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

Abstract

Policy 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.