Limboing into overburdened administrations? How leaving citizens in administrative limbo can generate vicious performance failure cycles

How does government compensation for policy failures and disasters leave citizens in cycles of administrative limbo? When crises culminate, political urgency demands that redress protocols are set up to compensate victims. It is not uncommon for these hurriedly designed protocols to demonstrate various policy gaps, resulting in oversights, unexpected delays and injustices (e.g. excessively complex procedures or procedures imposing excessive financial burdens on citizens). The core of our argument is that these policy gaps can lead to a vicious cycle of overburdening, underperformance and administrative limbo. The goal of this article is to conceptualize and explore this vicious cycle, supported by evidence from interviews and secondary data interviews from one Irish and two Dutch crises. In addition to providing evidence of a vicious cycle in all three cases, the article aims to provide some initial insights on such cycles’ impact on both citizens and civil servants alike. We propose that, as policy gaps leave citizens in limbo, the call for both revised protocols and additional protocols increases. The turmoil induced by citizen demands and continuous protocol reform in turn overburdens the agencies tasked with the protocols’ implementation. Ironically, this overburdening worsens citizens’ states of administrative limbo, as citizen applications are delayed further and as frontline civil servants decide to leave an organization in turmoil. With citizens’ already extensive limbo being worsened further, the vicious cycle begins anew. The net result is increased turmoil and failure to adequately address the policy problem. Meanwhile, remaining civil servants are stuck in the middle, dealing with turmoil and overburdening from the top, turmoil from citizen interactions, and turmoil within the organization. We draw on two Dutch incidents, respectively involving manmade earthquakes (Groninger gas extraction crisis) and unduly revoked childcare benefits (childcare benefits scandal), as well as one Irish incident involving defective house construction (defective blocks/mica crisis). All three crises demonstrate severe policy failures, administrative limbo and overburdening of public agencies tasked with policy implementation. Methodologically, we triangulate our findings by utilizing a variety of civil servant and victim interviews (primary data), as well as ad verbatim interviews with victims and their representatives from parliamentary inquiries into both Dutch crises (secondary data). We draw on 12 interviews for defective blocks Ireland, 10 interviews for the Dutch Childcare benefits scandal and 18 interviews for the Dutch Groninger gas-extraction induced earthquake crisis (40 interviews across all three crises (30 primary data, 10 secondary data)). Interviewing is in progress, with 33 interviews being available and 7 more to be held until spring 2024.