Reducing Administrative Burdens: Strategies, Stakeholders, and Impact

Submit your paper here

Introduction

Over the past years, administrative burdens have developed into an ambitious and vivid research field within public administration studies. Building on the original definition provided by Burden et al. (2012), studies have focused on the learning, compliance, and psychological costs that cause citizen-state interactions to be perceived as onerous and cumbersome by the citizens (Moynihan et al. 2015; Herd & Moynihan 2019). This change of focus to citizens has inspired numerous scholars to delve into the sources, nature, and consequences of these burdens (Halling & Baekgaard, 2024). They show how burdens are universal but disproportionally affect vulnerable groups of society (Chudnovsky & Peeters, 2021; Assouline et al., 2022). Thus, they pose a substantial threat to the equity of administrative systems, especially, but not exclusively, and welfare systems.

More recently, scholars have started investigating various strategies to reduce burdens or mitigate their impact (Benish et al. 2024), ranging from attempts to foster citizens’ personal resources (Döring 2021; Masood & Nisar 2021), for example via the use of intermediaries, such as private companies and NGOs (Peeters & Campos, 2021; Benish et al., 2024; Tiggelaar & George, 2025) to design and communication adjustments by public organizations and their employees (Moynihan et al. 2022; Baekgaard et al. 2025). In fact, the role of public employees, for example street-level bureaucrats, is crucial in terms of communicating, creating, and mitigating administrative burdens during public service encounters (Bell & Smith 2022; Boswell & Smedley, 2023; Mikkelsen et al. 2024; Döring et al. 2025), especially in the context of increasingly digitalized services (Kirjavainen & Jalonen 2025; Lindgren et al. 2019). This is not least because administrative burdens can be caused by how public administration is organized and by administrative processes established by public organizations (Herd & Moynihan, 2019; Peeters, 2020).

However, studies of these interventions - and their interplay - remain scarce. What can public organizations, public managers, and street-level bureaucrats do to support citizens in their encounters with the state? How can they reduce the burdens they impose? Which initiatives are effective, and why? Are initiatives universally effective or favour certain groups of society? Are burden-reduction initiatives and external responses to burdens embraced by public organizations, or are they sometimes perceived as illegitimate disobedience?

The present Special Issue (SI) aims to address these themes and present studies of burden-reduction initiatives (broadly defined) undertaken by various actors, using a range of empirical cases and contexts, as well as diverse theoretical approaches. We welcome contributions from around the world that scrutinize burden-reduction interventions at all levels, and we are also open to papers that go beyond the suggested themes listed below. The SI seeks to generate societal impact through its relevance to all actors working to reduce administrative burdens.

List of Topic Areas

• Digital initiatives to reduce burdens, including algorithms, automation, and AI
• How burden-reduction initiatives are initiated and defined - and by whom
• Initiatives aimed at preventing administrative limbo (Kleizen et al. 2025) or repeated referrals
• How do different public organizations react to and enact burden reduction strategies across policy sectors?
• How do street-level bureaucrats perceive, avoid, or create burden reduction strategies?
• How do different types of intermediaries (private companies vs. NGOs vs. public intermediaries) support citizens in their attempt to overcome burdens?
• The relationship between burden-reduction interventions and social inequalities
• What is the relationship between leadership and the responsiveness to burden reduction strategies?
• The interplay between bureaucratization and administrative processes in producing burdens
• How do administrative reforms affect administrative burden?
• Which role do burden reduction strategies play in the political debate? Is there a connection to political action?
• The materiality of burden reduction, administrative burdens, and responses.

Guest Editors 

If you have any questions regarding the special issue, feel free to contact the guest editors:

Matthias Döring, University of Southern Denmark, Denmark, mdoering@sam.sdu.dk

Ayesha Masood, Lahore University of Management Sciences, Pakistan, ayesha.masood@lums.edu.pk

Johan Sandén, Södertörn University, Sweden, johan.sanden@sh.se

Submissions Information

Submissions are made using ScholarOne Manuscripts. Author guidelines must be strictly followed.

Submit via ScholarOne

Author Guidelines

Authors should select (from the drop-down menu) the special issue title at the appropriate step in the submission process, i.e. in response to “Please select the issue you are submitting to”. 

Submitted articles must not have been previously published, nor should they be under consideration for publication anywhere else, while under review for this journal.

Key Deadlines

Opening date for manuscripts submissions: 31st October 2026

Closing date for manuscripts submission: 28th February 2027