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Policy advisory systems, which provide evidence-informed policy advice to governments, are put under great pressure in times of crisis. Crisis situations may engender conflicting interpretations by stakeholders about how to respond. These conflicts are compounded by inevitable gaps in knowledge and uncertainties about how the crisis might develop. All governments face challenges beyond their control which can take many forms, ranging from financial and political disruptions through to health pandemics, natural disasters, and threats to national security. Such decision-making pressures were especially evident during the COVID-19 crisis and followed different trajectories in different countries. This introductory article frames a group of research studies that brings new insights into various aspects of how governmental policy advisory systems responded to this crisis. Policy advice was formulated against a backdrop of controversies about how to prioritise health outcomes, economic livelihoods and social interaction. These studies analyse policy advisory systems with particular attention to the quality of the available knowledge base, the disciplinary mix of expertise within advisory bodies, the roles of experts as either trusted insiders or as external commentators, as providers or 'shapers' of knowledge, and the degree of (in)formality in their relationships with politicians. These issues are also investigated in the context of creeping crises, such as climate change. Taken together, the special issue provides new insights into how knowledge provided through policy advisory systems informs crisis governance. In this way, it advances our knowledge of the relationship between experts in policy advisory systems and political decision-makers in times of crisis.

Intro -- Preface -- Acknowledgements -- Contents -- List of Figures -- List of Tables -- 1 The Housing Crisis -- Homeownership -- 'Rabbit Hutches' -- Homelessness -- Economic Determinism -- But Is There a Housing Crisis? -- House Prices and Consumer Spending -- The Politics of Housing Wealth -- Renting: Not Such a Bad Thing? -- A Supply Dearth? -- Whose Crisis? -- Privatisation and Commodification -- Social Justice -- John Rawls -- Justice as Historical -- Marxist Theory -- Housing Crises -- Age -- Class -- Gender -- Ethnicity -- Location -- Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland -- Tenure -- Conclusion -- References -- 2 The Slow-Burning Fuses -- Building Industry Capacity -- Private Landlordism -- Private Landlords and Slums -- 'Creeping' Decontrol -- Housing Financialisation -- Competition -- The Demise of Council Housing -- Rise -- Fall -- Housing Associations -- 'Entrepreneurial' Housing Associations -- The Decline in Social Housing Supply -- Stigmatising 'Social' Housing -- Investment in the Existing Housing Stock -- Demographic Change -- Planning -- Sharp, Middle-Class Elbows -- 'Middle England' -- Conclusion -- References -- 3 Housing Crises -- Owner-Occupation: Acquiring -- Managing -- Using and Transferring -- Acquiring -- Managing: Staying on and Climbing the Ladder -- Using and Transferring -- Variations in Old Age -- Class -- Homeownership and Class -- Private Renting -- Social Renters -- Housing and Inequality -- Housing Wealth and Class -- Land -- Land Ownership -- Gender -- Younger Single Women (Without Children) -- Single Parents -- Older Women -- Ethnic Minorities -- Conclusion -- References -- 4 Location, Location, Location -- Globalisation -- Securitisation -- Real Estate Speculation and the Super Rich -- United Kingdom Devolution -- Scotland -- The Scottish National Party (SNP) -- Scotland's 'Housing Crisis'? -- Wales.

Introduction -- The Before Times -- The Months Markets Melted -- One Nation Under Banks -- The Fed's Second Act -- The Temple is Under New Management -- A Polarized Fed -- March Madness -- A Corporate House of Cards -- The Day the Fed Changed -- Racing Across Red Lines -- Culture Wars and Capital -- Love Songs to Full Employment -- A Fed Restrained -- The Creeping Crises -- A Year of Uncomfortable Questions -- Epilogue.

