Coping practices and the spatial dimension of authority design

• Published date: 01 January 2024
• Author: Constantin Kaplaner,Yves Steinebach
• Date: 01 January 2024
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1111/puar.13654

SCHOLARLY TAKES

Coping practices and the spatial dimension of authority

design

Constantin Kaplaner

1

| Yves Steinebach

2

1

Geschwister-Scholl-Institute of Political Science,

LMU Munich, Munich, Germany

2

Department of Political Science, University of

Oslo, Oslo, Norway

Correspondence

Constantin Kaplaner, Geschwister-Scholl-

Institute of Political Science, LMU Munich,

Oettingenstr. 67, 80538 Munich, Germany.

Email: constantin.kaplaner@gsi.uni-

muenchen.de

Funding information

European Research Council, Grant/Award

Number: 788941

Abstract

Frontline implementers develop coping practices to deal with implementation

burdens. Unfortunately, we have only limited knowledge of how widespread and

systematic these practices are applied. This paper provides a comprehensive anal-

ysis of the enforcement activities carried out in the context of the European Union

Industrial Emission Directive, relying on a quantitative data set that summarizes

the information from more than 2000 inspection reports published by the German

state Baden-Württemberg. Our analysis reveals that inspectors tend to give priority

to sites that (1) are closer and easier to reach and (2) that pose only a small risk to

their environment. These findings indicate that implementers are primarily guided

by concerns over the quantitative rather than the qualitative aspects of their work.

These insights highlight that public authorities’spatial location is a crucial, yet still

unexplored factor in the study of policy implementation.

Evidence for practice

•Frontline implementers develop coping practices to deal with implementation

burdens.

•It is important to understand what drives implementers in their decision to prior-

itize parts of the target group or the execution of some implementation tasks

over others.

•We find that environmental inspectors tend to prioritize industrial plants that

are close to the location of their authority and those that only pose a small risk

to their environment.

•In particular, the first aspect reveals that it makes a crucial difference where

exactly an implementing authority is ultimately located.

•In consequence, we provide a novel approach to how the spatial location of

public authorities can be improved.

INTRODUCTION

Frontline implementers make sure that policies are com-

plied with and thus can be considered the most influential

actors in shaping policy outcomes. They operate in various

areas such as social, environmental, and education policy.

As typical street-level bureaucrats (SLBs), implementers

must often perform their tasks with limited resources and

ever-growing expectations raised by central decision-

makers (Lipsky, 2010;Wightmanetal.,2022). Consequently,

they must develop adequate coping strategies that allow

them to “master, tolerate, or reduce external and internal

demands and conflicts among them”(Folkman &

Lazarus, 1989, p. 223) to achieve a manageable workload.

This can involve implementers focus on executing some

implementation tasks or controlling some selected parts of

the target group (Winter & Nielsen, 2008).

While previous scholarly contributions have made

substantial progress in identifying, classifying, and exam-

ining different coping strategies (Tummers et al., 2015),

we have limited knowledge of how widespread and sys-

tematic these coping strategies are applied in practice.

Received: 28 February 2022 Revised: 21 April 2023 Accepted: 26 April 2023

DOI: 10.1111/puar.13654

This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any

medium, provided the original work is properly cited and is not used for commercial purposes.

© 2023 The Authors. Public Administration Review published by Wiley Periodicals LLC on behalf of American Society for Public Administration.

86 Public Admin Rev. 2024;84:86–99.

wileyonlinelibrary.com/journal/puar