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.

中文翻译：

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官僚主义超载与组织政策分类：五个欧洲国家执行机构的比较研究

传统上，政策实施研究的重点是了解特定背景下个别政策的成功或失败。人们很少关注政策组合随着时间的推移累积增长所带来的挑战。本文通过研究组织政策分类现象来解决这一研究空白，这种现象发生在实施组织面临超载并被迫在其投资组合中的不同政策实施之间做出权衡决策时。我们调查了五个欧洲国家（丹麦、德国、爱尔兰、意大利和英国）16 个社会和环境实施机构的政策分类实证模式。我们表明，政策分类的变化可以通过三个核心因素的结合来解释：推卸责任的机会、外部资源的调动以及执行当局对补偿超载的承诺。