Building street-level capacity. Evidence from a policy for problem gambling prevention

This article studies the implementation of a policy for the prevention of problem gambling in the metropolitan area of Turin (Italy). The research adopts the theoretical lens offered by the street-level bureaucracy framework to understand how social workers develop individual policy capacities in the implementation of highly discretional tasks. So far, the relation between discretion and policy capacity has been scarcely investigated in the academic field. To fill this gap, this paper presents the results of a case study on local policy implementation to understand how street-level bureaucrats use their margin of discretion to redesign the policy and how this process leads to the development of policy capacities. The methods combine a longitudinal ethnographic study on three gambling venues (participant observation) and a series of semi-structured interviews with key actors. The evidence shows that street-level bureaucrats undertook a process of redesigning the policy, together with the development of a pragmatic and qualitative kind of individual analytical capacities acquired during daily practice. Focusing on such processes of redesign and capacity development, the paper offers novel insights for the theorization of more nuanced understandings of individual policy capacities.