Ireland showcases the full spectrum of policy triage outcomes, driven by varied institutional setups and organizational cultures. Independent regulators at the central level—the Environmental Protection Agency and the Pensions Authority — manage their tasks with minimal triage. Their status as independent agencies limits blame-shifting, while formal accountability frameworks and political clout help secure resources. Moreover, both agencies foster strong organizational cultures that emphasize collaboration and flexibility, enhancing their ability to absorb additional workloads without undermining core functions. By contrast, the Department of Social Protection exhibits moderate triage frequencies, mostly occurring during sudden workload spikes or seasonal surges. Although the organization’s integrated policy formulation and implementation model shields it from excessive blame-shifting, centralized budgetary controls can hinder its resource mobilization efforts. The National Parks and Wildlife Service, however, grapples with severe, routine triage, largely due to chronic underfunding, weak structural ties to its parent department, and a fragmented internal culture in combination with an increasing implementation load. Finally, Irish City and County Councils also face frequent triage, contending with uncapped policy accumulation yet limited authority to negotiate additional support.

Portugal’s social and environmental sectors both exhibit pervasive and severe policy triage, driven by pronounced policy growth that no longer aligns with stagnating or shrinking administrative capacities. Despite the formal centralization of administrative responsibilities, environmental agencies across the board routinely prioritize urgent tasks while neglecting or delaying routine monitoring, inspections, and enforcement. Austerity measures have worsened chronic understaffing, leading to shortfalls in skilled personnel and aging workforces. Similar challenges plague social implementers, which struggle to fulfill core functions amid overwhelming caseloads and hamstrung resource mobilization. Efforts to mitigate overload such as overtime, inter-agency staff transfers, and basic workflow automation provide only limited relief. Moreover, policymakers frequently shift blame for implementation failures to budgetary constraints and the Ministry of Finance. As a result, Portugal’s public agencies are forced to engage in near-constant triage, with significant negative effects on timeliness and thoroughness of policy implementation.

This chapter examines how growing policy portfolios and administrative burdens affect environmental and social policy implementation in Denmark. Despite Denmark’s relatively modest overall policy growth, local environmental authorities face increasing overload, resorting to policy triage where tasks are postponed or selectively neglected. By contrast, central environmental agencies—the Danish Environmental Protection Agency, Nature Agency, and Energy Agency — experience similar expansions in policy tasks but display minimal triage due to greater resource mobilization opportunities and a strong sense of policy ownership. In social policy, national agencies likewise show no triage despite decentralized responsibilities for unemployment and welfare programs. Notably, municipal job centers also avoid triage despite rising task complexity, leveraging clear political attention, central–local consultation, and reimbursement schemes that encourage sufficient funding. Taken together, these findings underscore that policy expansion does not uniformly result in triage. Instead, blame-attribution structures, resource mobilization channels, and organizational commitment determine whether implementers can compensate for chronic overload.

Germany’s traditionally robust public administration faces escalating challenges as policy portfolios expand, complexities increase, and resource allocations lag behind. This chapter examines how federal, state, and local authorities in the environmental and social sector cope with growing implementation burdens. While Germany’s federal structure can foster high-quality governance, it also enables policymakers to shift blame across levels. Consequently, local offices and agencies with weaker political leverage are especially vulnerable to overload. In the environmental realm, tasks increasingly cascade downward, forcing local authorities — frequently short-staffed — to engage in trade-offs that compromise monitoring and enforcement. By contrast, higher level bodies like state ministries and offices can still manage most obligations, typically deferring only nonmandatory or long-term planning. The German social sector displays a slightly different scenario: The Federal Employment Agency demonstrates strong resilience, leveraging flexible resources and effective crisis management, whereas the Pension Insurance and some regional welfare agencies struggle with increasing task loads. Despite generally moderate instances of policy triage, critical support and preventive planning are often neglected, fueling organizational frustration and jeopardizing long-term governance capacity.

