Jonathan C. KAMKHAJI, Policy learning and the Euro. The EU's responses to the sovereign debt crisis

Why do actors in the world of policy do what they do? This remains a quintessential question in public policy scholarship. It is intriguing not only for academics, but also for a public often puzzled by trying to understand the “why” and “how” of government action as well as inaction. Policy learning scholarship tries to answer this question by investigating why policy actors do what they do as a function of what and how they learn about policy issues. In this view of the world, learning is u..

Practicing policy learning during creeping crises: key principles and considerations from the COVID-19 crisis

AbstractPolicy learning plays a critical role in crisis policymaking. Adequate learning can lead to effective crisis responses, while misdirected learning can derail policymaking and lead to policy fiascos, potentially with devastating effects. However, creeping crises such as the recent COVID-19 pandemic pose significant challenges for doing “good” policy learning. Such crises pose persistent threats to societal values or life‐sustaining systems. They evolve across time and space while stirring significant political and societal tensions. Given their inherent features, they are often insufficiently addressed by policymakers. Taking the COVID-19 crisis as an illustrative example, this article aims to draw practitioners’ attention to key features of creeping crises and explains how such crises can undermine critical policy learning processes. It then discusses the need for “policy learning governance” as an approach to design, administer and manage crisis policy learning processes that are able to respond to continuous crisis evolutions. In doing so, it helps practitioners engage in adaptive and agile policy learning processes toward more effective learning by introducing four key principles of policy learning governance during creeping crises. Those are: identifying optimum learning modes and types, learning across disciplines, learning across space, and learning across time. Practical tools distilled from emerging research are then introduced to help apply the proposed principles of policy learning governance during future crises

Expanding the horizon of policy learning

Policy learning is an established conceptual and analytical framework to study the policy process. Its progress as a research agenda hinges on solid micro-foundations, its integration with other policy process theories, the consideration of both positive and negative cases (of learning and change) from diverse continents and countries, and the clarification of the causal pathways connecting individual learning to decisions and change. We sketch these problematic areas, showing where policy learning research has encountered problems, and illustrate how the articles of this special issue contribute to their solution

Policymaking in an age of polycrises: emerging perspectives

Policymaking has witnessed significant changes over the past decades, most of which stem from perturbations in the context where policy is made. These developments have emphasized considerable shortcomings of conventional approaches to both theories and practices of policymaking, whether in terms of policy design or analysis. Accordingly, several new theoretical approaches emerged to better understand the new reality of policymaking, including wickedness, turbulence and crises. While the crisis approach has become one of the strongest and fastest growing, research on crises rarely addresses the ever so pressing notion of “polycrises”, i.e. situations where crises intersect, overlap, and spill over into one another. This is despite polycrises becoming more frequent in scale, intense in magnitude and having significant influence on policymaking processes and outcomes. Sparing a handful of exceptions, the embryonic research on polycrises approaches the concept as a capacious semantic label, devoid of analytical utility, while policymakers use the term in a politicized manner that invokes urgency, without significant reflections on its implications for practice. This special collection contributes to the development of literature on polycrises by advancing its analytical utility as a promising lens to policy design, analysis and crisis governance, while illustrating its implications both for future research and practice

Assessing the effects of calculated inaction on national responses to the COVID-19 crisis

How does calculated inaction affect subsequent responses to the COVID-19 crisis? We argue that when governments employ calculated inaction during crises, they are more likely to manipulate the technical (scientific) aspects of national responses and highlight symbolic politics, each in the name of projecting power and strengthening the regime's governing authority. Using theoretical insight from McConnell and 't Hart's policy inaction typology, we investigate sense-making and crisis response narratives in China and Greece. We conclude with implications for policymaking and the crisis management literature