Intro -- Preface -- Acknowledgments -- Contents -- Abbreviations -- List of Figures -- List of Tables -- 1 Understanding Crisis-Induced Policy Changes in China -- Crisis and Policy Change -- The Core Role of Policy Elites in China -- How Did Policy Elites Exploit Three Mega-Crises in China? -- What Will Be Learned from This Book? -- Structure of This Book -- References -- 2 Toward Understanding Crisis Exploitation in China -- Introduction -- Exploring the Role of Policy Elites in Crisis Exploitation Theory -- The Importance of Perception -- Framing Strategies by Policy Elites in China? -- Strategies of Framing by Policy Elites During Crises -- The First Framing Point: Significance-How Bad Is the Situation? -- The Second Framing Point: Causality and Responsibility-Why Did This Occur, and Who Is to Be Held Responsible? -- The Third Framing Point: Proposed Solutions-What Should Be Done to Avoid the Reoccurrence of a Similar Tragedy? -- Exploring Factors that Influence the Strategy Choices of Policy Elites -- Situational Factors and Policy Elites' Propensities -- Temporal Factors and Policy Elites' Propensities -- Summary -- References -- 3 Three Cases and Qualitative Thematic Analysis -- Three Mega-Crises from 2002 to 2012 -- Definition and Data of Policy Elites -- References -- 4 SARS Pandemic Crisis as a "Window of Opportunity" -- Crisis Response to the Creeping SARS Virus -- Black Box Phase: From Secret to Public -- National Campaign Phase -- From Crisis Response to Crisis Exploitation -- Significance of the SARS Epidemic: From Denial to Acknowledgment -- Exogenous Causality and Endogenous Responsibility Claims -- Change-Oriented Policy Exploitation -- Toward a Positive Crisis Exploitation Strategy -- Major Policy Changes During and After the SARS Crisis -- New Paradigm: Scientific Outlook on Development -- Health Policy Reforms.

AbstractToday the world is confronted with dual crises: creeping and acute threats unfolding at the same time—for example, the manifestation of extreme weather events such as drought and flooding and the creeping crisis of climate change. To cope with dual crises, this article develops a novel temporal perspective that offers policy actors a repertoire of interrelated strategies for enhancing the robustness of institutional efforts. The repertoire consists of five temporal strategies that policy actors can use to navigate the twin challenges of immediate and latent threats in conjunction: strategic coupling of short‐term shocks and creeping crises, crafting time horizons, molding the pace of public problem‐solving, mobilizing anticipatory capacity through futuring techniques, and adaptive iteration of policy decisions. We illustrate the practical application of these strategies in an exploratory case study of adaptive water management in the Netherlands.SamenvattingDe wereld wordt geconfronteerd met duale crises: sluipende en acute dreigingen op hetzelfde moment, zoals extreme weersgebeurtenissen als droogte of watersnood tegelijkertijd met de sluipende crisis van klimaatverandering. Om te reageren op duale crises, ontwikkelt dit artikel een nieuw repertoire van vijf temporele strategieën voor beleidsmakers om de robuustheid van overheidssystemen te vergroten. Dit repertoire bestaat uit de volgende strategieën: strategische koppeling van onverwachte korte termijn schokken en sluipende crises, tijdshorizonnen creëren, het tempo aanpassen van implementatie, het mobiliseren van anticiperende capaciteit door middel van scenariotechnieken, en de adaptieve iteratie van beleidsbeslissingen. We illustreren de werking van deze vijf strategieën aan de hand van een uitgewerkt voorbeeld van adaptief watermanagement in Nederland: de invoering van het programma Ruimte voor de Rivier.

