Negotiated compliance at the street level: Personalizing immunization in England, Israel and Sweden

Abstract

Often portrayed as behaviour that is inconsistent with policy goals, public noncompliance poses a significant challenge for government. To explore what compliance efforts entail on the ground, this study focuses on childhood immunization as a paradigmatic case where a failure to ensure compliance poses a public health risk. The analysis draws on 48 semi‐structured interviews with frontline nurses and regional/national public health officials in England (N = 15), Sweden (N = 17) and Israel (N = 16), all of which have experienced periodic noncompliance spikes, but differ in direct delivery of vaccination provision. Compliance efforts emerged as a joint decision‐making process in which improvisatory practices of personalized appeals are deployed to accommodate parents’ concerns, termed here ‘street‐level negotiation’. Whereas compliance is suggestive of compelling citizens’ adherence to standardized rules, compliance negotiation draws attention to the limited resources street‐level workers have when encountering noncompliance and to policy‐clients’ influence on delivery arrangements when holding discretionary power over whether or not to comply.

The importance of policy narrative: effective government responses to Covid-19

“…Second, effective management of policy narrative increases the likelihood that citizens will appropriately interpret the policy measures that are being taken and the actions that they can take to support those policy measures. This action by citizens is fundamental to supporting implementation (Gofen et al 2019;Weaver 2015). In the absence of clear narrative, messaging from political leaders can become ambiguous.…”

Street-Level Bureaucrats at the Forefront of Pandemic Response: A Comparative Perspective

“…Nevertheless, recent studies shift attention to clients' agency in direct-delivery interactions (e.g. Dubois 2010;Gofen et al 2014Gofen et al , 2019aJohannessen 2019;Peeters et al 2020). Furthermore, street-level theory acknowledges public demands for more and better services (Brodkin 2021).…”

Behavioural governance in the policy process: introduction to the special issue

“…In general, this research challenges top-down views of policymaking that posit a sharp distinction between politics and administration. Instead, it focuses on the attitudes and perceptions that members of the public administration hold toward public policies and their implementation (e.g., Brodkin, 2012;Gofen, 2014;Loyens, 2015;Thomann et al, 2018;Tummers, 2017); the interaction of policy implementers with target populations (Gofen et al, 2019;Moynihan et al, 2015) and specifically individual-level variation in motivations for, and 'styles' of implementing and enforcing public policies and ways of holding public servants accountable (Aleksovska et al, 2019;Baviskar & Winter, 2017;Brodkin, 2007;de Boer et al, 2018;Dörrenbächer, 2017;Hall et al, 2017); and not least, the role of biases and heuristics in street-level policy implementation and resulting inequities and inefficiencies (Cantarelli et al, 2020;Harrits, 2019;Moseley & Thomann, 2021).…”