The ‘Unknown Unknowns’: Brexit, the EUSS and the challenges of governing complexity

Brexit’s project of ‘re-bordering’ Britain impacted residency rights for EU nationals in the UK. Rather than focusing on how EU nationals experience the consequences of Brexit in the UK, this paper focuses on how the key policy instrument, the EUSS (EU Settlement Scheme) described as a complex system, ‘complexifies’ EU nationals’ regularisation of their residency status in the UK. Using qualitative interviews with frontline workers involved in the EUSS application process, we analyse this complexity across three dimensions. First, how digital governance enables the EUSS’s agile approach, based on a mobile and flexible norm that generates uncertainty and confusion. Second, how outsourcing responsibility to non-governmental organisations to assist EU nationals’ application to the scheme increases diversity in the availability for help and blurs accountability. Third, the uneven and never complete distribution of knowledge generates complexity as there remain ‘unknown unknowns’. Taken together, this paper adds to the literature on complex policy systems by scrutinising the role of digital governance and outsourcing, while highlighting how these two policy dimensions can further compound the availability of policy knowledge.