LIST OF WORKSHOPS

In recent years, various governments have confronted a multitude of complex, elusive and intertwining crises (COVID-19, the war in Ukraine, financial crises, migration crises and the dramatic effects of climate change); at the same time, a multitude of exceptional public policy responses have been put into place (e.g. lockdowns, increasing debt, etc.). These crises seem to have been a persistent dimension of politics and policy-making in our time and have led to an observation that we live under the risk of poly-crises (Morin and Kern, 1993) and in structurally turbulent times (Ansell et al., 2017; Denford et al., 2022). However, it is interesting that even though the concept of ‘crisis’ has been used for a long time and has been the object of huge scholarly attention, it continues to be conceptually undeveloped, especially with respect to the politics and policy dimensions of policy making.

Despite the significant amount of literature on this concept, both in the social sciences and in the humanities, the definition of ‘crisis’ is still challenging, and it risks being a catch-all word[1]. It is not the case that many highly reputable scholars have underlined this conceptual problem. Edgar Morin (Morin 1976)) explained that ‘this notion, [which] as it has become generalized, has been emptied of its meaning’, while Colin Hay underlined that crisis ‘is one of the most underdeveloped concepts in state theory’, calling it a ubiquitous term that is characterised by its ‘notorious imprecision’ (1999, p .317). Allan McConnell (2020) claimed that ‘crisis is an “umbrella,” under which resides a multitude of terms such as accidents, emergencies, fiascos, disasters and catastrophes, as well as variations such as natural disasters, transboundary crises, and mega-crises’. Paul Ricoeur (1988) noted that ‘the concept of crisis is a “suitcase” concept’.

In policy studies, the concept  of ‘crisis’ has also largely been observed from different perspectives (Maor, 2020). The initial classical approach involves grasping ‘crisis’ as an ‘exceptional’, ‘unusual’ or ‘focusing’ event that perturbates the mediatic and governmental agenda (Resodihardjo, 2021; Kuipers & Welsh, 2017) and that can open the doors to various political and policy effects. All in all, there is a lack of a conceptualisation of crises in this policy perspective; crises are usually treated as drivers of effects in the policy process (and thus on the related policy outputs) and as a potential activator of various types of change (Kingdon, 1984; Baumgartner & Jones, 1993), or potentially critical junctures (Capoccia & Kelemen 2007). Furthermore, even in streams of public policy literature that have focused on policy design (Peters & Fontaine, 2022; Howlett & Mukherjee, 2018) or on governance and/or policy capacities (Howlett & Ramesh, 2016; Wu et al., 2018), crises are never specifically focused on. Only recently have a few attempts to read crises from a policy perspective been proposed that focus on robust design against crises (Ansell et al., 2021; Capano & Toth, 2023; Howlett & Ramesh, 2023) or on the different effects of crises over time (Capano et al., 2022).

The second perspective focuses more specifically on the definitional dimension of crisis as for the problem definition to understand how politicians and policy makers name it and define crisis as ‘social construction’ ( Boin and 't Hart, P. 2003; Spector 2022; Boin at al. 2005, 2021)). For example, McConnell explained that ‘the sheer diversity and frequent ambiguity among terms reflects the ‘politics’ of how societies and political actors seek to cope with and address extreme events, which often pose a mixture of threat and opportunity’ (McConnell 2020). All in all, from this perspective, crises are not only events that need to be objectively treated for recovery—they can create opportunities for political and policy change according to how they are framed and capitalised on by policy-makers. Scholars of crisis management have clarified this point well: ‘As underlined in crisis management studies: “crisis opens up semantic and political space for actors to redefine issues, propose new policies, foster public reflection, or simply to gain popularity and strike at opponents. Typically, such opportunism rides on the wave of crisis-induced processes of accountability and learning.” (Boin et al. 2008, 284).

Beyond the debates between the different approaches to public policy, it is clear that these approaches have two points in common. First, they generally consider a ‘crisis’ as an external event that disrupts the policy process. Second, most policy scholars, despite their belonging to either a constructivist or a positivist epistemology, are all fascinated by the double dimension of crises: crises are ‘objective’ because they are linked to real facts and events,  but crises are also  ‘subjective’ because what they depend on how they are framed according to existing political and policy dynamics and to the socio-cultural characteristics of the contexts in which crises occur (Hofstede, 2001; Douglas & Wildavsky 2010; Voltolini et al., 2020).

In this workshop, instead of exploring crisis and policy processes separately, we would like to shed light on new perspectives through the complex dialectic between crises and political/policy dynamics by focusing on the way in which crises are defined or re-defined by policy-makers as they formulate their proposal, define their role, claim their legitimacy and show effectiveness in their policy.

Thus, we would like to deepen the link between how policy-makers try to shape the meaning of crises and how they design their policies as responses to these crises. For example, ‘crisis’ can interestingly be observed as an epistemic challenge to the classical capacity of a state to define and tame public problems —thus pushing policy makers to criticise their previous framing—or as a decisional challenge that involves the policy makers’ capacity to govern society.

