The Epistemics of Policymaking: from Technocracy to Critical Pragmatism in the UN Sustainable Development Goals
In: International review of public policy, Band 2, Heft 2, S. 233-244
ISSN: 2706-6274
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In: International review of public policy, Band 2, Heft 2, S. 233-244
ISSN: 2706-6274
In: Policy sciences: integrating knowledge and practice to advance human dignity, Band 53, Heft 4, S. 735-758
ISSN: 1573-0891
In: Journal of contingencies and crisis management, Band 29, Heft 1, S. 104-107
ISSN: 1468-5973
AbstractThe COVID‐19 pandemic is a crisis with high complexity and should be understood as such by scholarship. A complexity science approach situates increasingly divergent ideological and epistemological perspectives about the crisis within the practical exigencies of containment and mitigation measures. We ask which of the seven stages of soft systems methodology contributes to deeper understandings about COVID‐19 as a policy issue, beyond the contributions of current and conventional perspectives. The discussion outlines implications for practice and places them within broader debates about tensions between scientific facts and political values.
In: Policy and society, Band 39, Heft 3, S. 403-423
ISSN: 1839-3373
ABSTRACT
With indiscriminate geographic and socio-economic reach, COVID-19 has visited destruction of life and livelihoods on a largely unprepared world and can arguably be declared the new millennium's most trying test of state capacity. Governments are facing an urgent mandate to mobilize quickly and comprehensively in response, drawing not only on public resources and coordination capabilities but also on the cooperation and buy-in of civil society. Political and institutional legitimacy are crucial determinants of effective crisis management, and low-trust states lacking such legitimacy suffer a profound disadvantage. Social and economic crises attending the COVID-19 pandemic thus invite scholarly reflection about public attitudes, social leadership, and the role of social and institutional memory in the context of systemic disruption. This article examines Hong Kong as a case where failure to respond effectively could have been expected due to low levels of public trust and political legitimacy, but where, in fact, crisis response was unexpectedly successful. The case exposes underdevelopment in scholarly assumptions about the connections among political legitimacy, societal capacity, and crisis response capabilities. As such, this calls for a more nuanced understanding of how social behaviours and norms are structured and reproduced amidst existential uncertainties and policy ambiguities caused by sudden and convergent crises, and how these can themselves generate resources that bolster societal capacity in the fight against pandemics.