When the cat is away: How institutional autonomy, low salience, and issue complexity shape administrative action
研究了在政治指令间歇或缺失时，高复杂性、低政治显著性和高行政自主性的议题如何催生协作治理，以欧洲抗菌素耐药性管理为例，发现嵌入知识共同体的高级公务员在驱动行动和促进治理中起主导作用。
Abstract Political issues sometimes display an intriguing combination of high degrees of complexity, low political saliency, and high levels of administrative autonomy. This article investigates how this type of issues shapes the relationship between politicians and the public service. More specifically, we advance the notion of “administrative action space” to describe the emergence of collaborative governance when directives from the political level are intermittent or absent. Using an illustrative case on the administration of measures to address antimicrobial resistance (AMR), a transnational public health issue in Europe, we find that senior public servants nested in epistemic communities play a leading role in driving agency and facilitating governance of complex but low‐salient issues when administrative autonomy is extensive.