Expertise and Power: Agencies Operating in Complex Environments

Abstract

This contribution investigates the strategies that environmental agencies develop to enhance their policy autonomy, in order to fulfil their organisational missions for protecting the environment. This article asks whether there are particular strategic moves that an agency can make to augment this policy autonomy in the face of the principals. Critiquing principal agent theory, it investigates the evolution of three environmental agencies (the European Environment Agency, the England and Wales Environment Agency and the United States Environmental Protection Agency), focusing on the case study of climate change. The contribution examines how the agencies influence environmental policy on domestic, regional and global levels, with a special focus on the principals that constrain agency autonomy. A greater focus on different multi-level contexts, which the three agencies face, may create other possible dynamics and opportunities for agency strategies. Agencies can use particular knowledge, network and alliance building to strengthen their policy/political positions.

Structural reform histories and perceptions of organizational autonomy: Do senior managers perceive less strategic policy autonomy when faced with frequent and intense restructuring?

“…Although this expectation of the influence of structural reforms has not been tested to our knowledge, substantial indications for the validity of a relationship between controlling behaviour by the political principal and perceived strategic policy autonomy may be found within the literature. In line with the argument that we make in this article, Zito () found, within the context of the British Environmental Agency (EA), that repeated structural reforms were imposed inter alia to steer the agency's task execution, and that these efforts were combined with explicit signals that the EA should not challenge government policy. In interviews with EU agencies, Busuioc () observed that controlling behaviour by the European Commission was perceived as reducing or even nullifying the formal decision‐making autonomy of agencies.…”

“…This control, in turn, will be interpreted by the organization's managers as a signal that the political principal prefers to keep important decisions in his/her own hands and opts to constrain the choices of the agent. Power exertion through structural reform may therefore create the perception that the agent lacks the autonomy to make important strategic choices and that its actions are mistrusted (Falk and Kosfeld ; Zito ). Thus, even if an organization receives a certain degree of formal strategic policy autonomy through its competences and (legal) insulation, the organization's senior management may experience a more constrained mandate through signals given by the principal's recurrent imposition of structural reforms.…”

“…178–79; Maggetti ; Groenleer , pp. 34–35; Egeberg and Trondal ; Yesilkagit ; Bach ; Van Thiel and Yesilkagit ; Maggetti and Verhoest ; Bach et al ; Zito ).…”

“…Furthermore, the influence of long‐term factors such as culture, age, learning, coalition‐building and institutionalization have increasingly been studied in the context of autonomy (Maggetti ; Zito ). However, a perspective that studies organizational histories of structural reforms and their influence on the perceptions of individual senior‐level managers remains lacking.…”

“…By testing the aforementioned propositions, we contribute to the dynamic and relational perspective of the study of organizational autonomy (see Maggetti and Verhoest ), a burgeoning section of the literature attempting to determine to what extent perceived autonomy is a function of an organization's experiences with political principals and other environmental actors during its lifetime (see also Carpenter ; Ossege ; Zito ). Moreover, the study complements existing work on de facto versus formal autonomy by zooming in on the senior manager perceptions.…”