X 4 1 8 3 4 1 0 S / 7 1 0 1 0 1 / g r o..

  Policy design and governance in hierarchical, risk-oriented organizations: a Danish Armed Forces case study · 2026 · DOI

• The limitations of this research are inherent in its methodology. As a literature review, it is based on the analysis and synthesis of secondary data and does not produce primary empirical findings. Furthermore, while the article attempts to connect theory with the Greek context, the application of the proposed interventions requires deeper empirical investigation of the specific conditions of each case, taking into account the cultural and historical factors that shape strategic interactions in Greece.

  Nash equilibrium as an analytical tool for Public Administration: diagnosing pathologies and intervention strategies in the Greek context · 2026 · DOI

• Several key recommendations emerged from the study to enhance the effectiveness of centralised SMS recruitment in the South African public sector.

  Centralised recruitment for senior management in South Africa's public sector: Implications for service delivery · 2026 · DOI

• This study confirms a persistent paradox in Uganda’s decentralised financial management system: policies are well designed and “wise in policy”, but implementation remains inconsistent and “weak in practice”. The recommendations therefore focus on closing this implementation gap by strengthening operational effectiveness, accountability, and institutional discipline. Although Uganda has comprehensive policies of public financial management, internal control laws and regulations, the main challenge lies in execution. It is therefore recommended that government shifts emphasis from policy formulation to implementation enforcement mechanisms, including regular compliance audits, performance-based monitoring, and sanctions for non-adherence to financial regulations. The study reveals overlapping responsibilities among CAOs, CFOs, accountants, and auditors. To address this, the study recommends that the government of Uganda at all levels should strengthen role clarity and accountability frameworks within local governments. Clear job descriptions, enforcement of segregation of duties, and standardized reporting lines should be reinforced to reduce inefficiencies in resource allocation. The study further recommends for internal control systems (budgeting, procurement, auditing, and Monitoring &Evaluation are well established in policy but weakly enforced in practice. It is recommended that local governments establish real-time compliance tracking systems and strengthen internal audit independence to ensure that controls are actively implemented rather than merely documented. The study recommends to strengthen the Weak implementation is partly driven by limited technical capacity. Continuous professional training in financial management, procurement, and auditing should be institutionalised for local government staff in Uganda. The Capacity-building should focus not only on knowledge but also on practical application and ethical compliance. The study recommends to address inefficiencies in resource allocation, local governments should adopt stricter budget execution controls, including variance analysis, expenditure ceilings, and mandatory justification for budget deviations. This will ensure that planning aligns more closely with actual financial performance. The study recommends fostering a results-based accountability culture, where financial managers are assessed not only on compliance but also on efficiency and Value for Money outcomes. Performance contracts and public reporting mechanisms should be strengthened to enhance transparency. Although monitoring systems exist, their application remains weak. It is recommended that M&E frameworks be strengthened through digital tracking systems, independent verification, and community-level oversight mechanisms to ensure that public funds translate into tangible service delivery outcomes. Lastly the study’s central argument, improving Value for Money in Uganda does not require more policies, but rather stronger execution discipline, enforcement of existing frameworks, and behavioural change in financial management practice. Bridging the gap between “wise policy” and “weak practice” is the key to achieving efficient, accountable, and development-oriented public financial management. REFERENCES 1) Akenroye, T. O., Mkansi, M., Mugurusi, G., & Nsakanda, A. L. (2025). Indigenous Supply Chain Management in Africa: Theory and Practice. Springer Nature.

  Wise in Policy-Making and Fragile in Practice: Financial Management and the Challenges of Value for Money in Uganda · 2026 · DOI

• The study was limited by its a case research design, which restricts the ability to establish causality between variables (Derakhshan et al., 2022). The relatively small sample size also limit generalizability beyond the selected region. Additionally, reliance on self-reported data may introduce response bias, particularly among officials discussing financial accountability practices. Time and resource constraints also limited the scope of geographical coverage. RESULTS The findings reveal a structural governance synergy within Uganda’s decentralised financial management system, where policy design is relatively strong but implementation outcomes remain uneven. The decentralisation framework has institutionally strengthened the accounting architecture of local governments by clearly defining roles for key financial actors, including the Chief Administrative Officer (CAO), Chief Finance Officer (CFO), accountants, vote controllers, and internal auditors. These actors collectively constitute the core of financial governance and are intended to function as complementary safeguards within the internal control system. However, the results indicate a dual reality of governance practice: while 30% of respondents acknowledged a fully integrated financial management structure involving all actors, a significant proportion still perceived fragmented or individualised control functions. This suggests that although policy frameworks promote collective responsibility, operational practice remains partially siloed, reflecting the broader paradox of being “wise in policy but weak in execution.”

  Wise in Policy-Making and Fragile in Practice: Financial Management and the Challenges of Value for Money in Uganda · 2026 · DOI

• Despite a 70% decline in ethical violations between 2016 and 2024, the analysis reveals persistent structural gaps, including insufficient independence of commissioners, lack of standardized performance indicators, and low public awareness of ethics oversight.

  EFFECTIVENESS OF INTEGRITY: EVALUATING ETHICS COMMISSIONERS THROUGH A CITIZEN-CENTRIC LENS · 2025 · DOI

• The findings show that South Africa lacks adequate resources and technological skills to establish transparency, the lack of digitalised platforms leads to poor citizen participation in the governance processes, and political will is lacking to enhance openness in government structures, processes, and decisions, to name a few.

