Streaming Framework Research Articles

Factors influencing the prioritisation of access to medicines in trade‐related intellectual property policymaking in Thailand

AbstractThailand is facing ongoing trade‐related challenges that threaten access to an affordable and sustainable supply of medicines. Despite Thailand's history of balancing trade pressures and public health priorities, little is known about the factors that enable or constrain a focus on access to medicines in trade‐related intellectual property (IP) decision making. Using document analysis and qualitative interviews, and drawing on Kingdon's Multiple Streams Framework, this qualitative study examines the factors that have enabled or constrained Thailand from focusing on access to medicines in three case studies of trade‐related IP policy: Thailand's patent law and its amendments; its issuance of compulsory licences; and its decision‐making about TRIPS‐plus trade agreements including potential membership of the Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans‐Pacific Partnership. The degree to which access to medicines has been prioritised in Thailand's trade‐related IP policymaking has varied across different types of policymaking and over time. Integral to its successes has been the involvement of the Ministry of Health and sustained advocacy by access to medicines coalitions which exert political pressure, generate evidence, and provide technical assistance to support evidence‐based policy reform. In addition, Thailand's compulsory licencing was made possible by a policy entrepreneur with the motivation and authority to implement policy change. Constraints to Thailand's focus on access to medicines have included its trade dependence on the United States (US), ongoing US trade pressure to implement TRIPS‐plus measures, and intense lobbying from Pharmaceutical Research and Manufacturers of America, the organisation representing US‐based major pharmaceutical companies, to increase IP protection for pharmaceuticals in Thailand. Through the use of Kingdon's framework, this study's focus on three different types of trade‐related IP policymaking has provided a detailed picture of the factors that have influenced the prioritisation of access to medicines and how these have played out in Thailand. Thailand's mixed history with regard to the prioritisation of access to medicines could provide lessons for other low‐ and middle‐income countries facing similar challenges to access to medicines by ensuring that the conditions are right in each of the three streams for windows of opportunity to emerge.

Explaining the German lobbying register law and its reform: combining insights from the Multiple Streams Framework and Punctuated Equilibrium Theory

AbstractThis paper explains the adoption and reform of the German lobbying register law in 2021 and 2023 as a major policy change in German lobbying regulation. Using the Multiple Streams Framework and Punctuated Equilibrium Theory as theoretical lenses, we conduct a congruence analysis of 87 policy documents in a time period from 2017 to 2023. Empirical results show that the lobbying register law represents a quick solution to a different problem (a conflict of interest scandal) and explain the time it took the reform to re-emerge on the policy agenda due to shifted legislative priorities. In line with previous studies on lobbying regulation, we find that scandals need to be combined with other explanatory factors in order to elucidate the introduction and strengthening of transparency measures. These factors are on the micro-level and focus on how political action is channeled by key actors that make use of these scandals to increase pressure to act and generate further attention. With regard to our theoretical lenses, our analysis illustrates that both theories are needed to fully investigate the policy processes.

Policy processes in China: a systematic review of the multiple streams framework

The multiple stream framework (MSF) helps explain why policy makers address some issues but not others. Although the framework was originally developed in the USA, scholars argue that it has universal explanatory power across political systems and have called for applications to authoritarian settings. In response, we conduct a systematic review of China-focused MSF research, including 22 English-language articles and 156 Chinese-language articles. We show an increase in publications and identify education and social policy as the two most studied areas. Based on the reviewed articles, we highlight four key themes pertaining to China’s policy process: the dominance of the political stream, the limited role of the national mood, managerial issues in the problem stream, and stream dependence. In addition to a need to conceptualise and test how these aspects shape policy outputs and outcomes, we argue that, if the framework is to contribute to a better understanding of China’s policy process, future MSF research should not only venture into unexplored policy areas but also ought to be more explicit and transparent in terms of operationalisation and focus more on analysing causal relationships. Other research priorities include comparative and critical analysis of MSF hypotheses in other non-democracies.

