Research Handbook on Public Management and COVID-19 (Elgar Handbooks in Public Administration and Management) 1802205942, 9781802205947

Table of contents :
Front Matter
Copyright
Contents
Figures
Tables
Contributors
1. Introduction to the Research Handbook on Public Management and COVID-19
PART I PUBLIC PROBLEMS AND PUBLIC MANAGERS: THE CHALLENGES OF COVID-19 AND HOW THEY HAVE CHALLENGED PUBLIC MANAGERS IN THEIR ESTABLISHED ROLES
2. Pandemic challenges for public managers: juggling parallel crisis playbooks
3. Reconsidering public management in a post-COVID world
4. What COVID-19 showed us about populism, democracy, and performance: the case of the United States
5. Uncertainty and ambiguity during a crisis and the challenge for public management: COVID-19 crisis management in the United States, the United Kingdom and Australia
6. The politics of “letting it rip”: why Australia went from zero-COVID to COVID-central
PART II HOW COVID-19 CHALLENGED THE FUNDAMENTALS OF PUBLIC MANAGEMENT
7. Procurement and public spending: amplification and emergence of issues arising from COVID-19
8. Citizen participation in public management: activated, empowered, responsibilised, abandoned?
9. Public Service Logic: a service lens on the COVID-19 vaccination programmes
10. Can co-production that emerged during the COVID-19 pandemic be sustained?
11. Examining the impact of COVID-19 on managing public sector employees: overcoming or exacerbating incoherences?
12. The governance of public services during COVID-19: a review of challenges and opportunities
PART III SUCCESS, FAILURE, AND IN-BETWEEN: WHAT THE PANDEMIC TAUGHT US
13. Responding to COVID-19 in Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities: the importance of strengths-based public administration, cultural safety and working in genuine partnership
14. A review of COVID-19 organisational recovery in a UK metropolitan police force utilising a complexity theory framework
15. Policing the pandemic: deciding and acting in the face of uncertainty and the unexpected
16. Trust, capacity and management of vaccine rollouts
17. The governance of food security in the post-COVID-19 context: innovative principles for public management in Argentina
18. ‘Build back better’: infrastructure policy’s post-pandemic promise
19. Ubuntu philosophy in times of crises: COVID-19 pandemic period and beyond
20. Small island states, COVID-19, and public policies: a thematic analysis
21. Death management in public administration: lessons from the front lines
22. The rise of robots in the COVID-19 pandemic: implications for public management
PART IV REVEALING AND ADDRESSING SYSTEMIC PROBLEMS
23. “Stay home”: queer(y)-ing the heteronormative assumptions of COVID policy responses
24. Public management challenges with the emergency response for people with disability during COVID-19
25. Gender mainstreaming and collaborative public management during COVID-19: a case study of national machineries for gender equality and care infrastructure in Argentina
26. How useful is priority setting in an emergency? An analysis of its role in national responses to the COVID-19 pandemic
27. The future of public management as we emerge from the acute phase of COVID-19: key themes and future trajectories
Index

Citation preview

RESEARCH HANDBOOK ON PUBLIC MANAGEMENT AND COVID-19

ELGAR HANDBOOKS IN PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION AND MANAGEMENT This series provides a comprehensive overview of recent research in all matters relating to public administration and management, serving as a definitive guide to the field. Covering a wide range of research areas including national and international methods of public administration, theories of public administration and management, and technological developments in public administration and management, the series produces influential works of lasting significance. Each Handbook will consist of original contributions by preeminent authors, selected by an esteemed editor internationally recognized as a leading scholar within the field. Taking an international approach, these Handbooks serve as an essential reference point for all students of public administration and management, emphasizing both the expansion of current debates, and an indication of the likely research agendas for the future. For a full list of Edward Elgar published titles, including the titles in this series, visit our website at www​.e​-elgar​.com.

Research Handbook on Public Management and COVID-19 Edited by

Helen Dickinson Professor of Public Service Research, School of Business, University of New South Wales Canberra, Australia

Sophie Yates Research Fellow, Crawford School of Public Policy, Australian National University, Australia

Janine O’Flynn Director, Crawford School of Public Policy, Australian National University, Australia

Catherine Smith Senior Lecturer, Centre for Wellbeing Science, Faculty of Education, University of Melbourne, Australia

ELGAR HANDBOOKS IN PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION AND MANAGEMENT

Cheltenham, UK • Northampton, MA, USA

© Helen Dickinson, Sophie Yates, Janine O’Flynn and Catherine Smith 2024

Cover image: Edwin Hopper on Unsplash. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical or photocopying, recording, or otherwise without the prior permission of the publisher. Published by Edward Elgar Publishing Limited The Lypiatts 15 Lansdown Road Cheltenham Glos GL50 2JA UK Edward Elgar Publishing, Inc. William Pratt House 9 Dewey Court Northampton Massachusetts 01060 USA A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Control Number: 2023951220 This book is available electronically in the Political Science and Public Policy subject collection http://dx.doi.org/10.4337/9781802205954

ISBN 978 1 80220 594 7 (cased) ISBN 978 1 80220 595 4 (eBook)

EEP BoX

Contents

List of figuresviii List of tablesix List of contributorsx 1

Introduction to the Research Handbook on Public Management and COVID-191 Helen Dickinson, Catherine Smith, Sophie Yates and Janine O’Flynn

PART I

PUBLIC PROBLEMS AND PUBLIC MANAGERS: THE CHALLENGES OF COVID-19 AND HOW THEY HAVE CHALLENGED PUBLIC MANAGERS IN THEIR ESTABLISHED ROLES

2

Pandemic challenges for public managers: juggling parallel crisis playbooks Arjen Boin and Paul ‘t Hart

19

3

Reconsidering public management in a post-COVID world Zeger van der Wal

31

4

What COVID-19 showed us about populism, democracy, and performance: the case of the United States Naim Kapucu and Donald Moynihan

5

Uncertainty and ambiguity during a crisis and the challenge for public management: COVID-19 crisis management in the United States, the United Kingdom and Australia Nicholas Bromfield

6

43

57

The politics of “letting it rip”: why Australia went from zero-COVID to COVID-central72 Blair Williams

