Explaining the policy advisory success of non-governmental organisations in unlikely settings: a complexity-oriented approach
研究了非政府组织在政策制定中取得咨询影响力的条件，以保加利亚社会服务改革为例，强调需要采用灵活的分析方法，并指出个体行动者、制度和情境因素的复杂作用。
The aim of this study is to explore under what conditions policy actors are able to achieve advisory influence in a contested policy-making space. Specifically, it focuses on the factors leading to the success of a set of advisory actors typically assumed to be among the most disadvantaged – non-governmental organisations (NGOs). The article departs from dominant approaches to studying influence relying on theoretical exclusivity and argues for the need to adopt more flexible complexity-oriented analytical styles. To illustrate this, the study uses the extreme case of Bulgaria’s social service delivery reform. The analysis of the case provides strong support for the need to employ greater analytic eclecticism rather than rigid theoretical assumptions based on a single explanatory theory in making sense of advisory influence. It highlights the critical role of individual agents in leading and facilitating an opening in the advisory space for NGOs’ input. It also, however, vividly illustrates the necessary, albeit not sufficient, enabling function performed by institutions and contextual factors in explaining advisory success. Importantly, the study indicates that the factors conducive to influence are not only complex and interdependent but also vary across stages of the policy formulation process and the arenas within which advisory activities take place.