How policy growth affects policy implementation: bureaucratic overload and policy triage

Abstract

While policies pile up in modern democracies, the effect of policy growth on policy implementation has not been addressed so far. Implementation research has focused on individual policies instead of studying the challenges implementation organizations face in dealing with growing policy stocks. In this paper, we address this research gap in three ways. First, we introduce the novel concept of organizational ‘policy triage’ which captures implementation effectiveness from an organizational rather than a policy-based perspective. Second, we develop a theoretical framework to account for variations in the prevalence of policy triage across organizations. We argue that policy triage is affected by the interplay of several factors related to (1) organizational overload vulnerability and (2) organizational overload compensation. Third, we provide an initial empirical test of our conceptual and theoretical considerations through four comparative case studies on environmental policy implementation in Ireland and England.