Concluding Remarks: Bureaucrats and Conflict Management

Abstract

Does the bureaucrat have a role in sustaining power-sharing arrangements; and if the bureaucrat has a role, what guides or motivates the bureaucrat in instances of discretion? These questions are fundamental if we are to understand how conflict is regulated. Having explored in depth the bureaucrat’s role and governance perceptions, and contextualised these preferences within the two distinct cases of consociational power-sharing, this chapter draws together some of the important findings from the research. Recall the purpose of this book has been to examine the role of the bureaucratic elite in assisting to sustain conflict management in instances where differing ethnic groups manage to actually coexist. The findings therefore contribute to our understanding of how societies considering consociation as a form of power-sharing could function. Drawing together two areas of scholarly research within political science and public administration — political control literature and bureaucratic values literature — a more comprehensive picture of the bureaucracy within the power-sharing society has been created. This public administration/political science lens has highlighted the importance of developing administrative capacity to the conflict management process. This lens has been used to view two different conflict management strategies.