Wearable Smart Cardiac Care: Take Vipasyana for Example

The most direct challenge to the healthcare system in Taiwan associated with population aging is the chronic and growing shortfall in medical and nursing practitioners. The integration of artificial intelligence, Internet of Things, and advanced 5G communication technologies is making healthcare more streamlined and intuitive to improve healthcare service efficiency, encourage cross-disciplinary cooperation to improve patient health management, and introduce and mainstream innovative service models such as telecare. To this end, the wearable smart cardiac care system 'Vipasyana', jointly developed by the interdisciplinary research team of the Departments of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science at National Yang Ming Chiao Tung University, not only has an innovative fully functional wireless wearable electrocardiograph but also uses machine learning-based detection/prediction methods to detect and monitor for emergencies such as myocardial infarction, ventricular tachycardia/ventricular fibrillation, and heart failure. To handle the real-time streaming sensing data generated during clinical trials, a big data real-time streaming framework based on Apache Storm and microservices has also been integrated. In addition, a mobile phone app and virtual reality 3D ward round system providing a user-friendly management and monitoring tool for medical staffs were developed and integrated into the system. The 'Vipasyana' system is capable of providing precision medical services to individual patients.

School Meals for All: A Qualitative Study Exploring Lessons in Successful Advocacy and Policymaking in Maine and California

BackgroundThe COVID-19 pandemic focused national attention on food insecurity, equity, and the role of school meal programs in supporting children, families, and communities. In doing so, the pandemic created a rare policy window—an opportunity to advance a longstanding public health goal of guaranteed access to free school meals for all students. In July 2021, California and Maine became the first states to authorize school meal for all legislation (also known as universal free meals). ObjectiveThe aim of this study was to explore perspectives of policymakers, state agency officials, and advocates on the conditions and mechanisms that facilitated passage of school meal for all legislation in California and Maine. DesignA qualitative case study was conducted. ParticipantsBetween December 2021 and June 2022, semistructured interviews were conducted with 30 policymakers, state agency officials, and advocates. Statistical analysis performedInterviews were analyzed using principles of content analysis. Key themes are organized using Kingdon’s multiple streams framework for public policy. ResultsEleven key themes were identified. Lessons are drawn from the policy and advocacy strategies used to advance laws in California and Maine. For instance, paving the way with incremental policy change, tailoring messaging to diverse audiences, and organizing at the grassroots and grasstops levels were critical to success of advocacy efforts. ConclusionsPromising practices can guide efforts to expand access to school meals and advance other child nutrition policies in other states and nationally. Moving forward, lessons learned from implementation of universal free school meal legislation in California, Maine, and other early adopters should be documented and shared.

Critical race theory, policy ambiguity and implementation: a multiple streams framework analysis

While the events leading up to the nation’s first ban of critical race theory, Idaho’s House Bill 377, was attention-grabbing given the controversy and salience of the issues, its implementation has been lacklustre as these issues have faded from the agenda. This article uses the multiple streams framework (MSF) to unravel these events and understand both why Idaho tackled the CRT (critical race theory) ‘problem’ and how problem framing around indoctrination impacted the progression of this policy through agenda-setting to implementation. Findings from this small-scale qualitative study illustrate how Idaho politics provided fertile ground for entrepreneurs to seize on indoctrination from educational institutions perceived to be overly liberal or ‘leftist’ and couple it with proposals to ban CRT. Following adoption, though, entrepreneurs failed to influence decisions within universities with the same efficaciousness. This caused streams to decouple, as faculty did not accept the indoctrination narrative, leading to some disruption in teaching practices but inconsistent implementation overall. As well as analysing this important empirical case, this article highlights important theoretical issues for MSF, such as the mechanisms of decoupling and the reliability of information in shaping policy narratives, and how they operate across the latter stages of the policy process, namely policy adoption and implementation.

Why and how is the power of Big Tech increasing in the policy process? The case of generative AI

Abstract The growing digitalization of our society has led to a meteoric rise of large technology companies (Big Tech), which have amassed tremendous wealth and influence through their ownership of digital infrastructure and platforms. The recent launch of ChatGPT and the rapid popularization of generative artificial intelligence (GenAI) act as a focusing event to further accelerate the concentration of power in the hands of the Big Tech. By using Kingdon’s multiple streams framework, this article investigates how Big Tech utilize their technological monopoly and political influence to reshape the policy landscape and establish themselves as key actors in the policy process. It explores the implications of the rise of Big Tech for policy theory in two ways. First, it develops the Big Tech-centric technology stream, highlighting the differing motivations and activities from the traditional innovation-centric technology stream. Second, it underscores the universality of Big Tech exerting ubiquitous influence within and across streams, to primarily serve their self-interests rather than promote innovation. Our findings emphasize the need for a more critical exploration of policy role of Big Tech to ensure balanced and effective policy outcomes in the age of AI.