PART II

HOW COVID-19 CHALLENGED THE FUNDAMENTALS OF PUBLIC MANAGEMENT

7

Procurement and public spending: amplification and emergence of issues arising from COVID-19 Barbara Allen

86

8

Citizen participation in public management: activated, empowered, responsibilised, abandoned? Catherine Durose, Beth Perry and Liz Richardson

99

v

vi  Research handbook on public management and COVID-19 9

Public Service Logic: a service lens on the COVID-19 vaccination programmes 112 Stephen Osborne, Maria Cucciniello and Tie Cui

10

Can co-production that emerged during the COVID-19 pandemic be sustained? 126 Trui Steen, Taco Brandsen and Menno Hoppen

11

Examining the impact of COVID-19 on managing public sector employees: overcoming or exacerbating incoherences? Sue Williamson and Linda Colley

137

12

The governance of public services during COVID-19: a review of challenges and opportunities Rachel Ashworth and Catherine Farrell

150

PART III SUCCESS, FAILURE, AND IN-BETWEEN: WHAT THE PANDEMIC TAUGHT US 13

Responding to COVID-19 in Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities: the importance of strengths-based public administration, cultural safety and working in genuine partnership Catherine Althaus, Dawn Casey and Lucas de Toca

162

14

A review of COVID-19 organisational recovery in a UK metropolitan police force utilising a complexity theory framework Phil Davies

176

15

Policing the pandemic: deciding and acting in the face of uncertainty and the unexpected Mark Fenton-O’Creevy, Nicky Miller, Helen Selby-Fell and Benjamin Bowles

192

16

Trust, capacity and management of vaccine rollouts Adam Hannah, Katie Attwell and Jordan Tchilingirian

17

The governance of food security in the post-COVID-19 context: innovative principles for public management in Argentina Joaquín Pérez Martín

18

‘Build back better’: infrastructure policy’s post-pandemic promise Sara Bice

19

Ubuntu philosophy in times of crises: COVID-19 pandemic period and beyond 243 Xolile Carol Thani

20

Small island states, COVID-19, and public policies: a thematic analysis Kim Moloney

257

21

Death management in public administration: lessons from the front lines Staci M. Zavattaro

274

206

218 228

Contents  vii 22

The rise of robots in the COVID-19 pandemic: implications for public management286 Helen Dickinson and Catherine Smith

PART IV REVEALING AND ADDRESSING SYSTEMIC PROBLEMS 23

“Stay home”: queer(y)-ing the heteronormative assumptions of COVID policy responses Peter Matthews and Daniel Edmiston

300

24

Public management challenges with the emergency response for people with disability during COVID-19 Sophie Yates and Helen Dickinson

312

25

Gender mainstreaming and collaborative public management during COVID-19: a case study of national machineries for gender equality and care infrastructure in Argentina Natalia Dopazo, Maria Daels and Hayley Henderson

26

How useful is priority setting in an emergency? An analysis of its role in national responses to the COVID-19 pandemic Iestyn Williams, Suzanne Robinson, Chris Smith, Lydia Kapiriri and Helen Dickinson

27

The future of public management as we emerge from the acute phase of COVID-19: key themes and future trajectories Sophie Yates, Janine O’Flynn, Helen Dickinson and Catherine Smith

325

339

354

Index369

Figures

4.1

COVID-19 cases in the US

46

4.2

Vaccination rates in the United States compared with other countries

52

9.1

The public service ecosystem

114

14.1

The construction of a hypernetwork

178

14.2

Operational Talla GSB

180

14.3

Hypernetwork of the Operation Talla Silver Group

180

14.4

Hypernetwork of Sara Crane’s COVID system

182

14.5

Hypernetwork of Hannah Wheeler’s COVID-19 system

183

14.6

Hypernetwork of Nick Bailey’s COVID system

185

14.7

Hypernetwork of Andy Sidebotham’s COVID system

187

14.8

Combined hypernetwork and the scenario of PPE supply and demand

188

26.1

Major elements of the framework for equitable allocation of COVID-19 vaccine346

viii

Tables

2.1

Two playbooks for public crisis management

21

2.2

Crisis management playbooks and key concerns of public managers

23

3.1

Stakeholder allegiance worksheet

34

3.2

Public managers as authoritative experts: challenges and strategies

37

6.1

Similarities between social Darwinism, neoliberalism and prosperity gospel

77

7.1

Spend of general government procurement as a percentage of GDP

89

9.1

The value creation matrix

116

9.2

An illustrative evaluative framework for the COVID-19 vaccination programme, from a PSL perspective

122

11.1

Findings of incoherence and coherence in managerial practice as employees worked from home

141

14.1

Grounded theory coding of participants operating environment

189

19.1

Attributes of Ubuntu philosophy derived from the reviewed literature

245

19.2

Poverty in Africa (derived from World Poverty Clock 2022)

252

20.1

Selected small island state data

261

22.1

Robot applications in public services

289

22.2

Policy capacity requirements to oversee robotics

291

23.1

Signs of financial distress amongst claimants between May and June 2020 in the UK

