Serving the Nation: Devolution and the Civil Service in Wales

Abstract

The article captures the evolution of the moving object of Welsh devolution over its first decade through a case study of the civil service in Wales. Three positions are proposed as heuristics for understanding politico-administrative relations in devolved Wales: these are administrative persistence, capacity-building and bureaucratic capture. Rather than set these dynamics against each other, the case study of the civil service in Wales demonstrates the value of reasoning in terms of a mix of administrative, political and managerial pressures, requiring the development of hybrid responses and skills. Although the institutional capacity-building dynamic clearly had the ascendancy during the first decade, as the post-devolution Welsh polity gradually becomes more settled, there is likely to be a revival of more generic administrative and/or managerial concerns.