Comparing policy accumulation induced capacity loss in public sector organizations

Policies continuously pile up in modern democracies. Organizations tasked with their implementation are confronted with the challenge to cope with an ever-increasing and more complex number of tasks. So far, the ability of organizations to cope with an expanding workload cardinally has been linked to hard resources — budget and staff. Yet, whether an organization is able to maintain its capacity despite a higher implementation load significantly depends on its ability to efficiently mobilize and distribute resources internally. Strikingly, however, this aspect has not been addressed systematically so far. We still lack analytical concepts that allow us to empirically capture changes in agency capacity at the aggregate level. We also lack theoretical explanations that might account for variation in accumulation-induced capacity losses across countries, sectors, or different implementation bodies. In this paper, I propose a new approach to address these research gaps in two ways. First, I develop a novel concept of capacity loss caused by policy accumulation allowing for the comparison of changes across organizations, sectors, and countries. Second, I suggest a new theoretical argument accounting for change in capacity. Centrally, I claim that organizational capacity gains or losses can be attributed to two factors, namely (1) agency legacy — internalized routines and structures that are difficult if not impossible to change and (2) agency management — organizational strategies that can be changed by reform, different leadership, or problem pressure. Third, I provide an initial test of the conceptual and theoretical considerations by a most similar systems case study of the English Environment Agency and the Irish Environmental Protection Agency.