Setting the scene for street-level bureaucracy in different Souths: opportunities and challenges in context-based approaches

The street-level bureaucracy (SLB) theory introduced by Lipsky (2010[1980]) more than 40 years ago has had considerable recognition from the scientific community, especially in Northern Europe and in the USA. These are the contexts in which most of the studies and research about street-level bureaucrats’ discretion have been conducted. The adoption of the SLB theory in the Mediterranean countries, Eastern Europe, Asia, South America and Africa is still in its beginning (Lotta et al., 2022). Only in recent times scholars have begun to highlight the potentiality of SLB theory to study the impacts of neoliberalism, economic crisis, population impoverishment, migratory processes, the digitisation of welfare, the transformations in the labour market, supranational development programmes (e.g. NextGenEU, and United Nations’ Millennium Development Goals) and the effects of COVID-19 pandemic on frontline workers’ work practices in underexplored contexts. This is the case of Brazil (Eiro, 2019; Lotta and Kuhlmann, 2021), Greece (Exadaktylos et al., 2021; Witcher, 2021), Italy (Barberis et al., 2019; Leonardi et al., 2021; Dallara and Lacchei, 2021; Raspanti and Saruis, 2022), Mexico (Ramirez, 2021), Nigeria (Ukeje et al., 2021), Spain (Guidi, 2020) and South Africa (Gaede, 2016). The Special Issue Setting the Scene for Street-Level Bureaucracy in the Global South: Opportunities and challenges in context-based approaches gathers papers that stress the importance of the institutional context to explain street-level bureaucrats’ decision to deal with clients. While a context-based approach to study how public administration works is not new, this Special Issue contributes to the SLB literature by shedding light on countries characterised by weak institutions, high levels of social inequalities, clientelism, different levels of trust in institutions and low state policy capacity.