Multiple Streams Approach and Implementation of Road Safety Policy Measures in Kisii and Kisumu Counties, Kenya

This study aimed to assess the implementation gaps in road safety policy measures in Kisii and Kisumu counties, Kenya, using the multiple streams framework. The study aimed to determine the impact of problem, policy, and politics on the implementation of road safety policy measures. A sample size of 335 was used, and interviews were conducted with traffic base commanders, county matatu owners' associations, and county directors. The reliability and validity of the study instrument were assessed using Cronbach's alpha, factor analysis, and expert opinion. Data was analyzed using descriptive and inferential statistical methods, with quantitative data examined through multilinear regression approaches and Pearson correlation analysis, and qualitative data using thematic content analysis. The findings showed a moderate influence of the multiple streams framework on the implementation of road safety policy measures among matatu operators. The study concluded that multiple streams significantly influence the implementation of road safety policy measures in Kenya.

At the controls: Politics and policy entrepreneurs in EU policy to decarbonize maritime transport

AbstractThe recent adoption of the FuelEU Maritime regulation, aiming to decarbonize maritime shipping, is part of the EU clean energy transition to reach carbon neutrality by 2050. Based on autoethnographic method and qualitative text analysis, applying the multiple streams framework as a theoretical lens, this article explores and explains the politics and the policy process of FuelEU Maritime. A policy window opened with adoption of the Paris Agreement on climate change in 2015, the slow progress on climate policies in the International Maritime Organization, and the subsequent adoption of the European Green Deal in 2019 and the new EU climate law in 2021. Diverging beliefs and narratives of policy entrepreneurs, policy makers, and stakeholders on problems to be addressed and different policy options to be implemented are analyzed. There were mainly two policy entrepreneurs, advocating different problem descriptions and policy options. The European Commission proposed a technology‐neutral, goal‐based approach to reach moderate emission reductions by 2050, while a coalition led by green mobility NGO Transport & Environment advocated a technology‐specific multiplier and subquota for zero‐carbon fuels to reach carbon neutrality by 2050. The article explains the agency of Transport & Environment and allies in influencing the European Parliament and several member states in the Council of the EU to stand the grounds against incumbent shipping and fossil fuel industry that influenced the Commission to present a down‐watered policy proposal. Finally, the article exemplifies the complexity of the second‐generation energy transition required for decarbonization compared to the first‐generation transformation focusing on renewable electricity.

Towards sustainable urban transport—Political agenda formation and policy windows in Helsinki, Oslo, and Stockholm

AbstractThis paper examines the development of urban transport political agendas in three Nordic capital cities, Helsinki, Oslo, and Stockholm, that strive towards urban sustainability. Utilising the Multiple Streams framework as a basis for analysis, an overview of local problems, policy solutions, and politics that have characterised transport systems and the related policy development processes over time is constructed. The attention is then drawn towards the points in time where the streams connect, and policy windows occur, to detect formative changes and their enablers towards sustainability. The data consists of 18 semi‐structured expert interviews, conducted amongst municipal policymakers and planners. The results reveal several policy windows that have transformed the local transport systems towards sustainability and an increasingly people‐oriented approach. The relevance of global climate change awareness, international planning trends for liveability and cycling, public pressure, individual political decisions, and establishment of modal hierarchy is evident across the case cities, while car traffic regulation is politically challenging and addressed through very different means at very different times. The findings of this paper outline diverse ways for advancing sustainability in local policy development but also detect methods for politically halting the process.

