Bureaucratic overload and organizational policy triage: A comparative study of implementation agencies in five European countries

Abstract

Research on policy implementation traditionally has focused on understanding the success or failure of individual policies within specific contexts. Little attention has been given to the challenges that emerge from the cumulative growth of policy portfolios over time. This paper is addressing this research gap by examining the phenomenon of organizational policy triage, which occurs when implementation organizations face overload and are forced to make trade-off decisions between the implementation of the different policies in their portfolios. We investigate empirical patterns of policy triage across 16 social and environmental implementation agencies in five European countries (Denmark, Germany, Ireland, Italy, and UK). We show that variation in policy triage can be explained by the combination of three central factors: blame-shifting opportunities, the mobilization of external resources, and the commitment to compensate for overload by implementation authorities.