Bureaucratic overload and organizational policy triage: A comparative study of implementation agencies in five European countries
研究了政策组合累积增长导致执行机构超载时，如何在不同政策间做出取舍决策（即政策分流），基于五个欧洲国家16个社会与环境执行机构的实证数据，揭示了责任转移机会、外部资源动员和执行机构补偿承诺三个关键因素的作用。
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.