Pandemic challenges for public managers: juggling parallel crisis playbooks

Arjen Boin and Paul ‘t Hart

Chapter 2 in Research Handbook on Public Management and COVID-19, 2024, pp 19-30 from Edward Elgar Publishing

Abstract: COVID-19 has drawn public managers everywhere into the vortex of the biggest and most prolonged acute transboundary crisis of the twenty-first century. Much attention has gone to the tragic choices that political leaders have had to make in this crisis. In this chapter, we focus on the challenges faced by public managers, whose roles are different and in some ways even harder to fulfill. We introduce two distinct action logics that may inform how public managers approach the key tasks of crisis navigation: a technical-managerial and a strategic-political playbook. We illustrate how public management researchers can detect these different action logics and the competing imperatives they generate in the way governments and public managers governed the pandemic, focusing in particular on the challenges of sense-making, decision-making and meaning-making.

Keywords: Business and Management; Economics and Finance; Politics and Public Policy Sociology and Social Policy (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2024
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