The “we” factor in improvisational statecraft: frontline repair of the state in Indonesia’s crisis response amidst resource constraints

Abstract

Street-level bureaucrats, confined by meager discretion, often find themselves reconciling the challenging terrain of inflexible policies with messy frontline realities. With a phenomenological lens, we examine how Indonesia’s frontline healthcare workers exercise discretion and improvise informal practices to adapt policies and deliver care despite scarce resources during the COVID-19 crisis. As formal emergency protocols lie encumbered under conditions of austerity, a grassroots motivation for communal action occurs from exchanges between peers mired in resource quandaries, encapsulating an improvisational “we” cohering frontline allies. Manifesting through focused responses drawing on unwritten collegial knowledge, these collaborative efforts embody the relational essence and defining contours of frontline policy repair, as opposed to isolated discretion. Probing further into these repair processes surfaces how shared struggles have the power to ignite collective capacity, empowering bureaucrats to govern complexity in concert, construct agency despite constraints, and promote equity in times of scarcity. Our findings champion tending to institutional receptivity and solidarity-anchored creative frontline initiatives, endorsing agile, adaptive processes finely tuned to situational realities that contests paradigms fixated solely on compliance.