Abstract
This qualitative case study is part of the international research project ESCaPE (Evaluating Scientific Advice in a Pandemic Emergency) and aims at understanding how expert advice has been sought, produced and utilized in the management of the Covid-19 emergency in Italy in 2020. Italy was the first country after China having to face the devastating effects of the Covid-19 soon to be pandemic. The state of national emergency was declared on January 31st, 2020, and the Italian Government sought expert advice as an important resource in the management of the pandemic. The Covid-19 crisis in Italy witnessed the emergence of different expert advisory groups: some envisaged by the law; some instituted ad hoc and tasked to deal with specific aspects of the emergency; and others that were already in place before the pandemic but that came to play a crucial role during the unfolding of the outbreak. This case study relies on a mix of both primary (stakeholder interviews) and secondary data collection (official documents and communications by expert advisory bodies, ministerial decrees, and policy documents). Our research shows three main findings: (a) the near-complete overlap of technical advice and political response in the first phase of the pandemic in Spring 2020, with a key policy role played by the advice provided by the Technical and Scientific Committee (CTS); (b) a predominance of epidemiologists and infectious disease specialists over social scientists in the mobilisation of experts for the management of the crisis in Italy; (c) a shift in containment policies from an emergency-based, very strict, national lockdown in the spring of 2020, to proactive risk-informed colour-coded regional restrictions in the fall and winter of 2020. Our case study ends at the end of 2020 and provides an overview and encompassing representation of the mobilization of experts, and of selected types of evidence, to manage the unprecedented health emergency, in year 1 of the Covid-19 pandemic in Italy. Our findings suggest that expert politics can lead to the confirmation of knowledge hierarchies that privilege hard sciences, and corroborate prior literature indicating that economic and social expertize has not been well integrated into public health expert advice, constituting a major challenge for policymaking during a health emergency.
Highlights
The Covid-19 pandemic provides an unparalleled opportunity to observe and evaluate how scientific advice is sought by policymakers, translated in policy measures, and accepted by the public, in a highly scrutinized situation of global emergency. This qualitative study is part of the international research project ESCaPE (Evaluating Scientific Advice in a Pandemic Emergency) and aims to evaluate the role played by expert advisory bodies during the Covid-19 outbreak in Italy in 2020, and to understand how expert advice has been sought, produced, and utilized in the design and implementation of Covid-19 containment measures in Italy in in 2020
The secondary data collection relied on official documents and communications by expert advisory bodies, ministerial decrees and governmental documents
The qualitative data resulting from the semi-structured interviews was analyzed through an abductive approach via thematic analysis, allowing us to combine theory-derived deductive categories with themes emerging from the data (Angeli et al, 2020; Timmermans and Tavory, 2012). Analysis of both primary and secondary data followed a protocol shared among all 19 case studies of the overarching EScAPE project, aimed at identifying common themes, similarities and differences across the countries involved in the project
Summary
The Covid-19 pandemic provides an unparalleled opportunity to observe and evaluate how scientific advice is sought by policymakers, translated in policy measures, and accepted by the public, in a highly scrutinized situation of global emergency. Technocratic governments are by many considered anti-democratic, as they replace direct elections and, in the case of the Italian political system, the Prime Minister is nominated by the President of the Republic not on the basis of the results of the elections. As such, these governments are known to be short-lived with quickly eroding public trust and political consensus. The President of the Republic is the guarantee of the Italian Constitution, does not participate directly in the executive, legislative, judicial branches of power, but nominates the Prime Minister, generally - not always, as noted below - on the basis of the results of the elections
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