305

23.2

Reasons for starting a new claim in May–June 2020 in the UK

305

26.1

The WHO SAGE values COVID vaccination framework (WHO, 2020)347

ix

Contributors

Barbara Allen is Deputy Head of the School of Government at Victoria University of Wellington – Te Herenga Waka, New Zealand, and is Associate Professor in Public Management and Policy. Her research interests include procurement and supply chain, procurement as a socio-economic policy instrument, performance management, implementation, smart cities and digital government. Catherine Althaus is ANZSOG Deputy Dean (Teaching and Learning) and ANZSOG Professorial Chair of Public Service Leadership and Reform at the University of New South Wales (Canberra). Catherine is a former award-winning public servant from Queensland Treasury and Director of the School of Public Administration, University of Victoria British Columbia. She holds particular focus and expertise in Indigenous public administration and adaptive leadership. She is Extraordinary Professor, University of Pretoria and Honorary Fellow, South Asian Network of Public Administration. Rachel Ashworth is Professor of Public Services Management at Cardiff Business School. Her research focuses on accountability and governance, equality, diversity and inclusion, and organisational change in public services. Her current projects focus on mainstreaming equality in public policy, the implementation of Public Value, and governance reform in emergency services. More detail can be found here: https://​www​.cardiff​.ac​.uk/​people/​view/​610209​ -ashworth​-rachel Katie Attwell is an Associate Professor in Public Policy at the University of Western Australia, an Honorary Fellow of the Wesfarmers Centre of Vaccines and Infectious Diseases at Telethon Kids Institute, and a Visiting Fellow at the Vaccines and Society Unit, Oxford University. She is a global expert in mandatory vaccination policies and led the interdisciplinary West Australian project ‘Coronavax: Preparing Community and Government’, which engaged in community and government for COVID-19 vaccinations. More information can be found at: https://​www​.uwa​.edu​.au/​Profile/​ABLE/​Katie​-Attwell Sara Bice is Professor and Head, Policy and Governance Program, Crawford School of Public Policy, the Australian National University where she co-founded and directs the Institute for Infrastructure in Society. Arjen Boin is professor of Public Institutions and Governance at the Department of Political Science, Leiden University, the Netherlands. Benjamin Bowles is a Research Fellow in the Open University Centre for Policing Research and Learning. He is an anthropologist with experience of research into decision-making in contexts of uncertainty. Taco Brandsen is Professor of Public Administration at Radboud University, the Netherlands. His areas of research are co-production and co-creation, social innovation, social inequality and the management of public services. More information can be found at www​.linkedin​.com/​ in/​tacobrandsen x

Contributors  xi Nicholas Bromfield is a lecturer with the Centre for Social Impact, University of New South Wales. His research interests include public policy, public administration and crisis management from Australian and comparative perspectives. More information can be found at: https://​ www​.csi​.edu​.au/​team​-members/​nicholas​-bromfield/​ Dawn Casey PSM FAHA is a Tagalaka traditional owner from North Queensland. Dawn is Deputy CEO at the National Aboriginal Community Controlled Health Organisation (NACCHO) and currently co-chairs the National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Health Protection sub-committee of the Australian Health Protection Principal Committee. Dawn was responsible for managing the design and construction of the National Museum of Australia and the Australian Institute of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Studies. Her career also includes a number of key executive positions in the public sector. Linda Colley is an Adjunct Professor of Human Resource Management/Industrial Relations at CQUniversity, Australia. Linda is an expert on gender equality in public sector workplaces. Linda has an extensive track record of completed research projects as well as scholarly publications and practitioner publications from that research. Maria Cucciniello is Associate Professor at Bocconi University. Her main research interests include transparency in government, effective use of information, value creation and innovation in the public sector, e-health, e-government and change management in the public sector. She has published several articles and contributions to books regarding transparency in government processes, e-government and transparency, and public innovation in the healthcare sector. Tie Cui is a Lecturer in Service Management at the University of Edinburgh Business School, Scotland. His research interests include public service reform and innovation, value co-creation, and value destruction. Maria Daels is an Argentinean anthropologist and Urban Planning PHD candidate at Monash University, Australia. Her research explores the spatial interaction between formal and informal sectors within high-touch, low-tech industries and investigates how these intricate ecosystems engage with land use policies and planning systems. She integrates perspectives from the Global South to enrich the understanding of urban processes and provide novel insights to address contemporary challenges in urban development. Phil Davies is a Chief Superintendent for Greater Manchester Police and a part-time PhD Student at the Open University Centre for Police Research and Learning. His areas of expertise include digital policing and information management, organisational change, and police leadership. His areas of research are the application of complexity theory to UK policing and the use of agent-based simulation in policymaking. More information can be found at: https://​ www​.linkedin​.com/​in/​phildaviesgmp or https://​www​.researchgate​.net/​profile/​Phil​-Davies​-6 Lucas de Toca PSM is First Assistant Secretary, Vaccine Policy, Implementation and Primary Care Response for the National COVID Vaccine Taskforce within the Commonwealth Department of Health and Aged Care. He leads the Primary Care Response and vaccination program for the COVID-19 pandemic. Lucas has a strong focus on Indigenous Health initiatives. Prior to his work in the Commonwealth he worked for nearly five years as the Chief

xii  Research handbook on public management and COVID-19 Health Officer at Miwatj Health, the regional Aboriginal Community Controlled Health Service for East Arnhem Land. Helen Dickinson is Professor of Public Service Research and Co-Director of the Public Service Research Group, University of New South Wales Canberra. Her expertise is in public services, particularly in relation to topics such as governance, policy implementation and stewardship of 4th Industrial Revolution technologies. Helen has published 19 books and over 100 peer-reviewed journal articles on these topics and is also a frequent commentator within the mainstream media. Natalia Dopazo holds a Loeb Fellowship at Harvard Graduate School of Design. Her research interests include feminist urban planning and design and the relationship between public management, applied anthropology and territorial development. Catherine Durose is Professor of Public Policy and Co-Director of the Heseltine Institute for Public Policy, Practice and Place at the University of Liverpool, UK, and Research. Catherine’s expertise is in urban governance, public policy and participation, and she has published extensively on these issues. For more information see: https://​www​.liverpool​.ac​.uk/​ humanities​-and​-social​-sciences/​staff/​catherine​-durose/​ Daniel Edmiston is principal investigator of the WHOCOUNTS project at the Autonomous University of Barcelona. He has undertaken national and comparative research drawing on mixed methods approaches to critically examine the effects of welfare policy and politics. He has previously worked for the ESRC, Prime Minister’s Strategy Unit, and University of Oxford. Daniel’s research focuses on poverty and inequality, public policy and citizenship. Catherine Farrell is a Reader in Public Management in Cardiff University’s Business School, UK. Her research interests are in the areas of leadership and governance and the changing careers of professionals across a range of different occupations. Her current research focuses on the impact of COVID on aspects of governance including the shift to virtual meetings. More information can be found at: https://​www​.cardiff​.ac​.uk/​people/​view/​1418879​-farrell​-catherine Mark Fenton-O’Creevy is Professor of Organisational Behaviour in the Open University Business School and Chair of the Open University Centre for Policing Research and Learning’s Partnership and Advisory Board. He has nearly three decades experience of researching decision-making in organisations in contexts of risk and uncertainty. He is a founder member of the UK national research network Challenging Radical Uncertainty in Science, Society and the Environment. Adam Hannah is a Lecturer in Political Science at the University of Queensland, Australia. His research focuses on the politics of health and welfare policy, particularly the role of ideas and knowledge challenges. His current research investigates the origins of vaccine hesitancy as a policy idea, the role of ‘non-knowledge’ in public policy and the role of choice in Australian health policy. More information can be found at: https://​researchers​.uq​.edu​.au/​ researcher/​33712 Hayley Henderson is a Research Fellow at the Institute for Infrastructure in Society based at the Crawford School of Public Policy, Australian National University. Her research focuses on collaboration in urban policymaking and governance relating to revitalisation programs, the transition to sustainable urban infrastructure (e.g. Blue Green Infrastructure) and social risks

