Why counter-terrorism policy fails: Street-level Dilemmas and the Prevent Duty as it affects Higher Education in the United Kingdom

Under its counterterrorism strategy, in 2015 the United Kingdom (UK) introduced the ‘Prevent duty’: university lecturers are legally required to identify and report any student they suspect may be undergoing a process of radicalization. However, in practice the prevent duty has failed to prevent radicalization, and students are extremely rarely reported. This study examines how the politically sensitive and contested nature of the Prevent duty affects its implementation at the street level. We ask: what accountabilities and dilemmas does this policy imply for lecturers? And how do these perceived accountabilities affect their willingness to implement the Prevent duty? We argue that street-level bureaucrats as “political animals” need to balance the Prevent Duty with personal political preferences, and that this creates street-level dilemmas in a policy context of high ambiguity and high conflict. This political-ideological accountability regime has so far received little attention in the street-level bureaucracy literature. We test our hypotheses on the effects of accountability dilemmas on implementation willingness and actual compliance through an anonymous online survey experiment of UK University lecturers (N=1005) with 109 qualitative follow-up interviews. By revealing the political nature of street-level implementation, results highlight the risk of failed implementation that arises from implementation arrangements that create potentially clashing street-level accountabilities.