P33 Beyond Regulatory Burden: Managing Standards Overload for Sustainable Public Administration
Panel Members & Contact Details
Salvatore Cincimino, Associate Professor of Business Administration, Università degli Studi di Palermo - ITALY. Email: salvatore.cincimino@unipa.it
Salvatore Tomaselli, Associate Professor of Business Administration, Università degli Studi di Palermo - ITALY. Email: salvatore.tomaselli@unipa.it
Summary
This panel explores the growing challenge of regulatory, and standards overload in public administration, where excessive rules, reporting requirements, and accountability expectations undermine organizational effectiveness. It examines three interconnected dimensions—standards, statement, and accountability overload—investigating their root causes, differential impacts across organizational types, and consequences for performance, innovation, and employee wellbeing. The panel welcomes theoretical, empirical, and comparative contributions from diverse disciplinary perspectives and national contexts, particularly those developing diagnostic frameworks, presenting cross-national comparisons, or proposing innovative governance solutions that balance accountability demands with operational agility.
Description
The concept of regulatory and standards overload has emerged as a critical challenge for public administration globally. Originally conceptualized in the accounting field as “accounting standards overload” (Beerbaum, 2016) affecting small enterprises (Brusca et al., 2015; Bergmann et al., 2019), this phenomenon has expanded into a broader public management concern. The panel proposes to examine how the proliferation of regulations, standards, and reporting requirements creates a “normative overload” that significantly impacts public organizations worldwide.
This normative overload manifests through three interconnected dimensions that warrant scholarly examination. First, standards overload refers to the proliferation and layering of regulations, accounting principles, and compliance requirements that public entities must navigate. Second, statement overload describes the consequent multiplication of plans, reports, and disclosure obligations that burden organizations with excessive documentation requirements. Third, accountability overload emerges when multiple, sometimes conflicting accountability demands create what Koppell (2005) termed “multiple accountabilities disorder”, hampering effective decision-making and performance and creating what describe as overload conditions that undermine organizational effectiveness.
The panel will investigate the causes and consequences of regulatory burden across diverse institutional contexts. Research has demonstrated that excessive regulations generate disproportionate compliance costs, organizational rigidity, efficiency losses, and innovation barriers (Pandey & Scott, 2002; Moynihan et al., 2015). Moreover, beyond a certain threshold, regulatory complexity may produce counterintuitive effects reducing transparency rather than enhancing it and creating decision-making paralysis rather than accountability as evidenced in Bozeman’s multidimensional theory of Government “Red Tape) (Bozeman, 1993; Bozeman, 2012).
The panel aims to address four critical research questions:
- Causes of Regulatory Proliferation: What political, institutional, and cultural factors drive the accumulation of laws, regulations, and standards in public administration systems across different countries and governance levels? How do mechanisms of policy diffusion (Levi-Faur & Jordana, 2005) and also Europeanization (Knill, 2001) contribute to regulatory accumulation in public administration?
- Differential Impact Analysis: How does normative overload affect organizations of different sizes, sectors, and institutional capacities? How can we operationalize and measure the relationship between regulatory complexity and organizational sustainability? What metrics can capture the disproportionate burden on smaller entities?
- Performance and Innovation Implications: In what ways does standards overload impact public sector performance, employee wellbeing, and capacity for innovation? What is the relationship between red tape and regulatory burden? How does normative overload affect public servant burnout (Giauque et al., 2012) and innovation capacity (Agolla & Van Lill, 2016)?
- Governance Strategies and Solutions: What approaches–including better regulation initiatives, digital technologies, proportional standards, and sunset clauses–have proven effective in managing regulatory complexity without compromising accountability? What lessons can be learned from RegTech applications (Butler, 2017) and regulatory offsetting mechanisms (Steinebach et al., 2024)?
The panel welcomes theoretical, empirical, and comparative contributions from diverse disciplinary perspectives (public management, accounting, administrative law, public policy) and various national contexts. We particularly encourage papers that develop diagnostic frameworks for assessing regulatory burden, present international comparisons of regulatory simplification strategies, analyse the behavioural and organisational consequences of normative overload, or propose innovative governance models that balance control needs with operational flexibility.
By bringing together these diverse perspectives, the panel will contribute to advancing both theoretical understanding and practical solutions to a challenge that affects public administrations worldwide, addressing the crucial balance between accountability demands and the operational capacity required for effective public service delivery.
Relevance
This panel directly engages with all three pillars of the IRSPM 2026 theme “Beyond Boundaries: Wellbeing, Innovation and the Future of Public Management” by examining a systemic challenge that transcends traditional boundaries of discipline, geography, and governance level.
Regarding wellbeing, the panel investigates how regulatory overload affects public sector employees’ cognitive load, stress levels, and professional satisfaction. Research by Halachmi (2014) demonstrates that excessive administrative burdens negatively impact motivation and decision-making quality (Fang & Zhang, 2025) – factors increasingly recognized as critical for sustainable public administration. Recent studies provide compelling evidence that red tape and accountability pressures significantly contribute to job burnout among public servants (Kim & Stoner, 2008; Bozeman & Feeney, 2011).
Concerning innovation, the panel examines how regulatory complexity can function as a primary barrier to administrative creativity and efficiency. When compliance demands consume disproportionate resources, public organizations struggle to invest in service improvements and transformative innovations. The panel will explore how more agile regulatory approaches might create space for experimentation and renewal in public service delivery. Cross-sectoral research by Cinar et al. (2019) reveals how organizational barriers, including regulatory complexity, systematically impede different phases of the innovation process in public organizations, with standards overload particularly affecting the implementation of novel solutions.
For the future of public management, the panel questions the sustainability of current regulatory models and investigates frameworks better suited to complex, rapidly-changing environments. As Grassi & Lanfranchi (2022) argue, emerging technologies like RegTech and AI offer promising avenues for managing regulatory complexity, but also present new governance challenges. The theoretical framework advanced by Arner et al. (2016) on the reconceptualization of financial regulation and their comprehensive analysis of regulatory technologies (RegTech) provide fundamental conceptual models for balancing innovation with appropriate oversight in the digital governance era.
The panel exemplifies “beyond boundaries” thinking through its interdisciplinary approach, connecting public accounting, management, administrative law, and policy perspectives. It transcends geographical boundaries by examining regulatory phenomena across diverse institutional contexts, facilitating comparative learning. The comparative work of Fernández -I-Marín et al. (2021) on policy design quality across OECD countries offers methodological insights for analyzing regulatory complexity across different administrative traditions. Most importantly, it addresses a fundamental tension in public management–balancing accountability with operational effectiveness–that will shape the field’s future trajectory.