Dispatch #109: What makes a policy work? Connection, not complexity

This dispatch unpacks why well-designed policies fail—and how a state’s ability to connect policy-making with implementation through Vertical Policy Integration can make or break effective governance

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The Paradox of the Ambitious State

India’s policymaking energy is boundless. From Swachh Bharat Mission and Ayushman Bharat to Make in India and Digital India, we are constantly launching, relaunching, and refining public schemes. On paper, they aim to transform lives. On the ground, they often stagger under their own weight—misaligned with administrative capacity, underfunded, and poorly coordinated.

But this is not a uniquely Indian predicament. Across democracies, governments increasingly suffer from what Xavier Fernández-I-Marín and colleagues call the burden-capacity gap—the widening distance between the complexity of policy portfolios and the constrained capacity of bureaucracies to implement them. Their paper, titled Bureaucratic Quality and the Gap between Implementation Burden and Administrative Capacities, published in the American Political Science Review, puts forward a powerful idea: that the quality of bureaucracies must be judged not in isolation, but in how well the policy process is integrated vertically.

This concept—Vertical Policy Integration (VPI)—could well be the most underappreciated determinant of state effectiveness.

The authors add:

How can we explain this variation in the relationship between the number of policies requiring implementation and the administrative capacities available to do so? We argue that the answer to this question lies in the coupling of sectoral bureaucracies in charge of policy formulation and those in charge of policy implementation. We consider these patterns of vertical policy-process integration (VPI) an important yet relatively overlooked feature of bureaucratic quality. We expect that (1) the more the policymaking level is involved in policy implementation (top-down integration) and (2) the easier the policy-implementing level finds it to feed its concerns into policymaking (bottom up integration), the smaller the burden-capacity gap.

What Is VPI and Why Does It Matter?

Vertical Policy Integration (VPI) refers to the strength of connection between policy formulation and implementation. It is not about passing more laws or hiring more officials—it’s about whether different levels and arms of the state are communicating, accountable, and learning from one another.

The paper defines VPI through two dimensions:

Top-Down Integration

This refers to the extent to which policymakers—typically national ministries or apex bureaucrats—remain responsible for execution. Do they provide implementation budgets? Do they bear political or administrative consequences when programs fail? Do they directly oversee the organizational setup?

Top-down integration disciplines the policymaker: if you must pay for and deliver what you create, you’re less likely to over-legislate and more likely to align policies with capacity.

Bottom-Up Integration

This is about listening. Can implementers—local officials, frontline workers—feed their insights and operational constraints back into the policy process? Are they formally consulted? Are their experiences systematically evaluated and used to adapt?

Bottom-up integration ensures that policies reflect field realities and evolve over time. Without it, bureaucracies cannot learn, and policies fail silently.

Together, these two forms of integration—responsibility from the top, feedback from below—define how coherent, responsive, and effective a government truly is.

Source: Xavier Fernández-I-Marín and others

Without VPI, bureaucracies risk becoming Weberian in form but Kafkaesque in function—endlessly churning policies they lack the resources to implement. As the authors note, policymakers have stronger incentives to create policies than to staff and support their implementation. This leads to policy overload, administrative fatigue, and declining public trust.

By contrast, VPI aligns incentives, strengthens feedback loops, and disciplines policymaking. Governments with high VPI produce fewer but better-supported policies—and have a far lower risk of implementation failure.

Diagnosing the Gap: A Structural Problem

The authors build a compelling empirical case. Studying 21 democracies over four decades in six major policy areas, they show that:

• The number of policies (especially in social and environmental sectors) has increased dramatically,

• While administrative capacity has remained stagnant or declined,

• And this disconnect is most acute where VPI is weak.

While diagnosing the problem, the authors argue:

Power-seeking politicians have strong incentives to demonstrate their responsiveness to societal demands by constantly proposing new policies. The same logic, however, does not apply to the expansion of administrative capacities that are needed for properly implementing these new policies. As political responsibilities for implementation success are often unclear, electoral incentives for politicians to invest in administrative capacities for policy implementation are generally weaker than those for adopting new policies. Although such capacity expansion improves implementation effectiveness, attributing such improvements to the actions of particular political actors is in many instances more difficult for voters. While political actors have strong incentives to engage in policy production, their incentives to engage in costly improvements of administrative capacities are typically much weaker. Deviations from this pattern are largely confined to specific constellations where implementation failures have immediate individual consequences for voters, for example, in the case of policies related to service delivery. From a mere political logic, we should hence expect a toxic combination of strong policy growth and stagnating or even declining administrative capacities. Although the urgency of this problem varies across countries and sectors, the nature of the challenge essentially remains the same: if we assume that policymaking is exclusively driven by politics, we would expect an ever-growing burden-capacity gap, with more and more policies undermining rather than strengthening overall policy effectiveness in the long run.

Countries with strong VPI exhibit smaller burden-capacity gaps. Policymakers in these states are either constrained from producing unimplementable laws or are forced to fund and structure implementation effectively. They also receive better information from the ground and adapt policies accordingly. The result? Better alignment between ambition and ability.

From Reform to Rewiring: Toward a VPI-Conscious Bureaucracy

The real strength of the VPI framework is that it reframes governance reform not as a matter of more staffing or digitization, but as a matter of organizational architecture and coordination logic.

Most governance reforms focus on expanding inputs: more officials, more training, better IT systems. Important as these are, they cannot resolve the systemic problem of fragmented authority and disjointed learning.

VPI, by contrast, draws our attention to the invisible relational fabric of the state:

• Who owns implementation failures?

• Who designs the machinery for delivery?

• Who listens to the people closest to the problem?

Answering these questions calls for institutional rewiring, not just capacity building. It calls for a shift from government as a vertical hierarchy of commands to a network of mutual responsibility and learning.

Here are four ways to build a VPI-conscious bureaucracy:

1. Mandate co-design of major schemes between central, state, and local authorities to ensure joint ownership of both success and failure.

2. Embed feedback loops in program cycles through structured consultation with implementers and real-time feedback mechanisms.

3. Create institutional memory by rotating bureaucrats between policymaking and implementation roles.

4. Link funding to implementation realism—ensuring that policies come bundled with capacity assessments and resourcing plans.

The goal is to create a system where ambition is tempered by accountability, and ground-level intelligence shapes national strategy.

Conclusion: A State That Talks to Itself

Fernández-I-Marín and his colleagues offer a crucial insight: a capable state is not one that merely delivers, but one that listens—to itself.

Modern democracies are flooded with policies. Yet many of these wash out at the point of execution. Why? Because the state often behaves like a fragmented machine: the head doesn’t know what the hands are doing, and the hands have no voice to speak back.

VPI gives us a language—and a framework—to fix this. It shows that effective governance is not just about laws or funds, but about how power, responsibility, and knowledge flow across levels.

India, like many large states, has no shortage of policies. What it needs is a bureaucratic nervous system—a structure that connects brain to limb, plan to ground, ambition to action.

The future of governance may not lie in doing more. It may lie in connecting better.