When a 'Global' Problem Enters the Agenda of a Decentralized Administration: Framing and Treatment of 'Antibiotic Resistance' by Swiss State Bureaucrats

The bureaucracy’s role by agenda–setting deserves new research’s attention. Which kinds of responses the bureaucracy addresses to political actors who pay attention to react promptly to a problem? If changes in framing alter public policy outcomes, the implication of the professional-bureaucrats in this process might be further examined. The constructionist approach is perhaps more accustomed to consider that bureaucrats define the problems with their specific resources. The internationalization of problems also conduces to revisit this perspective. Professional-bureaucrats play a key role in translating a problem into their national organizational design. In Switzerland, the problem “antibiotic resistance” enters administrative units after a restructuring period. As in many European countries, units in charge of food safety were merged with those in charge of animal health. Now the professional bureaucrats (veterinarians, chemical or food engineers) cope with the decision of top political actors to make a plan following the guidelines of the WHO. Although they recognize that antibiotic resistance requires the collaboration of professionals active in animal and human health, the plan they established leaves each field autonomous, because of administrative structures. By organizing the national control of antibiotic delivery through monitoring, they don’t include the controversial issues. Moreover, they don’t feel responsible for the transnational exchanges of food products that they see as the main cause of the problem. Through this case, we argue that the role of professional-bureaucrats has to be further taken into account by agenda setting and constructionist approaches. They are not only brokers linking different actors through each phase of the policy process. They tell what is possible and worth to implement. If the circulation of expertise in international scientific committees is crucial to understand the career of transnational problems, the comparative study of middle range bureaucrats’ reactions might shed a complementary light on this process.