Of EU waste and national garbage cans: How the organization of national ministerial departments shapes the transposition of EU Waste Directives

Although the political role of bureaucracy in policymaking is rarely contested, bureaucratic influence on policymaking remains an important research gap. This concerns, in particular, the organizational preferences of policy bureaucracies and organizational decision-making in preparation of policy proposals. Looking at the transposition of EU Waste Directives as a most likely case of strong bureaucratic influence, I analyze how lead ministerial departments as policy bureaucracies develop policy proposals: Under what conditions do lead ministerial departments propose permissive or restrictive transposition of EU Directives in a ministerial draft? This paper focuses on organizational decision-making in the lead ministerial department as the potentially most influential and relevant unit of analysis during policy formulation. From a new institutionalist perspective and building on the garbage can model of organizational decision-making, I argue that the policy decision depends on the institutionalization of organizational structure, expertise, and political preferences in the policy bureaucracy as an organization. More specifically, socialization, politicization and professionalization are identified as competing institutional mechanisms of organizational decision-making in policy bureaucracies. I apply fuzzy-set Qualitative Comparative Analysis (fsQCA) to study empirically the interaction of these mechanisms in the transposition of EU Waste Directives across EU member states. This cross-case analysis might inform future in-depth within-case studies to understand the consequences of socialization in “bureaucratic silos” on policymaking and to what extent they might be mitigated by politicization and professionalization of the decision-making process. This paper contributes to the academic debate on organizational decision-making in policy bureaucracies.