Shots segmentation-based optimized dual-stream framework for robust human activity recognition in surveillance video

Nowadays, for controlling crime, surveillance cameras are typically installed in all public places to ensure urban safety and security. However, automating Human Activity Recognition (HAR) using computer vision techniques faces several challenges such as lowlighting, complex spatiotemporal features, clutter backgrounds, and inefficient utilization of surveillance system resources. Existing attempts in HAR designed straightforward networks by analyzing either spatial or motion patterns resulting in limited performance while the dual streams methods are entirely based on Convolutional Neural Networks (CNN) that are inadequate to learning the long-range temporal information for HAR. To overcome the above-mentioned challenges, this paper proposes an optimized dual stream framework for HAR which mainly consists of three steps. First, a shots segmentation module is introduced in the proposed framework to efficiently utilize the surveillance system resources by enhancing the lowlight video stream and then it detects salient video frames that consist of human. This module is trained on our own challenging Lowlight Human Surveillance Dataset (LHSD) which consists of both normal and different levels of lowlighting data to recognize humans in complex uncertain environments. Next, to learn HAR from both contextual and motion information, a dual stream approach is used in the feature extraction. In the first stream, it freezes the learned weights of the backbone Vision Transformer (ViT) B-16 model to select the discriminative contextual information. In the second stream, ViT features are then fused with the intermediate encoder layers of FlowNet2 model for optical flow to extract a robust motion feature vector. Finally, a two stream Parallel Bidirectional Long Short-Term Memory (PBiLSTM) is proposed for sequence learning to capture the global semantics of activities, followed by Dual Stream Multi-Head Attention (DSMHA) with a late fusion strategy to optimize the huge features vector for accurate HAR. To assess the strength of the proposed framework, extensive empirical results are conducted on real-world surveillance scenarios and various benchmark HAR datasets that achieve 78.6285%, 96.0151%, and 98.875% accuracies on HMDB51, UCF101, and YouTube Action, respectively. Our results show that the proposed strategy outperforms State-of-the-Art (SOTA) methods. The proposed framework gives superior performance in HAR, providing accurate and reliable recognition of human activities in surveillance systems.

Graduate education and government policy in times of crisis: a case study of the United States during the COVID-19 pandemic

PurposeThe purpose of this paper is to understand US federal government policy during the early stages of the COVID-19 pandemic and the connections to graduate education. Using the multiple streams framework, the paper outlines these actions through various streams (problems, policy and political) and perspectives (defining problems, articulating options and mobilizing responses).Design/methodology/approachThe primary sources of data collected for this study were US federal government policies from March 2020 through May 2021. Policies were examined through introduction, implementation and alteration (when possible) within the specific time period of the study. The policies outlined in this paper were connected to the US Department of Education, and to a lesser extent, the National Institutes of Health, the National Science Foundation and other federal agencies. Data analysis was a two-fold process. First, the individual policy was considered as a single case and second, a cross-case comparison occurred across the multiple cases.FindingsAnalysing the study’s data in the problem stream provides a strong indicator of how the pandemic was perceived as a challenge for US graduate education. The pandemic served as a focusing event and illuminated the connections of graduate education to key institutional functions, including research and teaching. Broadly, US federal policy actions in this area focused on giving institutions resources and flexibility to support graduate students and allow them to continue their academic work while also seeding funding and incentives to continue the movement of knowledge, activities and people in the research pipeline. Actions in the policy stream aligned with the decentralized nature of the US higher education system and allowed for choice by academic institutions within the parameters of options.Originality/valueThis paper extends extant literature related to policy-making and graduate education to consider policy-making during a time of crisis. The paper offers methodological and conceptual ideas for consideration in future research.

Kingdon의 다중흐름모형을 활용한 다문화교육 정책변동 분석

The study applied Kingdon's multiple stream framework model to analyze the process of change in multicultural education support policies promoted from the Park Geun Hyen government to the Moon Jae Inn government, clarifying policy issues, policy alternatives, the flow of politics, the opportunity to open the window of politics, and the identity of policy leaders in the process of change. To achieve this research purpose, 2013-2022 was set as a timely range, and various data such as statistical data, press releases from the Ministry of Education, presidential election pledges, and government press releases were collected and analyzed. The main analysis results are as follows, the flow of policy problems consisted of statistical indicators such as the ratio of multicultural students and the enrollment rate, holding multicultural education forums, prejudice against multicultural children, and collective feedback through forums. Also, the flow of policy alternatives mainly consisted of presidential election pledges and proposals from lawmakers. In the flow of politics, the national atmosphere of the need for support for multicultural students and the changes of the administration were included. The window of multicultural education support policy opened twice, while the Park Geun Hyen government and the Moon Jae Inn government were playing the role of policy leaders who led the policy change.

