Street-Level Bureaucratic Discretion in Integrated Public Services: A Study at the Bengkulu City Public Service Mall

Public service integration through One-Stop Shop (OSS) models such as Indonesia's Mal Pelayanan Publik (MPP) is widely promoted as a solution to bureaucratic fragmentation, yet the frontline officers who operationalize these systems retain considerable interpretive latitude. This study examines how discretion is exercised by frontline officers at the Bengkulu City Public Service Mall "Harapan dan Doa," applying Lipsky's street-level bureaucracy framework and extending it with an institutional-isomorphism lens. Employing a qualitative descriptive design, data were drawn from in-depth interviews with the Head of the MPP, licensing and non-licensing service officers, and service users, supplemented by field observation and document review, as a secondary analysis of a broader dataset previously examined through a good-governance lens. Findings show that officers exercise discretion across three recurring domains: interpreting standard operating procedures (SOPs) when cases fall outside documented scenarios, communicating service information inconsistently across counters despite shared regulatory references, and applying priority-queue rules flexibly for vulnerable groups under conditions of high demand. These patterns are consistent with coercive isomorphic pressure arising from layered regulation and escalation procedures that narrow officers' discretionary space, while the digital queuing and satisfaction-monitoring system (SIKEMON) illustrates an emerging system-level layer of discretion in which digital infrastructure reshapes, without eliminating, frontline judgment. The study contributes an empirically grounded account of street-level bureaucracy in an Indonesian integrated-service setting, a context still underexamined relative to the welfare and labour-inspection domains where the theory has predominantly been applied, and offers implications for SOP design, officer training, and digital-service governance