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

This article studies the implementation of a policy for the pre-vention of problem gambling in the metropolitan area of Turin (Italy). The research adopts the theoretical lens offered by thestreet-level bureaucracy framework to understand how socialworkers develop individual policy capacities in the implemen-tation of highly discretional tasks. So far, the relation betweendiscretion and policy capacity has been scarcely investigated inthe academic field. To fill this gap, this paper presents the resultsof a case study on local policy implementation to understandhow street-level bureaucrats use their margin of discretion to re-design the policy and how this process leads to the developmentof policy capacities. The methods combine a longitudinal eth-nographic study on three gambling venues (participant observa-tion) and a series of semi-structured interviews with key actors. The evidence shows that street-level bureaucrats undertook aprocess of redesigning the policy, together with the develop-ment of a pragmatic and qualitative kind of individual analyticalcapacities acquired during daily practice. Focusing on such pro-cesses of redesign and capacity development, the paper offersnovel insights for the theorization of more nuanced understand-ings of individual policy capacities.