Understanding the emergence of ‘Communitization’ under India’s National Rural Health Mission (NRHM): Findings from two Witness Seminars

ABSTRACT India’s experience with the National Rural Health Mission (NRHM) is notable on account of nationally formalising – at scale – community action in service delivery, monitoring, and planning of health services. A study was undertaken to document and create a historical record of NRHM’s ‘communitization’ processes. The oral history method of the Witness Seminar was adopted and two virtual seminars with five and nine participants, respectively, were conducted, and supplemented with 4 in depth interviews. Analysis of transcripts was done using ATLAS.ti 22 with the broad themes of emergence, evolution, and evaluation and impact of ‘communitization’ under NRHM. This paper engages with the theme of ‘emergence’ and adopts the Multiple Streams Framework (MSF) conceptualised by John Kingdon for analysis. Key findings include the pioneering role of boundary spanning decision makers and the Jan Swasthya Abhiyan (JSA) in advocacy and design of ‘communitization’ structures, and the legacy of rights based social mobilizations and state-civil society partnerships in health during the 1990s influencing the ethos underlying ‘communitization’. Democracy, leadership from the civil society in policy design and implementation, and state-civil society partnerships are linked to the positive results witnessed as part of ‘communitization’ in NRHM.

Policy Change Process of Suwon City’s Participatory Budgeting System Applying Kingdon’s Policy Stream Framework

This study aims to analyse the amendment process of the resident participatory budgeting ordinance of the Suwon City Government by applying Kingdon's Policy Stream Framework, and to explore ways to activate the participatory budgeting system. This study examines the three streams in the Kingdon’s Policy Stream Framework influenced by the revision of the participatory budgeting ordinance and identifies who played a leading role. In particular, this study analyses to resolve the structural limitation of the system and suggests ways to revitalize the system. As a result, it is necessary to audit the political stream of Kingdon’s 3 policy stream in order to legislate a new system such as the participatory budgeting system. The political stream is the most influential in deciding whether to introduce participatory budgeting. It is also important to make a cooperative network among local government, local council and Non-Governmental Organisations (NGOs) in order to solve the structural limitations of the participatory budgeting system, such as the lack of professionalism and representatives of the residents.

EMS: Erasure-Coded Multi-Source Streaming for UHD Videos Within Cloud Native 5G Networks

Ultra-High-Definition (UHD) videos have been getting increasing attention. However, existing video streaming solutions fail to deliver them due to the extremely high bandwidth requirement. The emerging cloud native 5G networks have opened up the possibility of enhancing UHD video quality by leveraging in-network video streaming. Unfortunately, the restricted storage and bandwidth of in-network servers could become the main bottleneck. To this end, we present <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"><tex-math>${\sf EMS}$</tex-math></inline-formula> , a novel UHD video streaming framework, by integrating <underline xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">E</u> rasure-coded storage with <underline xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">M</u> ulti-source <underline xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink">S</u> treaming. We respectively introduce a deadline-aware and a latency-sensitive metric to indicate the service quality of video servers and advocate a federated learning paradigm for the adaptive service quality update, including a reinforcement learning based multi-server selection (i.e., user local training) and a global service quality aggregation. To facilitate user local training without sacrificing streaming Quality-of-Experience (QoE), we cast the multi-server selection associated with the restriction on the average number of selected servers per video chunk into two kinds of Multi-Armed Bandit (MAB) models in terms of the proposed service quality metrics. We design lightweight Upper Confidence Bound (UCB) based algorithms with a theoretical performance guarantee. We implement a prototype of <inline-formula xmlns:mml="http://www.w3.org/1998/Math/MathML" xmlns:xlink="http://www.w3.org/1999/xlink"><tex-math>${\sf EMS}$</tex-math></inline-formula> , and extensive experiments confirm the superiority of the proposed algorithms.