References

Ansell, C. K., Trondal, J., & Øgård, M. (2017). Governance in turbulent times. Oxford University Press.

Ansell, C., Sørensen, E., & Torfing, J. (2021). The COVID-19 pandemic as a game changer for public administration and leadership? The need for robust governance responses to turbulent problems. Public Management Review, 23(7), 949–960.

Baumgartner, F. R., and B. D. Jones. 1993. Agendas and Instability in American Politics. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.

Boin, A., & ‘t Hart, P. (2003). Public leadership in times of crisis: mission impossible?. Public Administration Review, 63(5), 544-553.

Boin, A., McConnell, A., & ‘t Hart, P. (2008). Conclusions: the politics of crisis exploitation. In:    A.  Boin, A. McConnell, and P. ‘t Hart (eds.), Governing After Crisis, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, pp. 285-316.

Boin, A., McConnell, A., & ‘t Hart, P. (2021). Governing the pandemic: The politics of navigating a mega-crisis. Basingstoke, Palgrave Macmillan.

Boin, A., Stern, E., & Sundelius, B. (2005). The Politics of Crisis Management: Public Leadership under Pressure. Cambridge, Cambridge University Press.

Capano, G., & Toth, F. (2023). Thinking outside the box, improvisation, and fast learning: designing policy robustness to deal with what cannot be foreseen. Public Administration, 101(1), 90-105.

Capano, G., Howlett, M., Jarvis, D. S. L., & Ramesh, M. (2022). Long-term policy impacts of the coronavirus: Normalization, adaptation, and acceleration in the post-COVID state. Policy and Society, 41(1), 1–12.

Capoccia, G., & Keleman, D. (2007). The study of critical junctures: Theory, narrative and counterfactuals in historical institutionalism. World Politics, 59, 341-69.

Denford, J. S., Dawson, G. S., Desouza, K. C., & Manoharan, A. P. (2022). Assessing the relevance of governmental characteristics to address wicked problems in turbulent times. Public Management Review, 1–22. Early view 25 September.

Douglas, M. and Wildavsky, A. (1983). Risk and Culture. Berkely: University of California Press.

Hay, C. (1999). Crisis and the structural transformation of the state: interrogating the process of change. The British Journal of Politics & International Relations, 1: 317-344

Hofstede, G. (2001). Culture’s Consequences: Comparing Values, Behaviors, Institutions and Organizations Across Nations, 2nd ed., Sage, Thousand Oaks, CA.

Howlett, M., & Ramesh, M. (2016). Achilles’ heels of governance: Critical capacity deficits and their role in governance failures: The Achilles heel of governance. Regulation & Governance, 10(4), 301–313.

Howlett, M. and, Mukherjee, I. (eds.) (2018). Routledge Handbook of Policy Design. London: Routledge

Howlett, M., & Ramesh, M. (2023). Designing for adaptation: Static and dynamic robustness in policy-making. Public Administration, 101( 1), 23– 35.

Kingdon, J. W. (1984)). Agenda, Alternatives and Public Policies. Glenview Ill: Scott Foresman and Co.

Morin, E., and Kern, A. (1993). Terre-Patrie. Paris. Le Seuil.

Peters, G., and Fontaine, G. (eds). (2022). Research Handbook of Policy Design. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar.

Voltolini, B., Natorski, M., & Hay, C. (2020). Introduction: The politicization of permanent crisis in Europe. Journal of European Integration, 42(5), 609–624.

Wu, X., Howlett, M., & Ramesh, M. (eds). (2018). Policy Capacity and Governance: Assessing Governmental Competences and Capabilities in Theory and Practice. Springer International Publishing.

Kuipers, Sanneke, et Nicholas H. Welsh. 2017. « Taxonomy of the crisis and disaster literature: Themes and types in 34 years of research ». Risk, Hazards & Crisis in Public Policy 8 (4): 272‑83.

Maor, Moshe. 2020. « A Disproportionate Policy Perspective on the Politics of Crisis Management ». In Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Politics. https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190228637.013.1513.

McConnell, Allan. 2020. « The Politics of Crisis Terminology ». In Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Politics. https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190228637.013.1590.

Morin, Edgar. 1976. « Pour une crisologie ». Communications 25 (1): 149‑63. https://doi.org/10.3406/comm.1976.1388.

Resodihardjo, Sandra L. 2021. « The Agenda-Setting Process and Crises: Toward a Conceptual Framework ». In Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Politics. https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190228637.013.1594.

Ricoeur, Paul. 1988. « La crise, un phénomène spécifiquement moderne ? » , Revue de théologie et de Philosophie, vol. 120 (1), 1-19

Spector, Bert. 2022. « Constructivist Perspectives in Crisis Studies ». In Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Politics. https://doi.org/10.1093/acrefore/9780190228637.013.2036.