Contributors  xiii on major infrastructure projects. She conducts research in Australian and Argentine cities, as well as comparative studies involving other South American, European and North American cities. Menno Hoppen is a PhD candidate in Public Administration at Radboud University Nijmegen, the Netherlands. His research focuses on the inclusion of disadvantaged citizens in the co-production of public services. Further information can be found at https://​www​.ru​.nl/​ en/​people/​hoppen​-m Lydia Kapiriri is a Professor of Global Health at McMaster University, Canada. Trained as a physician, Dr Kapiriri’s research has primarily focused on health systems priority setting in low income countries. This research seeks to understand how policymakers make the decisions and also identifies strategies for strengthening the prioritisation processes with an emphasis on including equity considerations and health systems strengthening. Naim Kapucu is Pegasus Professor of public administration at the University of Central Florida, USA. He is joint faculty with the School of Politics, Security, and International Affairs and the Center for Resilient, Intelligent and Sustainable Energy Systems. He is elected fellow of National Academy of Public Administration. His research interests include network governance, emergency management, and social inquiry and public policy. He recently received the Fulbright Distinguished Chair Award in Democratic Resilience jointly hosted by Flinders University and Carnegie Mellon University Australia. Peter Matthews is a Professor in Sociology, Social Policy and Criminology in the Faculty of Social Sciences, University of Stirling. His research focuses on urban public policy and management, with a particular interest in tackling spatial and social inequalities. More recently, his research has recently concentrated on the lives of LGBT+ people and how policy can exacerbate or tackle the inequalities they face. Nicky Miller is the Director for Knowledge into Practice for the Open University’s Centre for Policing Research and Learning (CPRL) where she leads the ambitious and innovative program of ‘research into practice, practice into research’, which is at the heart of the CPRL’s partnership between academic researchers and police forces/agencies. Nicky’s research interests are focused on knowledge mobilisation, understanding the barriers and facilitators in getting research into practice, as well as evidence-based policing through police–academic collaborations and building the ‘what works’ evidence base in policing. Kim Moloney is an Assistant Professor at the College of Public Policy at Hamad Bin Khalifa University. Her research is split between (a) the administrative opportunities and challenges of small states and (b) the administrative life of international organizations. Her book, Who Matters at the World Bank, was published by Oxford University Press in 2022. Donald Moynihan is the inaugural McCourt Chair at the McCourt School of Public Policy at Georgetown University. His research seeks to improve how government works. He examines the behavioural effects of efforts to improve public sector outcomes through government reform, as well as the administrative burdens people encounter in their interactions with government. Janine O’Flynn is Director of the Crawford School of Public Policy, Australian National University. Her research interests are in public management, especially reform and rela-

xiv  Research handbook on public management and COVID-19 tionships. This covers topics such as the creation and evolution of public service markets, collaboration, joined-up government, public value, performance management systems, and the intersection of morality and public management practice. More can be found at: https://​ crawford​.anu​.edu​.au/​people/​academic/​janine​-oflynn Stephen Osborne is Professor and Chair of International Public Management and Director of the Centre for Service Excellence at the University of Edinburgh Business School, Scotland. He is also a Professorial Fellow in the Edinburgh Futures Institute and Editor of Public Management Review. His research interests include public service reform, innovation and change in public services, co-design, and the application of service theory to public services. Joaquín Pérez Martín is Professor at the Chair of Agri-food Systems at the School of Agronomy of the University of Buenos Aires. His research interests include food security, public policies, agri-food systems, logistics, and urban food supply. More information can be found at: https://​linktr​.ee/​joaquinperezmartin Beth Perry is Director of the Urban Institute and Professor of Urban Knowledge and Governance at the University of Sheffield. Her work focuses on co-production, urban governance and sustainable urban transitions. She has co-authored and co-edited six books on these topics and her work has appeared in interdisciplinary journals including Futures, International Journal of Urban and Regional Research, Regional Studies, and Local Environment. For more information, see  https://​www​.sheffield​.ac​.uk/​social​-sciences/​key​-people​-and​-professorial​ -fellows/​beth​-perry Liz Richardson is a Professor of Public Administration at the University of Manchester. Her research interests focus on public policy, citizen participation, and participatory research methods. Her work has appeared in a range of journals such as Governance, Evidence and Policy, Environment and Planning, The British Journal of Politics and International Relations, and Social Policy and Administration. Suzanne Robinson is Chair and Director of Deakin Health Economics at Deakin University, Australia. Suzanne is an experienced Health Economist and health services researcher. She leads international research on decision making and priority setting and disinvestment in health. See https://​www​.deakin​.edu​.au/​about​-deakin/​people/​suzanne​-robinson Helen Selby-Fell is a Senior Lecturer in the Faculty of Business and Law at the Open University, UK. Her research interests and publications cover various areas of policing, including evidence-based policing (EBP), in particular, the challenges associated with embedding EBP in the police service. Prior to her appointment as Senior Lecturer, Helen has 15 years’ experience in the police service, where she held various senior police staff roles in a metropolitan police force. Catherine Smith is Senior Lecturer at the Melbourne Graduate School of Education at the University of Melbourne. Her work draws on sociologies of social justice and practice and philosophies of care to analyse the nexus of politics, policy and practice. With an interest in the effects of disruption, her work has focused on policies and practice of forced migration, equity and education, wellbeing and resilience, gender identity and new technologies. Its application in teaching, training and research encompasses theories of relationality and reflexivity which drive innovation in teaching and learning across government sectors.