An Empirical Study of the Policy Processes behind Norway’s BEV-Olution

Norway’s large battery electric vehicle (BEV) market and fleet are not the result of a comprehensive policy plan. Using the multiple streams (MS) framework and document analysis, it was identified that the most important Norwegian BEV policy decisions were made using inadequate policy processes that fall outside of traditional politics. This is contrary to the MS framework postulate that three independent streams of problems, policy solutions, and politics must align to pave the way for new policies. Politicians had limited information about the effects of policies they introduced in this “learning by doing process”. Impact assessments were rarely made. The decision rationale was often not documented. The future market expectation and thus the national budget consequences were low when important policy decisions were made, whereas the political gain was high. The processes were more aligned with traditional politics after 2014. The ambitious ZE vehicle targets for 2025 and the climate policy targets for 2030 locked in incentives, despite rising tax losses. In sum, these developments created the world’s largest per-capita BEV market. To avoid negative issues and keep the BEV policies’ potential to support the BEV transition, politicians should ensure that sufficient knowledge is available when making decisions about future policies. Such decisions should be taken transparently within traditional politics, be properly assessed as with EU policy processes, and regularly reviewed as with the California ZEV mandate process. The required knowledge should be developed in open-access research.

Policy process theories in autocracies: Key observations, explanatory power, and research priorities

AbstractThe policy process frameworks and theories that are currently considered mainstream were originally developed in the United States, before traveling to other countries. Despite their roots in democratic values, these frameworks and theories are increasingly applied to autocracies. Given important differences between democracies and autocracies, this raises questions about the desirability, limitations, and future directions of this development. In response, this article synthesizes findings from studies that apply existing policy process frameworks and theories to autocracies with the aim of assessing the extent to which the theories are, can, and should be used to explain key aspects of the policy process in autocracies. Based on qualitative content analysis of 146 English‐language peer‐reviewed journal articles that apply the Advocacy Coalition Framework, the Multiple Streams Framework, the Narrative Policy Framework, and the Punctuated Equilibrium Theory to 39 autocracies, we show that these theories help identify influential institutions, actors, networks, ideas, beliefs, and events. The analysis reveals important differences in policy processes between autocracies and democracies. Future research ought to bring existing literature on authoritarianism and authoritarian politics into policy process research to test existing and new hypotheses.

Postponement of the 2024 Election: Failure to Create Policy Window from the Perspective of the Multiple Stream Framework

In late 2021, public attention was captivated by a contentious issue surrounding the potential postponement of the 2024 election. Prominent figures including Minister of Maritime Affairs and Investment Luhut Binsar Panjaitan, as well as leaders from the Golkar, PKB, and PAN parties, put forward proposals to delay the upcoming election. This study was undertaken to delve into the underlying factors contributing to the downfall of the discourse advocating the postponement of the 2024 election. Through the application of Kingdon's (2014) multi-stream framework (MSF) analysis, this research reveals that the notion of postponing the election lacked the necessary feasibility to transition into a viable policy agenda, as assessed from the perspectives of the problem stream, policy stream, and political stream. Examination of the problem stream reveals a lack of indicators supporting the idea of postponing the 2024 election from an economic standpoint. The prevalent positive economic growth and the optimistic sentiment of the populace toward national economic progress undermine any basis for endorsing the discourse. Moving to the policy stream, it becomes evident that most legislative members and community groups outright rejected the discourse. Additionally, the dearth of policy entrepreneurs emerged as a crucial factor contributing to the discourse's failure. Lastly, from the political stream perspective, the lack of widespread public support proved to be a pivotal factor in the discourse's demise. Political parties, the legislature, and various segments of society, including students, vehemently opposed the proposition. This landscape underscores the incongruence between the nation's sentiment and the notion of postponing the election. Consequently, the inability of the discourse to gain traction as a government policy agenda can be attributed to the prevailing economic conditions, the absence of substantial public support, and the lack of influential groups positioned as policy entrepreneurs advocating for the postponement of the 2024 election.

A serious crisis that didn't go to waste? The EU, the Covid-19 pandemic and the role of ambiguity in crisis-management

ABSTRACT Was the European response to the Covid-19 crisis coherent to the challenges posed by the pandemic? The paper argues that the response to the pandemic had little to do with the characteristics of the crisis at hand and was rather linked to pre-conceived priorities of key actors in Europe (particularly surrounding the need to foster the green transition). The pandemic was thus considered as the epitome of an exogenous shock, to which no clear long-term policy response could be given, if not one that strengthens on previous political economic plans. The paper contributes to the literature on crisis-management in the EU, arguing that the multiple streams framework's focus on ambiguity is a fruitful complement to the historical institutionalist emphasis on critical junctures, particularly when studying exogenous shocks.