Johanna Kuenzler

This article investigates how organizational structure, collaboration, and professional standards influence the resilience of public agencies facing adversity. It links organizational reputation and blame avoidance literature with resilience and collaboration literature. We use the case of the Swiss Child and Adult Protection Agencies (CAPA), which faced massive media attacks. We apply a qualitative research design analyzing data from interviews and participatory observations. Our findings show that professional organizational structure, collaboration and standards are three interrelated factors that increase resilience against adversity. In particular, these factors reduce “blame‐avoiding policy implementation” (BAPI), which is a coping strategy where street‐level bureaucrats (SLB) exploit their discretion to make policy implementation less blameworthy. In their interplay, professional organizational structure, collaboration and standards increase the knowledge of a public agency about a particular situation because they enable better‐informed decisions through collective deliberation practices, and strengthens the collective ownership as well as the individual SLB's confidence that the right decision is being made.

This article introduces the distinction between substance (questions of policy design) and process (questions of power in the policy process) to the Narrative Policy Framework (NPF). While both occur in existing NPF research, so far, they are not separated analytically. We conceptualize them as categories of the “policy dimension,” a new aspect of narrative content. Applying this dimension to an exploratory case, we show that such an analysis leads to useful insights for NPF scholars. Substance policy narrative elements show a debate about a policy's implementation model, whereas process policy narrative elements reveal that this debate is permeated by power conflicts. Furthermore, we find that the two categories' occurrence in narratives is influenced by the debate venue, whereas political parties as narrators do not seem to be relevant. The policy dimension allows for new research avenues and provides practitioners with a new tool to understand and intervene in policy debates.