1. Regulatory reasons for the crisis 2. Refinancing credit and Target balances 2.1 Target balances 2.2 Target balances and fiscal rescue credit 2.3 The lowering of collateral standards for refinancing credit 2.4 Indirect state financing via refinancing credit to commercial banks 3. ECB government bond purchases and official bail-out programmes 3.1 From indirect to direct state financing: the SMP 3.2 The intergovernmental rescue funds: EFSF, ESM & Co. 3.3 Monetary policy or fiscal policy: ESM, SMP and OMT 4. The risks and costs of the ECB policy 4.1 Potential exposure via the OMT programme 4.2 Risks related to refinancing credits 4.3 Target losses in the case of exit and bankruptcy, should the euro continue to exist 4.4 Target losses in the case of a euro break-up or a German exit 4.5 Shift in growth forces due to free insurance coverage 4.6 The path dependency of policy 4.7 The creeping confiscation of savings 5. Economic assessment of ECB policy 6. Policy measures against interest rate spreads: the ECB's justification 6.1 The economic importance of interest rate spreads 6.2 Discussion of the ECB's arguments 7. Summary of key points

AbstractThe field of crisis and disaster studies has proliferated over the past two decades. Attention is bound to grow further as the world negotiates the prolonged challenges of the Covid‐19 pandemic. In this review, we provide an overview of the main foci, methods, and research designs employed in the crisis and disaster research fields in the period of 2001–2020. The review documents that the focus and methods used have not changed much over time. Single case studies and exploratory research prevail, the focus has shifted from preparedness to response, and methodological diversity is limited, but gradually increasing. Future challenges are to understand transboundary crisis management and creeping crises. Advancing the field calls for our community to put more effort in drawing lessons beyond the single case to uncover comparable and universal patterns that connect between events or phases, which help to theorize the multifaceted nature of crisis and disaster management.

Cover Page -- Title Page -- Copyright Page -- Contents -- List of Figures -- List of Tables -- Notes on Contributors -- Preface -- Acknowledgements -- List of Abbreviations -- PART I: INTRODUCTION -- 1 The Eurozone Crisis and Other Policy Challenges in the EU -- PART II: THE EUROZONE CRISIS -- 2 Eurozone: Creeping Decay, Sudden Death or Magical Solution? -- 3 the eurozone crisis and the fiscal treaty: implications for the social dimension and democracy -- 4 britain and monetary union -- PART III: OTHER POLICY DEVELOPMENTS AND CHALLENGES -- 5 the common agricultural policy: the right path versus blind alleys -- 6 new challenges for eu trade policy-making: why is the eu pursuing a comprehensive economic and trade agreement with canada? -- PART IV: DEEPENING, WIDENING OR MULTISPEED INTEGRATION? -- 7 Direct Democracy: Remedying the Democratic Deficit? -- 8 Europe After the Greek Default: Widening, Deepening, or Splitting? -- 9 Chronic Anxiety: Schengen and the Fear of Enlargement -- 10 Crossroads of Integration? The Future of Schengen in the Wake of the Arab Spring -- PART V: CONCLUDING CHAPTER -- 11 Equilibrium, Further Deepening or More 'Variable Geometry': Reflections on the Future of European Integration -- Index.

AbstractPolicy learning plays an important role during crises, where it can empower effective crisis responses or derail policy . Accordingly, a crisis like the COVID‐19 pandemic has created a surge in research on policy learning. In this article, and more than 3 years from the crisis' onset, we systematically review what COVID‐19 policy learning research has hitherto offered. We take stock of 45 scientific articles to provide an account of where policy learning has been researched, what methods, policy domains, and conceptual approaches were most used, and what new theoretical and conceptual advances have emerged from this growing body of research. Furthermore, we distil the key insights it offers to both scholars and practitioners. In doing so, we point to the theoretical and empirical gaps that future scholarship can address, as well as how can practitioners leverage research insights towards improving policy learning practices during similar crises in the future.Points for practitioners
In creeping crises such as COVID‐19, policy‐makers need to consider the multidimensionality and societal embeddedness of policy issues while designing policy learning processes, particularly in identifying relevant expertise.
Creeping crises evolve over time. Hence, policy‐makers need to continuously re‐align the policy learning processes to match evolving crisis definitions, manifestations, and societal perceptions. This requires continuous context scanning.
In creeping crises, policy learning has considerable time and space interactions. Thus, when designing policy learning processes, policy‐makers need to proactively consider the heterogeneity of policy learning processes across various levels of the governance architecture over time. As such, holistic 'governance' of policy learning processes becomes essential.
Policy‐makers should strive towards minimising perceived political interventions and influences on the policy learning processes, particularly during crises to maintain transparency and public trust.

