Making Meritocracy Work: Institutional Barriers, Competence-Performance Gaps, and Lessons for Capacity Building Institutions in Nepal

Contemporary civil services, in principle, operate on the premise that meritocratic recruitment yields competent officials capable of delivering quality public services. However, officials who outperform competitors during selection often struggle to translate competence into effective administrative performance. This study investigates how experienced Nepali civil servants perceive institutional barriers mediating the relationship between entry competence and administrative performance. Anchored in an interpretivist-constructivist paradigm, the study draws on nine in-depth first-person accounts of serving and retired civil servants, analyzed using Reflexive Thematic Analysis. Results indicate that participants consistently describe institutional constraints, misaligned incentives, political-administrative relations, and bureaucratic socialization as systematic mediators of competence enactment. The paper posits that meritocratic recruitment constitutes a necessary but insufficient condition for administrative effectiveness, and that performance emerges as a property of the institutional ecosystems within which competence is exercised. The findings offer lessons for capacity building institutions in Nepal, suggesting they may consider evolving beyond training delivery to embrace institutional engagement as a means to address the competence-performance gap.