Overcoming Bureaucratic Cognitive Flexibility Limitations to Enhance Policy Integration: Qualitative Insights from Local Asset Management in South Konawe Regency, Indonesia

Policy integration depends not only on formal coordination arrangements but also on how bureaucrats interpret, negotiate, and respond to complex and changing policy demands. This study examines how limitations in bureaucratic cognitive flexibility (BCF) become consequential for policy integration in local public asset management and how bureaucrats navigate these constraints in practice. BCF is conceptualized as a situated capacity to reinterpret information, revise understandings, and adjust administrative action within institutional constraints. Using an instrumental case study of South Konawe Regency, Indonesia, the study draws on 23 semi-structured interviews, documentary evidence, and approximately 120 hours of non-participant observation across three local government organizations. Thematic analysis identifies three interrelated mechanisms linking BCF to policy integration: interpretive, relational, and adaptive. Interpretively, regulatory change generated uneven understandings when new requirements were not consistently translated into shared administrative guidance. Relationally, differences in procedural understanding and technology use constrained cross-unit coordination, leaving integration partly dependent on informal communication and personal initiative. Adaptively, officials modified workflows and used digital systems to maintain administrative continuity, but these responses often remained reactive and localized rather than becoming institutionalized organizational learning. Bureaucrats partly compensated for these limitations through peer consultation, technical workshops, informal coordination, procedural adjustment, and technology use, although such practices did not consistently generate integrated routines. The study concludes that BCF operates as a situated micro-foundation of policy integration rather than an autonomous individual attribute. Its organizational consequences emerge through the interaction of bureaucratic interpretation, cross-boundary relationships, adaptive practices, and institutional conditions. Policy integration therefore requires not only formal coordination structures but also arrangements that enable shared interpretation, cross-unit learning, and the institutionalization of adaptive responses.

Public Administration

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