Beyond technocracy: reconceptualising individual policy capacity as relational, interpretive, and politically situated - a systematic review.

Collins, Matthew ORCID: https://orcid.org/0000-0001-7458-3593 2026. Beyond technocracy: reconceptualising individual policy capacity as relational, interpretive, and politically situated - a systematic review. Presented at: Political Studies Association 76th Annual Conference, Oxford, UK, 30 March - 1 April 2026.

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Abstract

Research on policy advisory capacity has expanded rapidly but has tended to focus on the system rather than the individual. This systematic review investigates what knowledge, skills, experience, and dispositions individual policy advisers in Westminster systems require. Database searches were conducted of peer-reviewed publications focussing on studies of Westminster Model jurisdictions published between January 2000 and December 2024 and using the terms “Civil Service”, “Policy Capacity”, “Civil Service Skills”, “Policy Advisory Skills”, and “Government” and “Skills” (n=75). These were thematically analysed guided by Collins and Evans (2007) categorisation of expertise to produce an integrated typology identifying three types of knowledge (specialised policy, generalised policy, and system knowledge); four skill domains (policy-making, social, communication, and integrative balancing); two experiential dimensions (occupational culture and institutional memory); and seven dispositions (political astuteness, creativity, judgement, leadership, adaptive capacity, risk-taking, and resilience). A significant limitation is the absence of the ministerial perspective from the literature, despite ministers constituting the preeminent consumers of policy advice. The article concludes that individual policy capacity is socially constructed, institutionally conditioned, and politically situated; competency-based models are insufficient to capture its relational character, and capacity emerges from dynamic interactions between technical expertise, political judgement, and organisational context.

Item Type:	Conference or Workshop Item - unpublished
Status:	Unpublished
Schools:	Schools > Social Sciences (Includes Criminology and Education)
Subjects:	J Political Science > JN Political institutions (Europe) > JN101 Great Britain
Last Modified:	28 May 2026 14:24
URI:	https://orca.cardiff.ac.uk/id/eprint/186056

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