[1] For example, the last Oxford Encyclopedia of Management Crisis (2021) proposed more than 100 chapters on this topic

We would like to discuss different types of dynamics of ‘governing crises’ and how the definition of crises is not separable from the political definition of how to govern. Thus, we would like to focus on the political and policy dynamics dialectic as follows:

1.     How policy-makers govern in a crisis. Ship captains navigate through a storm and have to decide if the storm will incur either dramatic or insignificant damage to their ship, and thus they have to interpret the storm and decide how to govern the ship. Captains must factor in the weather and eventually make the decision to either wait for the storm to pass or adopt a more proactive strategy. The same applies to policy-makers when they perceive a crisis as a temporary event. In this case, they will govern the crisis according to two strategies:

-       If they think that the crisis effects will be not relevant, they adopt the usual frameworks of understanding and thus interpret the crisis as a normal event that can be dealt with without having to make any new decisions or policy instruments in particular. They wait until the storm passes, relying on the usual public policies to absorb the shock of the crisis.

-       If they think that the crisis will result in serious socio-political and policy damage, they will define the crisis according to a new cognitive framework and will thus design new measures to combat it.

2.     How policy-makers govern by crisis. This occurs when the crisis is defined as a more structural phenomenon and a test of legitimacy issue that structures responses in the form of reforms and projects shaping a new future. The crisis becomes an opportunity for those in power. As Rham Emanuel, a former mayor of Chicago, said, ‘You never want a serious crisis to go to waste. And what I mean by that is an opportunity to do things you could not do before’. Thus, the crisis becomes an event that can accelerate existing but still undeveloped or minoritarian policy frameworks or allow the introduction of new policy solutions.

We welcome papers on both the theoretical and empirical sides of the discussion.

From the theoretical side, we would like to receive papers’ proposals that focus on the following:

1.     Defining crises in terms of related political and policy dynamics.

2.     Clarifying the different dimensions between crises and policy makers’ reactions in terms of framing and goals.

3.     Reviewing the literature in social sciences and crisis management to find possible common definitions and concepts for analysing the government of crises.

From the empirical side, we would like to receive papers’ proposals that focus on the following:

3.   Analyses of the political and policy dynamics of specific crises.

4.   The ways in which policy makers choose to frame crises and accordingly design policies.

5.   The ideational and contextual drivers of the politics of governing crises.

6.   The processes through which crises activates critical junctures and the subsequent political and policy outcomes.

In this workshop, instead of exploring crisis and policy processes separately, we would like to shed light on new perspectives through the complex dialectic between crises and political/policy dynamics by focusing on the way in which crises are defined or re-defined by policy-makers as they formulate their proposal, define their role, claim their legitimacy and prove the effectiveness of their policy.

Thus, we would like to deepen the link between how policy-makers try to shape the meaning of crises and how they design their policies as responses to these crises. We hold that policy-makers can either govern the crisis in different ways and according to different frames, or they can govern by the crisis, by using critical events as opportunities for innovating not only policies but also the political dynamics. Therefore, this workshop calls for the contributions of not only policy scholars but also of political scientists, and experts in crisis management to bridge these scientific fields and increase our comprehension of the political and policy sides of crises in the contemporary world.

Giliberto Capano is Professor of Political Science and Public Policy at the University of Bologna, Italy. He specializes in public administration, public policy analysis, comparative higher education, and policy design. He is one of the editors of Policy and Society.  His research focuses on governance dynamics and performance in higher education and education, policy design and policy change, policy instruments’ impact, the social role of political science, the policy impact of Covid-19, and leadership as an embedded function of policy making. His recent books are: A modern Guide to Public Policy (coedited with M. Howlett, Edward Elgar,  2020); Convergence and Diversity in the Governance of Higher Education (co-edited with D. Jarvis, Cambridge University Press, 2020); Trajectories of Governance. How States Shaped Policy Sectors in the Neoliberal Age. (with JA. Zito, J. Rayner and F. Toth, Palgrave-Macmillan, 2022); The Fate of Political Scientists in Europe. From Myth to Action (with L. Verzichelli Palgrave-MacMillan 2023)

Philippe Zittoun is Research Professor of Political science at LAET-ENTPE, University of Lyon, and general secretary of IPPA. He specializes in understanding policy processes and policy-making by developing a constructivist and pragmatist approach. He draws a specific attention to the political and conflictual dimension of the policy process, and the role of knowledge and meaning through the policymakers’ discursive practices in action and in interaction. He is one of the co-editors of the International Review of Public Policy and a member of the scientific committee of a number of Journals. His recent books: Handbook of Teaching Public Policy (coedited with Emily St Denis, Elgar, 2024), The politics of meaning struggles (with Sebastien Chailleux, 2022 Elgar), The Political Formulation of Policy Solutions, arguments, arenas, coalitions (co-edited with Frank Fischer, Nikolaos Zahariadis, 2022, Bristol UP), L’Etat sous Pression (with Sebastien Chailleux, 2021, Presses de Sciences Po).