Contributors  xv Chris Smith is a Teaching Fellow at the University of Birmingham, UK. His primary interest is in using sociological theory to develop original insights into health systems and organisations. His areas of expertise include UK health policy, qualitative case study research designs, the sociology of morality, and critical realism in empirical research. See https://​www​ .birmingham​.ac​.uk/​staff/​profiles/​social​-policy/​smith​-christopher​.aspx Trui Steen is Full Professor of Public Governance and Coproduction of Public Services at KU Leuven Public Governance Institute, Belgium. She is interested in the governance of public services and the role therein of public sector professionals, civil society and citizens. Her research interests include co-creation and co-production of public services, public values, public sector innovation, and local governance. Further information can be found at: https://​ soc​.kuleuven​.be/​io/​english/​staff/​00014004​ Jordan Tchilingirian is a Lecturer in Sociology and co-director of the Centre for the Analysis of Social Policy and Society at the University of Bath, UK. His research focuses on the sociology of expertise. Jordan is currently researching: the role of ‘non-knowledge’ in public policy; the stability of the British knowledge regime and the trajectories of British policy intellectual careers; and epistemic (in)justice in social policy and conflict prevention expertise about the MENA region, and transitional justice expertise in Cambodia. Xolile Carol Thani is a Senior Lecturer in Public Administration and Management at the University of South Africa. Her research interests are public administration research methodology, postgraduate supervision, and public administration education and philosophy. More can be found at: https://​www​.unisa​.ac​.za/​sites/​corporate/​default/​Colleges/​Economic​-and​ -Management​-Sciences/​Schools​,​-departments​,​-bureau​,​-centres​-​&​-institutes/​School​-of​-Public​ -and​-Operations​-Management/​Department​-of​-Public​-Administration​-and​-Management/​Staff​ -members/​Ms​-XC​-Thani Paul ‘t Hart is professor of public administration at Utrecht University and a member of the Scientific Council for Government Policy of the Netherlands. He has been studying and writing about crises and crisis management since the mid-1980s. Among his books on this subject, always co-authoring with Arjen Boin (and assorted others), are: Governing After Crises (Cambridge University Press, 2008), The Politics of Crisis Management (Cambridge University Press, 2017, 2nd ed.), and Governing the Pandemic (Palgrave, 2021). Zeger van der Wal is Senior Fellow at the Lee Kuan Yew School of Public Policy of the National University of Singapore, and Professor by Special Appointment at the Faculty of Governance and Global Affairs, Leiden University. He is a globally recognised public management expert, and recipient of various teaching and research awards. Zeger has (co)authored over 130 publications, and serves on editorial boards of leading journals. He also regularly consults for governments across the globe. Blair Williams is a Lecturer in Australian Politics at Monash University. She has published widely on the gendered media coverage of women in politics, including recent publications in Feminist Media Studies, Politics and Gender, and Parliamentary Affairs. Her current research projects include analyses of political leadership masculinity, sexism in Australian politics and media, and the politics of the COVID-19 pandemic. See: https://​scholar​.google​.com​.au/​ citations​?user​=​UTPhJRYAAAAJ​&​hl​=​en

xvi  Research handbook on public management and COVID-19 Iestyn Williams is a Professor of Health Policy and Management at the University of Birmingham, UK. He specialises in social science approaches to health services research, employing mixed methods study designs. He has specific expertise in priority setting, decision making and decommissioning in health care; strategic planning and decision making; implementation studies, and; evidence synthesis and reporting. See www​.birmingham​.ac​.uk/​staff/​ profiles/​social​-policy/​williams​-iestyn​.aspx Sue Williamson is an Associate Professor of Human Resource Management at UNSW Canberra. She is an expert on gender equality in public sector workplaces. She has published extensively on flexible working arrangements and gender equality, and provides regular media commentary on these issues. Her most recent work focuses on how public servants worked from home during the pandemic. Further information about Sue’s work can be found at: https://​research​.unsw​.edu​.au/​people/​associate​-professor​-sue​-williamson Sophie Yates is a Research Fellow at the Crawford School of Public Policy, ANU. She is interested in a gender and equality lens on public administration and public policy issues. She has published on topics such as gender equality and family violence, client co-production of public services, and disability policy. More can be found at: https://​scholar​.google​.com​.au/​ citations​?user​=​oMaTSg4AAAAJ​&​hl​=​en Staci M. Zavattaro is Professor of Public Administration at the University of Central Florida. Her research interests include administrative theory, street-level public service, and public sector communication. She is former editor-in-chief of Administrative Theory and Praxis, and her chapter supports work for her 2022/2023 Richard P. Nathan Public Policy Fellowship at the Rockefeller Institute of Government.

1. Introduction to the Research Handbook on Public Management and COVID-19 Helen Dickinson, Catherine Smith, Sophie Yates and Janine O’Flynn

INTRODUCTION In this chapter we introduce the book and some key concepts that are important for its context. First, we provide a brief overview of some key events and timelines around the virus SARS-CoV-2, commonly known as the coronavirus or COVID-19. These are broad observations based on significant international trends over the first three and a half years of the pandemic. We then reflect on our own experience of the pandemic, given that the editorial team are all based in Australia. In this, we highlight the importance of context to considerations of the pandemic and that while some new challenges for public management emerged through the pandemic, many of the issues that came to the fore have existed for some time, often through deeply entrenched social inequities. We then move on to consider the field of public management and the ways that it has tended to think about crises. A whole literature has emerged in this area in response to the idea that more traditional modes of public management are not amenable to crisis contexts. We argue that although in the early stages of the pandemic some features of crisis management were required, beyond this many of the issues faced were not in many senses new but were highlighted through the impacts of the pandemic. Many scholars have suggested that this means that the field is not currently well-equipped for its task and needs some significant reorientation. In this sense, the COVID-19 pandemic might offer an opportunity for public management to reflect and reorient to better support governments and public managers in the future. We offer reflections on why this book is needed, how it is structured, what some of the gaps are, and preview key themes that various contributors develop.