This chapter explores the pronounced divide in England’s environmental and social policy implementation, painting a highly diverse picture of policy triage across organizations. The Environment Agency, initially envisaged as an integrated “one-stop shop,” now exemplifies frequent and severe triage. Chronic underfunding, staff attrition, and politically induced blame-shifting in combination with ever-increasing workloads undermine its monitoring, enforcement, and crisis-preparedness functions. In contrast, most local authorities sustain only moderate triage levels, where increasing implementations tasks are mitigated by a broader range of financing avenues and political networks. In the social sector, the Department for Work and Pensions displays striking levels of triage despite minimal formal policy growth, as unrelenting welfare reforms, departmental downsizing, and inadequate cross-agency collaboration spur severe and frequent trade-offs. Meanwhile, The Pensions Regulator remains a near-anomaly, effectively managing regulatory expansion. The English case study thus underscores how variation in blame-shifting, opportunities for resource mobilization, and organizational overload compensation can yield a highly diverse triage scenario — even within a country.

Policy triage in Italy is widespread across both environmental and social policy, reflecting a sizable gap between ever-increasing legislative demands and stagnating or declining administrative capacity. Political incentives and unstable governing coalitions encourage policy overproduction, as politicians face negligible blame-shifting costs. Implementation bodies, on the other hand, have few avenues to mobilize resources. Austerity measures and rigid, centralized personnel controls leave many agencies chronically understaffed, while constitutional and administrative complexities create fragmented responsibilities and blurred accountability. Consequently, authorities at both national and subnational levels must constantly decide which tasks to handle superficially, defer, or in some cases disregard altogether. Nonetheless, the most severe failures are partially mitigated by strong internal efforts to absorb additional workload. Motivated staff often work overtime, team up to reassign tasks, and exploit external funding or outsourcing arrangements. Although these compensatory strategies keep disastrous implementation deficits contained so far, they come at the cost of quality, timeliness, and workforce morale. Overall, Italy’s case highlights how constrained resource mobilization and pervasive blame-shifting can promote frequent triage, while strong organizational commitment helps to avert total breakdowns in policy implementation.

This chapter outlines the empirical strategy for studying policy triage, which occurs when limited administrative resources and growing policy stocks force agencies to prioritize certain implementation tasks over others. To measure policy triage, the analysis distinguishes between triage frequency and intensity. These dimensions together provide a nuanced assessment of overall implementation performance. The chapter also details the theoretical predictors of policy triage: whether central policymakers can shift blame for failures, whether implementing agencies can mobilize external resources, and whether they are internally committed to achieving policy goals despite resource constraints. To test these claims, the research design focuses on two policy areas — environmental and social policy — across six countries representing diverse administrative traditions. Data collection involves secondary document analysis and 157 expert interviews with implementation officials. By systematically capturing both formal and informal organizational practices, this methodology reveals the complex trade-offs inherent in modern public administration and underscores how different political and organizational conditions jointly shape policy triage.

Centring on key state functions of protection and the promotion of the economic and social well-being of its citizens, the welfare state describes a range of functions related to state intervention aimed at reducing the risk of market failure, ensuring a decent living standard and a certain degree of equality and intergenerational distribution. The welfare state thus often plays a central role in relation to essential issues of people’s daily lives such as housing, employment, income security, health and education. Nevertheless, despite some initial explorations of the relevance of perspectives grounded in sustainability transitions for understanding processes of change and innovation in welfare states, the question of welfare remains a neglected area in transition studies and, until recently, in environmental studies more broadly. Yet the welfare state can both be used to enable and hardwire social protection into transitions to protect ‘stranded workers’ and also have a key role to play, and be heavily impacted by, the social costs and adjustments brought about by the disruptions and dislocations that transitions inevitably bring in their wake. The chapter concludes with a discussion of what ‘sustainable welfare’ might look like as part of a transformation of the welfare state.

Chapter 6 applies the preceding insights to the problem of inter-cultural and inter-group relations in contemporary societies struggling with multiculturalism. It considers policy implications associated with the integration or assimilation of migrants, that burden migrants with the prospect of learning the ways of life of their host societies. This is known as acculturation. The chapter proceeds to consider the debate between assimilationist or multicultural policy in terms of social capital theory. It makes a case for integration based on social capital terms, whilst noting the challenge this poses to locals concerned about the erosion of their ways of life as a result of accommodating diversity.