This paper sheds new light on the role of individual-level and structural explanations for implementation of EU/EEA regulations at the street level, an area suggested by Dörrenbächer (2018) as fruitful for future research. More specifically, it examines 1) to what extent street-level bureaucracts (SLBs) prioritize different stakeholders’ wishes in situations of ambiguity and which signals they prioritize, and 2) what impacts on this prioritization.

Much EU literature focuses on compliance perspectives (Thomann & Sager 2017) and explicit “pathologies of non-compliance” (Schmalter, 2019) in implementation. This is an inherently top-down perspective (Heidbreder, 2017) which neglects the regulatory ambiguity and changing judicial landscape surrounding interpretation of multilevel regulations and frameworks. Understanding when national or European frameworks on social security rights apply can be challenging (Thierry & Martinsen, 2018), and bureaucrats also have discretion in their interpretation. While domestic signals shape practical application of law, in areas with high levels of ambiguity, individual motivations of SLBs can also have an influence (Martinsen et al., 2019). A theoretical point of departure is thus in the body of literature on street-level bureaucracy (Lipsky, 2010) and implementation (Hupe & Hill, 2021; Winter, 2012), where bureaucratic autonomy enables discretion in interpretations of regulations, and thus their practical application. In line with Schmälter’s (2019) inductive study on EU implementation, multiple factors may be relevant for SLBs in this context: lacking resources, insufficient education on meaning of the legislation, resistance to the provision, and missing accountability mechanisms.

Our context is the Norwegian Labor and Welfare Administration (NAV), which administers social security benefits. While Norway is not a member of the European Union, it is still bound by hundreds of agreements with the EU, most importantly the EEA agreement (Trondal & Kühn, 2023). Our focus is on coordination of social security benefits (disability, pension, family benefits, and unemployment benefits), which ensures that rightful benefits are retained in the case of a person’s international travel and movement. This in the aftermath of a 2019 “scandal”, where a restrictive (mis)interpretation of EEA regulations resulted in wrongful prioritization of national law; thousands had to reimburse paid benefits, and some were incarcerated. The empirical analyses rest on unique quantitative survey data supplemented by qualitative data from open-ended survey questions. Data were collected from April-June 2023 using a web-survey to NAV caseworkers and coordinators (N=200+).

We aim to contribute in several ways: First, providing a new understanding of tensions related to social security coordination in the context of international agreements, as well as more nuance in the literature on street-level bureaucracy in the context of these agreements. Norway also represents a little-researched context. Finally, the paper may have implications for practitioners, informing policy and practice decisions within the welfare administration.

The ways social workers, teachers, and healthcare professionals draw on discretion to breed policy divergence or to adapt abstract policy designs to the concrete world are objects to many empirical studies (Gofen, 2014; Chang & Brewer, 2022). The professionality of such categories is instrumental to street-level bureaucracy research: it highlights the tension between bottom-up, occupation-backed arguments for professional legitimate discretion and top-down accountability to rule-makers or managers (Evans, 2016; Thomann et al., 2018). However, public service clerks can also have a level of discretion—and thus can shape policy implementation (Hupe & Hill, 2007).

Clerical professionals (non-traditional, semi-, blue collar, or organisation-based) lack the wide discretion enjoyed by traditional, occupation-based professionals, and primarily engage in canonical tasks. Their role identities are embedded in and determined by the organizational context, lacking external institutional anchoring (Dudau et al., 2021). Yet, the layering of reforms makes the public organisations in which they dwell home to hybrid institutional logics, further complexifying their clerical profile, and how they understand and accomplish their tasks (Klenk & Cohen, 2019).

The importance of clerical professionals is paramount in large developing economies such as Brazil, where economies of scale demand complex welfare policy systems to be massively run by these agents, whose decision-making, as residual as it should be, can impact policy outcomes (Campos & Peeters, 2022). This study addresses Brazilian national social security officials—typical street-level clerical caseworkers, acting in INSS (Instituto Nacional do Seguro Social), a national agency object of many subsequent reforms in the last years. Notwithstanding the strict limits to their discretion, the ways they perceive, confer meaningfulness to and effectively use it (Thomann et al., 2018) can have relevant impacts on social policy implementation, especially in the Brazilian context of institutional frailty, susceptible to both alienative commitment and policy improvisation (Lotta et al., 2021; Peeters & Campos, 2022).

I rely on reflexive thematic analysis of 14 interviews, purposefully sampled from a previous survey with INSS clerical officials (n=678), to answer the question: how do INSS officials challenge canonical practices to shape social policy implementation? The findings elucidate the tactics employed by these clerical officials to create meaningful discretion gaps within strictly regulated procedures. Besides, findings suggest that heterogeneous background formation present in clerical bureaucracy can increase the mix of institutional logics and thus institutional hybridity.

The study contributes to a contextually bound theoretical account, informing policy design—especially for policymakers in large developing countries where clerical officials act in the frontline of social policies dealing with inequality and poverty.

In contemporary times, ‘innovation’ is regarded as the solution to a multitude of problems facing societies. Innovative policy solutions and public sector organizations capable of delivering these are regarded as necessary and so, public sector innovation has grown rapidly as an area of both research and practice over the last few decades. Governments are expected to deliver in the face of increasingly complex problems, growing levels of mistrust and decreasing legitimacy, and shrinking budgets combined with mounting community expectations. For those who believe that ‘innovation’ will deliver, it holds out the promise of finding solutions by design and the use of creativity. This is a far cry from the long-lived, negative view of innovation held by those who saw it as political and disruptive to the established order (Godin 2015).

In contrast, discretion on the frontline of service delivery tends to be associated with negative connotations. Staff exercising judgement during implementation is regarded as problematic, echoing some of the earlier concerns about innovation as a vice, rather than a virtue. Creativity, in this forum, becomes non-compliance, poor performance, and divergence from the policy goals. It seems that innovation is ‘good’ for the creation of policy but not for its implementation. Innovation is sometimes defined as rule-breaking, so it seems that policy designers are seen as positive rule-breakers, while policy implementers are negative rule-breakers.

This paper focuses on this disjunction, using the case of employment services. Policy designers seek to direct the work of service delivery agencies and the individuals working in them, using different policy tools (Bali et al 2021). Policy design for employment services has aimed at making them less rule-bound and more flexible and tailored. A survey of the perceptions of frontline staff in Australia and the UK at four points in time (1998, 2008, 2012 and 2016), demonstrates what is orienting their work (rules, targets, competition, or cooperation) at two levels: office and personal (Lewis, Nguyen and Considine 2022). The results indicate that the effect on staff has been to reduce their flexibility and discretion on the frontline.

References

Bali, AS, Howlett, M, Lewis, JM and Ramesh M (2021) ‘Procedural policy tools in theory and practice’. Policy and Society 40 (3): 295-311

Godin, B (2015) Innovation contested. The idea of innovation over the centuries. New York: Routledge.

Lewis, JM, Nguyen, P and Considine M (2021) ‘Are policy tools and governance modes coupled? Analysing welfare-to-work reform at the frontline’. Policy and Society 40 (3): 397-413.