THE TALE OF COVID-19 (SO FAR) To start this chapter, we offer a brief chronology of the pandemic as context to the book. This is broad in nature – an entire book could be written on individual country responses to COVID-19. COVID-19 rapidly came into the lives of us all in late 2019/early 2020 and quickly changed the ways that we lived and continue to live. Initially it was treated as an exceptional disease, one that many thought would be reduced or even eliminated through public health restrictions and the eventual creation of vaccines. At a number of points, it has appeared like COVID-19 has been in retreat, often associated with seasonal conditions, only for it to re-emerge in significant waves. Despite substantial investment in limiting the spread of COVID-19, as we write this introduction in the first few months of 2023, most countries have moved back to a state of business as usual and have removed many of the public health 1

2  Research handbook on public management and COVID-19 restrictions that we saw in place in the first few years of the pandemic. In May 2023, the World Health Organization (WHO) declared the COVID-19 public health emergency over, indicating that the focus should move toward long-term management of the pandemic. A global pandemic was not particularly surprising – it was arguably a matter of when rather than if. The WHO (World Health Organization, 2017) and epidemiologists have been warning of the potential for a global pandemic for many years. Estimates suggest the likelihood of a worldwide pandemic is about 2 per cent in any given year (Marani et al., 2021). In modern history, the deadliest pandemic prior to COVID-19 was the Spanish flu of 1918–1920, which killed 30 million people. More recently we have seen outbreaks of severe acute respiratory syndrome (SARS), Middle East respiratory syndrome (MERS) and Ebola virus disease, although these were largely contained before becoming significantly widespread. Governments around the globe have maintained pandemic preparedness plans in the expectation that we would soon witness a disease that would spread globally. The real test for these would come with COVID-19. In December 2019, reports first started to emerge of a new respiratory virus that had emerged in Wuhan, the capital of Hubei Province in China. By the end of 2019 there was a cluster of pneumonia cases in the city that had an unknown cause. In the early stages of this outbreak there was not substantial international attention to this issue, although it is now suspected that the virus may have been circulating in China for around six weeks (Bryner, 2020) and may have already been present as far afield as Italy (World Economic Forum, 2020) and France (The Guardian, 2020). A key priority became the development of tests to identify whether an individual has COVID-19. In January 2020, Chinese scientists published the first genetic sequences of SARS-CoV-2, which allowed the development of molecular tests for the virus. In the same month, a number of polymerase chain reaction (PCR) tests were developed that allowed COVID-19 cases to be developed, although many countries experienced a shortage of capacity in the face of significant demand, resulting in prioritising of testing for particular groups. By mid-February, cases had been identified in Europe, Egypt, Australia and the US, demonstrating the speed at which the virus – now known as the coronavirus, or more colloquially COVID-19 – was able to spread. Through the early weeks of March, the impact of the virus was seen through horrific outbreaks in Italy where hospitals became overwhelmed (Reuters, 2021). Governments around the world scrambled to construct temporary hospitals to deal with demand and purchase significant numbers of ventilators. A number of countries warned overseas citizens to return to their home countries as international travel bans became imminent. On 11 March the WHO declared COVID-19 a global pandemic, with more than 118,000 cases of the virus detected across 114 countries and over 4000 individuals thought to have died (World Health Organization, 2020). Just a few days later the Director-General of the United Nations, António Guterres, declared COVID-19 “a health crisis like we have never seen in our lifetimes; one that requires us to come together collectively to mount a war on the virus” (Guterres, 2020). In the months that followed, citizens in many parts of the world got used to a range of public health interventions seeking to slow the spread of COVID-19, including stay at home mandates, school closures, limits on public gatherings, restrictions on travel both domestically and internationally, mask wearing, and test and trace regimes. By July 2020, the UN declared that COVID-19 was wiping out years of gains that had been made towards the Sustainable Development Goals and an estimated 71 million people were expected to be pushed back into extreme poverty that year – the first rise in global poverty since 1998 (United Nations, 2020).

Introduction   3 Governments around the world agreed to significant spending packages in an attempt to rescue their economies as large numbers of their citizens sought unemployment benefits and health costs soared. As areas of the northern hemisphere entered their summer, reported cases were on a decline and across Europe, the UK and the US there were calls to return to life as usual and to remove some of the public health interventions. But by September, COVID-19 had returned in a number of areas of the northern hemisphere at alarming speed. Weekly cases in Europe were being reported at a higher rate than the first peak in March, and India saw the world’s fastest levels, with more than 5 million cases in just two months. In the final months of 2020, many countries were in the midst of stay-at-home orders again as case numbers surged. Global cases passed 50 million and more than 1.25 million had died from COVID. At this time, we saw a series of announcements about vaccines having been developed and tested. Pfizer, Moderna, AstraZeneca and the Russian Sputnik V vaccines were all found to be around 90 per cent effective in preventing COVID-19 in participants. The UK was the first country to approve the Pfizer vaccine and a 90-year-old woman became the first person in the world to receive this on 8 December. Spain became the first country in the world to sell rapid antigen tests (RATs), also known as lateral flow tests. These allow individuals to self-test for COVID-19 within a few minutes without having to send a sample to a lab for analysis. As anticipated, the coronavirus did not stay stable and as it increasingly transmitted it started to produce new variants. January 2021 saw the Gamma variant being declared by the WHO as a variant of concern after first being detected in Brazil. By February 2021, global vaccinations had surpassed the number of COVID-19 infections, although over three quarters of those vaccinated lived in just 10 countries. New variants of COVID-19 continued to be identified through the year, with Delta identified as a variant of concern in May 2021 after first being detected in India. As vaccinations rolled out, countries developed digital certificates in order to confirm vaccination status and allow individuals to move between jurisdictions, access public spaces or comply with employment requirements. 2021 also saw discussion emerge of a new condition where individuals do not fully recover from COVID-19 infection within the usual timeframe of a few weeks. Long COVID is a condition where individuals still show infections four or more weeks after first infection and although symptoms vary (over 200 have been identified in multiple organ systems) they are often associated with fatigue, cognitive impairment and autoimmune responses (Davis et al., 2023). It is estimated that one in five people who contract COVID-19 have symptoms of long COVID. As such, COVID-19 has been described as a “mass disabling” or “mass deterioration” event (Mazer, 2022) with not all who contract the disease recovering and some continuing to have ongoing symptoms for some time. Towards the end of 2021 we also saw the development of antiviral treatments that were shown to reduce the risk of hospitalisation or death from COVID-19 when administered soon after infection. This news came just as the Omicron variant was designated a variant of concern, having first being discovered in South Africa. Omicron proved to be a particularly virulent variant leading to worldwide spikes in cases. By the start of 2022, COVID fatigue had set in within many parts of the world as a willingness to comply with controls declined and vaccine rates slowed. Although case numbers were still high in many areas and individuals were still dying, take up of vaccinations meant that serious illnesses were not at the levels that they been earlier in the pandemic. But it had also become apparent that prior infection and vaccination were not effective prevention measures, as many individuals found themselves being reinfected with COVID (some multiple times),