  GOOD GOVERNANCE CHALLENGES IN THE SOUTH AFRICAN PUBLIC SERVICE · 2025 · DOI

• These include an unclear definition of the type of federalism practiced, ineffective dispute resolution mechanisms between the federal government and member states, limited federal capacity and resources, lack of consensus on key issues prior to federalism’s adoption, and poor coordination between the federal government and member states.

  Weaknesses of Federalism in Somalia and Required Reforms · 2024 · DOI

• The relevance of this scientific problem decision is that inter-organisational LTC cooperation with and by tertiary sector organisations has to date received very modest research attention, and is inconclusive and fragmented.

  NGOS and stakeholder cooperation in long term care organizing and delivery: an equal player or an outlier? · 2023 · DOI

• Results show that current NGO engagement in cooperation is lower in comparison to public and private LTC service providers and their cooperation is mainly limited to the sphere of LTC service delivery at an individual level, and family members, social workers and other NGOs make key stakeholder groups they cooperate with.

  NGOS and stakeholder cooperation in long term care organizing and delivery: an equal player or an outlier? · 2023 · DOI

• In doing so, we draw attention to the need for further research on the dynamic multilevel interactions between the configuration and adjustment of supranational institutions and how these mediate CSO and MNE interactions.

  Calling multinational enterprises to account: CSOs, supranational institutions and business practices in the global south · 2023 · DOI

• In this article I investigate one aspect of proto-bureaucracies that has not been examined in the literature: in a society characterized by patrimonial relations, the sudden introduction of meritocratic principles of recruitment may be interpreted as violating the principles of rewarding loyalty or kinship.

  Proto-Bureaucracies · 2022 · DOI

• In this paper we discuss four of these: (1) the obsession with covariance, which means that important phenomena are ignored; (2) the lack of agency, which leads to underwhelming explanatory models; (3) the unclear universe of cases, which means the inferential value of theories and the empirical results are unclear; and (4) the focus on outputs, even though most theories contain strong assumptions about the political process leading to certain outputs.

  Comparative Public Policy Analysis: Shortcomings, Pitfalls, and Avenues for the Future · 2022 · DOI

• nursing homes, this study fills four gaps in the literature: (1) the need to include nonprofit organizations rather than just public and for‐profit, (2) consideration of the credibility of the source of performance information, (3) the use of simple commonly used performance metrics, and (4) the willingness to use services as a performance dimension.

  Sector Bias and the Credibility of Performance Information: An Experimental Study of Elder Care Provision · 2021 · DOI

• New Public Governance is the most wanted and admired paradigm in Central and Eastern Europe, especially because of its social attractiveness and sensitivity, but it is still lacking more certain methods and tools to be implemented in practice.

  CONSIDERING NEW PUBLIC GOVERNANCE POSSIBILITIES IN CENTRAL AND EASTERN EUROPE · 2020 · DOI

• Originality/value While centralized structures produce administrative bottlenecks creating ideal grounds for coordination, it appears that the assumed connection between centralization and coordination may not be applicable to educational systems and that coordination among and within policy plans in complex systems is not a zero-sum game.

  Educational centralization as a catalyst for coordination: myth or practice? · 2020 · DOI

• Drawing on the experience of hitherto understudied small states, including 112 interviews with political elites, we show how the effects of country size create governance challenges in the form of leader dominance, patronage systems and capacity constraints.

  The core executive and small states: Is coordination the primary challenge? · 2020 · DOI

• This model can be used for diagnosing aspects of local democracy, comparative studies of participatory budgeting processes taking place in various countries around the world, as well as for further research into other processes of direct democracy, thus contributing to the development of knowledge in this field and to social sciences in general.

  Institutional Analysis Model for Examining Direct Democracy Phenomena: a Case Study of Participatory Budgeting · 2019 · DOI

Most-cited papers in Public Policy and Administration Research

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Most recent work

• Introduction: Public Affairs Education as an Institutional Response to Complex Social Problems · Journal of Public Affairs Education · 2026
• Policy design and governance in hierarchical, risk-oriented organizations: a Danish Armed Forces case study · Journal of Public Policy · 2026
• The Perils of Partial Reform: Capability Systems and Public Organization Performance · Public Organization Review · 2026
• Publicness and local public service delivery choices: the role of place-based institutions · Cambridge Journal of Regions Economy and Society · 2026
• Bridging Participation and Development Outcomes: Citizen Engagement as a Governance Strategy for Sustainable Development in the East African Community — A Systematic Review of Institutional Dynamics, Public Financial Management Reforms, and IPSAS Integration (2019–2024) · Science Education and Innovations in the Context of Modern Problems · 2026
• Institutional Study of the Management of Three-City Cooperation (IKN-Samarinda-Balikpapan) and its Surrounding Areas · Journal Of Social Research · 2026
• Governing the de-risking agenda: policy instrument mixes in Scandinavian research collaboration with China · Education Inquiry · 2026
• The Coherence Problem: How Institutions Learn, Drift, and Realign · Knowledge Commons (Lakehead University) · 2026
• <b>From Compliance to Conversion: A Delivery-Oriented Budget Execution Framework for School Infrastructure in Zimbabwe</b> · African Journal of Commercial Studies · 2026
• Managing the dual authority paradox in affiliated public hospitals: A dynamic multi-level process model · International Journal of Healthcare Management · 2026

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