Mass inflows of immigrants are believed to create moral panic which impacts attitudes and votes. However, few scholars systematically explore the discursive construction of migration as a crisis in relation to actual migration flows. When and how does migration become a crisis? To answer this question, we draw on mixed methods harnessing automated text analysis, linear regression, as well as qualitative analysis, to analyze "migration crisis" discourses in a corpus extracted from French newspapers between 2008 and 2020. We locate the emergence of "migration crisis" discourses in the summer of 2015, absent massive inflows of migrants or refugees in France contrary to other European countries. We show that conservative newspapers overwhelmingly contribute to framing the crisis as one of "migration or migrant" rather than one of asylum or refugees despite the humanitarian nature of inflows. Furthermore, conservative newspapers do not only mention the migration crisis more than liberal ones, but they also create a sense of slow-burning or creeping migration crisis, as an undercurrent in media topics. Our fine-grained analysis of the case of the migration crisis in the French media offers theoretical and methodological inputs for an empirically grounded and constructivist theory of political crises.

Identity is at the core of a rich body of business communications research, spanning studies on organizational identity, branding, and corporate social responsibility. This work has, however, neglected the question of corporate identity from the perspective of co-operatives—democratically-controlled businesses owned and controlled by their users—and the existential challenge posed by an operating environment often hostile to the business model. At the same time, the question of identity permeates the scholarly organizational and co-operative literature, shaping studies into co-operative identity crises, isomorphism, and from a transactions-cost economics perspective, the co-operative lifecycle. Bridging these literatures, we develop a first-ever conceptual dictionary of terms that we associate with co-operative and investor-owned firms (IOFs). Using text-as-data techniques, we apply the dictionary to a 15-year sample of credit union (a type of co-operative) and bank (IOFs) annual report texts. The resulting model ranks credit unions and banks on a co-op versus IOF firm scale and identifies credit unions that may be at risk of losing their identity because of their use of IOF language. To validate our results, we employ a variety of strategies, including novel machine learning models. Generally, these strategies support the findings from our dictionary model but also suggest the model may not be picking up on some creeping isomorphic pressures on credit unions to conform to IOF language. We conclude by noting that identity questions have important real-world implications, noting potential legal and public policy implications (e.g., loss of preferential tax measures) and pointing to literature that associates co-operative "identity crises" with business failures and demutualizations which, in turn, can lead to higher consumer prices.

AbstractThe COVID‐19 pandemic represented one of the most significant wicked policy problems in modern history. Global policy efforts to combat the pandemic reflect a diverse set of approaches, with varying underlying goals and values driving the policy choices. This article studies the pandemic response of two small island developing states, Mauritius and Seychelles, to better understand the policy landscape in this understudied African region. Evidence from these two island nations provides important insights into the opportunities and constraints faced by island developing states. Using in‐depth qualitative interviews with policy actors and reviews of official policy documents, this article studies the policy landscape of these two small island developing states. Findings from this research offer insights for scholars and practitioners interested in the intersection of wicked problems and policy.Related ArticlesOnyango, Gedion, and Japheth Otieno Ondiek. 2022. "Open Innovation during the COVID‐19 Pandemic Policy Responses in South Africa and Kenya." Politics & Policy 50(5): 1008–31. https://doi.org/10.1111/polp.12490.Vince, Joanna. 2023. "A Creeping Crisis When an Urgent Crisis Arises: The Reprioritization of Plastic Pollution Issues during COVID‐19." Politics & Policy 51(1): 26–40. https://doi.org/10.1111/polp.12512.Kinyondo, Abel, and Riccardo Pelizzo. 2013. "Strengthening Legislatures: Some Lessons from the Pacific Region." Politics & Policy 41(3): 420–46. https://doi.org/10.1111/polp.12020.