4  Research handbook on public management and COVID-19 raising concerns over the long-term damage that this might do to an individual’s health (Bowe et al., 2022). Moreover, many governments were keen to move on from special policy measures that were incredibly costly, and to get economies moving again after many industries had been restricted. But most health systems were and are still operating beyond capacity, and significant numbers of health workers have left the profession due to burnout (Tabur et al., 2022). While other respiratory viruses such as influenza and Respiratory Syncytial Virus (RSV) declined significantly under public health interventions in 2020 and part of 2021, RSV in particular is making somewhat of a resurgence (Mondal et al., 2022). Moreover, during the early phases of the pandemic many individuals delayed treatment for health issues. Taken together this means that in many places there is a backlog on an already strained health system (Gertz et al., 2022), as well as prolonged health issues that went untreated. Across the world there were calls to return to life as usual – to deal with COVID as a seasonal illness in a manner similar to influenza, and to provide treatment to more vulnerable individuals through antivirals. Personal responsibility was seen as crucial in managing COVID, with individuals being encouraged to stay home if they have symptoms that might be indicative of the illness, to access RATs or lateral flow tests to identify infection, and to do their best not to spread the disease. In many areas of the Western world populations eschewed public masking and governments found it politically and practically difficult to mandate this. While for many this allowed them to return to life as normal, for individuals who are immunocompromised or with severe health conditions this meant having to make difficult decisions between remaining isolated from community life and risking severe illness or even death. Beyond the burden of disease, illness and death, COVID-19 has also changed life for some in other ways. Some groups have found that there is increased flexibility in working arrangements following the mass working from home experiments. This has had significant impacts for some people with disability who may have been refused such accommodations before (Hirst and Foster, 2021). But these impacts have often accrued to higher paid knowledge workers and not those in lower paid roles, who were often infected at higher rates during the pandemic. There were also concerns over the idea of the “Great Resignation”, where individuals found that the pandemic had made them reflect on their lives and they had already quit or intended to quit their employment, although this may prove to have been more of a media storm than actual impact. In the domestic sphere there was an international increase in the rates of family violence experienced (Kourti et al., 2023). By mid-2020, it was estimated that 1.5 billion young people had been removed from physical schooling, with an expectation that some 10 million, mostly girls, would never return to education (The Economist, 2020). There is compelling evidence that COVID-19 has spurred a global mental health crisis that will reverberate for decades to come (Bower et al., 2023). By the end of April 2023 there had been over 764.5 million confirmed cases of COVID-19 around the globe and just under 7 million deaths. Debates abound regarding whether COVID-19 will become an endemic rather than a pandemic disease in the future. What is clear is that the danger of this disease is not over, even if in many places most of the formal public health interventions have been removed, raising the question of how we will live with COVID.

Introduction   5

THE VIEW FROM DOWN UNDER While the scope of this book is international in nature, the editorial team are all based in Australia and spent 2020–2023 predominantly within the state of Victoria, where the capital of Melbourne experienced one of the longest lockdowns in the world, at 277 cumulative days. At the end of 2019 and the start of 2020 much of the attention of Australia was on Black Summer, which was a very intense bushfire season that saw the burning of an estimated 24.3 million hectares, and which destroyed nearly 3000 homes and killed 33 people. Some areas of the country had some early experience of masking as the fires produced low, and in some places dangerous, air quality, which meant wearing a mask outside was necessary. But it is safe to say that Australians started 2020 exhausted and traumatised by the summer bushfire season. Our experience of the early days of the pandemic was somewhat different to those of other authors in the book. We could only watch with sadness and horror as media reported on some of the outbreaks in other countries during 2020. Through a combination of early border closures, widespread availability of testing, mask mandates and some ardent contact tracing (some of the team experienced defence force personnel on their doorstep ensuring stay at home rules were being followed after a case at a child’s school), Australia reported around 28,000 cases (of a population of just over 26 million) in 2020. Australia was seen as a COVID-19 success story especially in comparison with nations such as the United States (New York Times, 2022) but did so by deploying what others referred to as “the country’s most intrusive bureaucracy since its days as a penal colony” (Cave, 2020). Therefore, through some significant public health interventions, Australia did not see the kinds of extreme events that occurred in other countries, such as Italy and the US. However, these interventions had the effect of isolating the country from others, something some of us experienced with family members who died overseas. Closure of state borders at varying times and in varying patterns over 2020 and 2021 also prevented loved ones who lived interstate from seeing each other. Within the state of Victoria, borders were erected within the state, dividing urban and regional areas, with military personnel deployed to enforce movement restrictions. Permit systems were put in place to police a range of activities, from working on site to attendance at childcare. The declaration of a state of emergency in that state formally handed control of the public service to the Police and Emergency Services Minister (Morton, 2020). In the early stages of the pandemic Australia was active in reducing the spread of COVID-19 and took unprecedented steps in designing appropriate systems around Indigenous populations (explored in detail in this book by Althaus et al.). While broadly popular, these interventions were still subject to debate. There was significant partisanship between those who dubbed Australia’s fortress approach an encroachment on the civil liberties of its population and those who argued for a need to revitalise the economy given that infections, transmission rates and deaths remained comparatively low (Clarke et al., 2021). Wherever people sat on the spectrum, the widespread experiment with restrictions on freedom and the exercise of power over everyday activities and freedoms was seen as inconceivable prior to the pandemic (Altshuler and Hershkovitz, 2020). Despite vaccinations being taken up at an enthusiastic level in Australia, with over 90 per cent of the population having two doses of a vaccine, during 2021 we did see an increase in case numbers to 402,000 – largely due to the Delta outbreak in the second half of the year. But the real explosion in cases came in 2022, later than in most parts of the world. At this

