Why Public Service Underperforms: Behavioural Governance, Misconduct, and Administrative Inefficiency in a Small Island Developing State (SIDS) Administration

Despite repeated waves of public service reform, administrative inefficiency remains a persistent challenge across many public administrations. Existing explanations commonly emphasize institutional design, implementation failure, or capacity limitations, yet these perspectives only partially account for why reforms frequently underperform in practice. This study investigates how administrative systems shape behavioural incentives that sustain inefficiency despite continuous reform efforts. It advances a behavioural governance perspective, arguing that inefficiency persists where systems fail to regulate behaviour credibly through incentives, accountability, fairness, and enforcement. Misconduct, understood broadly as rule-bending, selective compliance, strategic delay, avoidance of responsibility, and opportunistic administrative behaviour, is conceptualised not merely as an ethical deviation, but as a systemic mechanism through which inefficiency is reproduced. Using a theory-informed documentary case study of the Maldives as an illustrative Small Island Developing State (SIDS), the article analyses civil service legislation, human resource regulations, remuneration frameworks, integrity instruments, decentralisation arrangements, and oversight reports. The findings identify six interrelated drivers of inefficiency: performance systems lacking credible consequences, inconsistent human resource governance, perceived organisational injustice, symbolic integrity management, fragmented authority, and strategic proceduralism. These conditions generate self-reinforcing patterns in which formal compliance substitutes for substantive accountability. The study contributes to public administration scholarship by reframing inefficiency as a behavioural governance outcome and by integrating administrative ethics into explanations of reform underperformance. AI-assisted visualisation tools were used to generate the conceptual framework figure presented in the article. The findings offer practical insights for strengthening efficiency, fairness, and accountability in contemporary public administration systems.

کلیدواژه ها:

Administrative inefficiency ، Behavioural governance ، Misconduct ، Small Island Developing States (SIDS)