The use of geographic information systems (GISs) in local, regional and state governments is increasing, now at a rapid rate, with regard to conventional applications. However, the requirements of emergency management are not usually included within the design and original phases of GIS's acquisition. The author believes that it is both necessary and technically possible to define emergency‐related applications into specifications. With regard to 'creeping crises', this is a matter of urgency, so that hazard index analysis should be conducted at the onset of systems' design. The role of a range of existing and future space technologies is also considered in the context of enhancing existing GISs, especially with regard to remote sensing applications.

AbstractThis article highlights the factors that shape the public's early engagement with preventative health policies in the United States and in France. Our analysis explores the role that ideology and cultural worldviews play in shaping individuals' engagement with COVID‐19 early preventative measures such as mask wearing, stay‐at‐home orders, and vaccine intentions. We find that conservative ideology has an indirect effect on engagement in preventative behaviors through conspiracy theory beliefs in both countries. In addition, building on literature that links cultural worldviews and a wide array of public policies (vaccination campaigns, environmental measures), we find that individuals who have more individualistic and hierarchic worldviews are also less likely to engage in preventative behaviors or plan to get vaccinated. Understanding the public response to early preventative measures is essential to preparing for future health crises, as long‐term health responses such as vaccinations may take months or years to be deployed.Related ArticlesRichey, Sean. 2017. "A Birther and a Truther: The Influence of the Authoritarian Personality on Conspiracy Beliefs." Politics & Policy 45(3): 465–85. https://doi.org/10.1111/polp.12206.Tyner, Katie, and Farida Jalalzai. 2022. "Women Prime Ministers and COVID‐19: Within‐Case Examinations of New Zealand and Iceland." Politics & Policy 50(6): 1076–95. https://doi.org/10.1111/polp.12511.Vince, Joanna. 2022. "A Creeping Crisis When an Urgent Crisis Arises: The Reprioritization of Plastic Pollution Issues during COVID‐19." Politics & Policy 51(1): 26–40. https://doi.org/10.1111/polp.12512.

The Euro-Atlantic relations after the end of the Cold war have been strongly influenced by the impact of three interrelated crises: the existential crisis of NATO, the world economic and financial crisis, and the crisis in the Russia-West relations. The end of bipolarity has changed the threat environment and revealed how different alliance members formulate their threat perception and foreign policy interests. Europe stopped to be the US foreign policy priority. The US pivot to Asia has raised European concerns about American commitments to collective defense. The removal of the threat of a global conflict resulted in the EU initiatives aimed at promoting integration in the field of common security and defense policy (CSDP). Even though the US has officially welcomed a stronger European pillar in NATO, it has become concerned about new approaches that could divide transatlantic partnership and take resources away from military cooperation. At the same time the unilateralist preferences of the Bush administration generated deep political divisions between the United States and the European Union. The world economic and financial crisis contributed to a dangerous gulf between American and European defense spending. The US has complained about the tendency of the alliance's European members to skimp on defense spending and take advantage of America's security shield to free ride. In the absence of a clear external threat NATO tried to draft new missions, which were found in NATO's expansion to the post-Communist space and Alliance's out of area operations. But these new missions could not answer the main question about NATO's post-bipolar identity. Moreover, the Kosovo operation of NATO in 1999 fueled Russia's concerns about NATO's intentions in the post-Soviet space. The creeping crisis in the Russia-West relations resulted in the Caucasus and Ukrainian conflicts that provided kind of glue to transatlantic relations but did not return them to the old pattern. There can be several representing possible futures lying ahead. But under any scenario EU will be faced with a necessity to shoulder more of the burden of their own security.