Inspecting environmental management from within: The role of street-level bureaucrats in environmental policy implementation

In this paper, we assert that an important element is largely missing in much of the current environmental policy literature regarding different management ideals: street-level bureaucrats (i.e., the practicing and, typically, anonymous civil servants at the very end of the environmental policy chain). Thus, we aim to enhance a deeper understanding of the role that street-level bureaucrats play within different management ideals, and through this discussion, we indicate how they affect the functionality of governing structures and processes. We do so by interviewing street-level bureaucrats carrying out their role in different management settings, enabling evaluations of the degree to which their practices correspond with the ideals expressed in the literature and in official directives. We find a rather poor match between these ideals on one hand and the way street-level bureaucrats actually perceive that they are internally steered and how they carry out their commissions on the other hand. •Frontline bureaucrats' role in implementation of environmental polices.•Comparing bureaucrats in top-down and collaborative management systems.•Analyses based on the concept of discretionary power.•Bureaucrats' discretion is dependent on freedom of action and capacity for action.•Bureaucrats in the top-down system have more discretion than their counterparts.