ABICAP

Key definitions

Administrative burdens:

• Administrative burdens are the factors that make people's experience of  policy implementation as onerous (Burden et al., 2012).

• They can take the form of learning, psychological, and compliance costs that people experience in their interactions with government (Moynihan, Herd, and Harvey 2015).

  • Learning costs arise from engaging in search processes to collect information about public services, and assessing how they are relevant to the individual.

  • Psychological costs include the stigma of participating in policies with negative perceptions, a sense of loss of autonomy when dealing with the state, or associated stresses.

  • Compliance costs are the burdens of following administrative rules and requirements, for example by completing forms or providing documentation.

Sludge:

• Excessive or unjustified frictions, such as paperwork burdens, that...

  • cost time or money;

  • may make life difficult to navigate;

  • may be frustrating, stigmatizing, or humiliating;

  • might end up depriving people of access to important goods, opportunities, and services.

• Because of behavioral biases and cognitive scarcity, sludge can have much more harmful effects than private and public institutions anticipate. (Sunstein, 2019)

Sludge.ie

We are undertaking a growing number of projects around sludge and administrative burdens, beyond ABICAP and environmental policy.

You can learn more about these projects, and find more resources, at sludge.ie.

Adminathon

Resources to come. The ABICAP adminathon will be based on the New South Wales Behavioural Insights Unit's Sludge-a-thons.

MSc student projects

Resources to come, based on MSc student projects on environmental policy and administrative burdens from the UCD MSc in Environmental Policy.

This project is funded under the EPA Research Programme 2021-2030. The EPA Research Programme is a Government of Ireland initiative funded by the Department of the Environment, Climate and Communications.

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