Implementation research has long been organized around the problem of control. Top-down accounts asked how policy makers could ensure that what happens on the ground corresponds to what was decided, and treated deviation as a defect to be engineered away. Street-level accounts reversed the question, showing that discretion is not a residual leak in the control system but a constitutive feature of policy implementation: rules are always incomplete, resources are always insufficient, and cases are always more particular than the categories built to hold them.
Accordingly, the implementation of water policies rarely mirrors its formal design. Policies are translated into practices through complex interactions among policy intentions and objectives, organizations, infrastructures, frontline workers, communities, and environmental conditions. Policies are not simply executed after formulation, but are interpreted, negotiated, adapted, and transformed as they move through implementation processes.
Frontline workers occupy critical positions at the interface between organizations responsible for water management and policy, and the people affected by their decisions. In their everyday work, they navigate competing demands, limited resources and uncertain information. They operate under procedural rules and supervision, but also under performance targets and key performance indicators, audit and reporting requirements, results frameworks, donor conditionalities, and international commitments such as the SDG targets. Each of these instruments attempts to render frontline practice visible and steerable. None of them eliminates discretion. Each redistributes it, and each generates its own forms of adaptation, selective compliance, and creative reporting.
This special issue explores how the distinctive socio-material characteristics of the water sector including the materiality of water, socio-technical infrastructures, and multiple knowledge systems reconfigure the relationship between control and discretion in water policy implementation.
Focus on the Global South
How control and discretion combine is not a universal constant, and the settings this special issue addresses differ in consequential ways from those in which street-level theory was first developed (see for example, Lipsky, 1980; Hupe & Hill, 2007; Gofen, 2014; Chang & Brewer, 2023). Control apparatuses in many Southern water bureaucracies are elaborate on paper and thin in practice: rule density coexists with weak supervision, so that discretion arises by default rather than by design. Accountability often runs upward and outward, toward ministries, funders, and international reporting frameworks, rather than downward toward users. Statutory mandates overlap with customary, communal, and religious claims to authority, leaving frontline workers answerable to more than one order, each of which carries legitimacy. Chronic scarcity, intermittency, and infrastructural improvisation are ordinary operating conditions rather than departures from a functioning baseline. Users themselves may co-produce the service through informal connections, community management, and self-supply, which unsettles the distinction between those who implement policy and those on whom it is implemented.
Our starting claim is not that these settings have less control and more discretion, but that the two are configured differently and that this configuration deserves theorization in its own right rather than being treated as a deviation from an implicit Northern standard.
Themes
We welcome contributions addressing one or more of the following themes. The themes are analytical rather than topical: each names a tension within the implementation process rather than a subject matter, and most contributions will speak to several at once.
1. Control and discretion
How is frontline practice in the water sector steered, and how much discretion remains? We invite contributions examining the instruments by which implementing organizations attempt to direct frontline work, including rules, supervision, targets and indicators, metering and monitoring technologies, audits, reporting requirements, and donor conditionalities, as well as the discretionary practices that develop around them.
2. Conformance, Performance, and Coping
A central concern within implementation studies is how actors balance accountability to policy objectives, prescribed strategies, and formal rules with the need to respond to local needs and circumstances. As policies move into practice, they are interpreted, negotiated and adapted. Such adaptations may improve performance while challenging conformance, or vice versa. We welcome contributions that examine which coping strategies these tensions produce and how they shape implementation outcomes, accountability, equity, effectiveness, and/or sustainability.
3. Knowledge, Uncertainty, and Frontline Judgment
Discretion is exercised under conditions of incomplete information, and what implementers know shapes what they can justify. The implementation of water policies requires frontline workers to draw upon and reconcile multiple forms of knowledge. We encourage contributions that investigate how different forms of knowledge are mobilized during implementation, and how they influence judgment in the navigation between conformance and performance.
4. Relational implementation: Multi-actor Interfaces and Authority
Implementation is relational. It unfolds through interactions among frontline workers, managers, community organizations, user groups, local authorities, traditional leaders, civil society organizations, and private actors. We invite analyses of how these relationships shape implementation processes in settings where frontline actors answer to several orders at once, and in how discretion is exercised when statutory mandates and locally legitimate claims point in different directions.
Submissions
The special issue aims to collect empirically based contributions that engage with the street-level work literature and one or more of these themes described above. For a first round, we invite authors to submit a two-page extended abstract (about 800-1000 words). The abstract should include the empirical context, the frontline work in the study, and the key research question and the anticipated knowledge contribution. Upon acceptance of the abstract, authors are invited to write a full paper.
Online Workshop
As part of developing this special issue, we would like to organize a 1-day online workshop. For this workshop, the authors of abstracts accepted for the special issue will be invited. Invited authors will have two tasks. Firstly, they will present their own draft paper (which they are to submit about 4 weeks before the workshop). Secondly, we will distribute the submitted drafts to a different author and ask each author to reflect on another author’s paper during the workshop.
The workshop does not replace a double-blind review that all papers will be subject to but will add a friendly feedback from colleagues contributing to the special issue. Publication of the paper will depend on final acceptance following that double-blind review.
Schedule
Launch of the call 10 August 2026
Submission of abstracts 15 October 2026
Notification of authors 5 November 2026
Draft papers 15 February 2027
Workshop 15 March 2027
Final papers 30 April 2027
Abstracts can be submitted to Klaas Schwartz: k.schwartz@un-ihe.org
Guest Editors
Dr. Sachin Tiwale - Ashoka Trust for Research in Ecology and the Environment
Dr. Jaap Evers – IHE Delft Institute for Water Education
Dr. Klaas Schwartz – University of Amsterdam/IHE Delft Institute for Water Education
Dr. Fernando Nieto-Morales - El Colegio de México
References
- Chang, A., & Brewer, Gene. A. (2023). Street-Level bureaucracy in public administration: A systematic literature review. Public Management Review, 25(11), 2191–2211.
- Hupe, P., & Hill, M. (2007). Street-Level Bureaucracy and Public Accountability. Public Administration, 85(2), 279–299.
- Lipsky, M. (1980). Street-Level Bureaucracy: Dilemmas of the Individual in Public Services. New York: Russel Sage Foundation.
- Gofen, A. (2014). Mind the Gap: Dimensions and Influence of Street-Level Divergence. Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory, 24(2), 473-493.