Institutional geography: effects of physical distance on agency autonomy
| Published date | 01 March 2024 |
| DOI | http://doi.org/10.1177/00208523231164072 |
| Author | Dag Ingvar Jacobsen,Jarle Trondal |
| Date | 01 March 2024 |
Institutional geography:
effects of physical distance
on agency autonomy
Dag Ingvar Jacobsen
University of Agder, Norway
Jarle Trondal
University of Agder, Norway
University of Oslo, Norway
University of California, Berkeley, USA
Abstract
Establishing government agencies outside ministerial departments is frequently justified
by a need to safeguard agency autonomy. In addition to ‘formal agencification’, that is,
erecting formal barriers between agencies and ministries, agencies are also frequently
(re)located physically distant from ministries to both signal and strengthen agency auton-
omy. However, we know little of the effects of physical location and distance on agency
autonomy. Using two large surveys from 2006 and 2016, this study examines how geo-
graphical location and distance affect agency autonomy. Our study establishes that
agency autonomy is only weakly associated with physical location and distance, and is
much less important than political salience. Whereas a conventional claim is that agency
autonomy may be strengthened by physically (re)locating agencies at arm’s length dis-
tance from the core executive, our study suggests that physical (re)location represents
an ineffective administrative policy design-tool when applied to agency autonomy.
Points for practitioners
•Physical distance between agencies and parent ministries is only remotely associated
with agency autonomy.
Corresponding author:
Dag Ingvar Jacobsen, Department of Political Science and Management, Universityof Agder, P.O. Box 422, 4604
Kristiansand, Norway.
Email: dag.i.jacobsen@uia.no
Article
International
Review of
Administrative
Sciences
International Review of Administrative
Sciences
2024, Vol. 90(1) 203–219
© The Author(s) 2023
Article reuse guidelines:
sagepub.com/journals-permissions
DOI: 10.1177/00208523231164072
journals.sagepub.com/home/ras
•Physical location thus represents an ineffective design-tool if the purpose is to increase
agency autonomy
Keywords
agency autonomy, geographical location, Norway, physical proximity
Introduction
A generic puzzle in public policy and administration (PPA) is the relations between min-
isterial departments and semi-detached agencies (Verhoest et al., 2012). During the last
couple of decades, we have witnessed a transfer of government activities to agency-like
organizations semi-detached from ministerial departments, labelled ‘agencification’.
Governments have established agencies at arm’s length from ministerial departments
to handle regulatory and administrative problems both at the national (James and van
Thiel, 2011; Pollitt et al., 2004; Verhoest et al., 2004) and international level (Egeberg
and Trondal, 2017). Decades of agencification have attracted considerable scholarly
attention, accompanying a rapidly growing literature on agency histories, reform experi-
ences, and the effects of agencification. In this research, a recurrent theme has been
agency autonomy (Bach et al., 2020; Christensen and Lægreid, 2006; Egeberg and
Trondal, 2009, 2017; Maggetti, 2012; Maggetti and Verhoest, 2014; Lægreid and
Verhoest, 2010; Pollitt and Bouckaert, 2004; Pollitt et al., 2004; Verhoest et al., 2010).
Still, a noticeable void persists in this literature, which pertains to the general lack of
studies of the spatial dimension of agencification. Although an old topic of administrative
science (e.g., Gulick, 1937), the effects of agency location and distance from ‘mother
ministries’is surprisingly overlooked by PPA scholarship (see Vogel and Hattke
(2022) for a systematic review). The absence of the spatial dimension in the literature
on the effects of agencification is puzzling for two reasons. The first is, because agenci-
fication is frequently directly associated with processes of geographical relocation, that is,
moving agencies physically from the capital where government ministries reside, towards
peripheral cities. Arguments for relocating have been to reduce corrupt behavior by
increasing social distances between principals and actors, to smooth regional inequality
by moving high competence jobs outside the capital, to reduce budgets by moving civil
servants to less costly locations, and to unclog the larger cities through decreasing com-
muting to the center of the capital (Economist, 2019; Jeon and Lee, 2021, Faggio, 2019;
Marshall et al., 2005; Wang and Liu, 2022). Geographical location and relocation of govern-
ment institutions also tend to mobilize more attention and resistance from stakeholders than,
for example, (re)organizing such institutions (Meyer and Stensaker, 2009). Intense protest
from employees seeing their jobs moved to another geographical area, in alliance with local
politicians fighting against moving jobs out of the municipality and county, are recurrent.
Second, practitioners often justify contested agency relocations by claiming that phys-
ical distance would underpin the autonomy of agencies from their ministerial departments.
For instance, when the Norwegian government decided to move several government agencies
204 International Review of Administrative Sciences 90(1)
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