6  Research handbook on public management and COVID-19 point Australia jumped to 15th in the world for total cases over the course of the pandemic (Worldometer, 2023). It might be expected that for a country that had relatively few cases in 2020 and 2021, it would be seen as disastrous to suddenly rank amongst the top countries for hospitalisations and deaths – but by this time ‘pandemic fatigue’ had set in and governments continued to remove public health interventions rather than enforce them (this is explored in more detail in the chapter by Williams). We note these issues not because we believe the Australian experience is exceptional in any way, indeed Aotearoa New Zealand and Portugal also had similar experiences of comparatively few cases in the first years of the pandemic only to see significant increases after public health measures were relaxed. We highlight this to demonstrate that while there is often a sense that the COVID-19 pandemic has been a shared global experience, there are nonetheless significant differences depending on context. While the Australian experience is different from the UK or Italian experience, even within Australia experiences differed. States and Territories took different measures: our Victorian experiences of stay-at-home measures were more prolonged than others in the Northern Territory or South Australia. Western Australia implemented a lengthy ‘hard border’ with other states, while people continued to live relatively normal lives within the state. While Australia had a highly active approach to vaccination (albeit slightly later than some countries), as an affluent country these were free and largely easily available to citizens, unlike the experience of low-income countries. The experiences of disabled Australians were, and still are, different from those of their non-disabled peers. Low-income workers were disproportionately represented in those infected by COVID (Willis, 2021). These are not new patterns and poorer health outcomes have long been linked to disadvantage (Turell and Mathers, 1990), but the COVID-19 pandemic has thrown these inequities into stark relief (O’Flynn, 2021). In the various contributions in this book this key theme is strongly reinforced.

CRISIS IN PUBLIC MANAGEMENT Crisis has a way of revealing the capacity of government, or the lack thereof (Moynihan, 2021). In recent times we have never had a series of events where the need for effective public management has been more apparent. As outlined earlier, we saw significant effort mobilised by governments around the world to find ways to restrict the spread of COVID-19 and to rapidly develop and implement a series of policies and programs to deal with the health impacts. In addition, governments in many nations developed programs to deal with economic stagnation, provide income protections for those who had lost work, and build more resilient systems for the future. Policymakers and public managers were thrust into the spotlight, charged with navigating a way through the pandemic for citizens. In some settings these normally anonymous actors moved centre stage and became quasi-celebrities. One way to approach this book might be to characterise the COVID-19 pandemic as a crisis that public management and public managers need to find more effective ways to address. As Ansell et al. (2021) argue: The COVID-19 crisis has made clear that turbulent problems – characterized by surprising, inconsistent, unpredictable, and uncertain events – persistently disrupt our society and challenge the public sector. The public sector is being tested to its limits by the COVID-19 pandemic, which has swept

Introduction   7 away the standard repertoire of foresight, protection, and resilience strategies and brought society and the economy to a near halt. (Ansell et al., 2021: p. 949)

There is a significant and growing literature that focuses on the many crisis situations that public management might deal with, be they natural disasters, economic turbulence, environmental challenges, terror attacks or any number of other issues (e.g. Ansell and Boin, 2019; Drennan et al., 2015; Schneider, 2015). Such a literature is deemed necessary because traditional models of public management and bureaucracy are seen as well-equipped when dealing with more simple problems through means-end rationality, legal rules and scale economies, but less able to deal with complex or wicked problems (Head and O’Flynn, 2015; Rittel and Webber, 1973). Responses to these challenges require the joint action of variety of stakeholders to help understand and address these issues (6 et al., 2002; Dickinson, 2016; Sørensen and Torfing, 2009). Undoubtedly, in the early stages of the pandemic, there was a need for a crisis response as governments sought to mobilise pandemic preparedness plans. In many cases governments found these plans wanting or struggled to implement them (Babu et al., 2021; Johnson Sirleaf and Clark, 2021; Razavi et al., 2022). Indeed, there have been calls within the literature to incorporate greater consideration of crisis management as a significant research agenda within the field (Di Mascio et al., 2020). But as we outlined in the previous section, many of the issues that posed challenges to public managers and public management beyond the initial crisis stage are issues that have long existed, often related to deeply entrenched social inequities. Instead, the pandemic served to illuminate and in some cases accelerate these issues, providing stark insight into enduring societal issues (O’Flynn, 2021). This is not unique to the COVID-19 pandemic. Previous research into other crises demonstrates that crises can often serve to exacerbate inequities. For example, significant research demonstrates the impact that global austerity measures in the aftermath of the 2008 global financial crisis had on health inequities. Countries with weak social protection policies saw significant exacerbation of health inequities (Karanikolos et al., 2016; Ruckert and Labonté, 2017). Historically, one of the most significant contributions that the field of public management has made is the development of ideas associated with New Public Management. Following the crisis of the Second World War, we saw an era characterised as the “heyday of welfare state politics in the Western World” (Nullmeier and Kaufmann, 2021: p. 93). Heavily influenced by the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, nation-states became more normatively attuned to the need to provide social justice, social protection and efforts to reduce poverty. The period from the late 1940s until the 1970s is often characterised in governance terms as being a time of hierarchy (Peck and Dickinson, 2008). Yet over time, this approach was increasingly critiqued for being inefficient, consuming too much of a nation’s resources and serving the interests of public service professionals rather than those of citizens (Dickinson, 2016). Some areas of the private sector had undergone radical change over the 1970s and 1980s, but the argument was that the public sector remained “rigid, bureaucratic, expensive, and inefficient” (Pierre and Peters, 2000: p. 5). Ideas associated with New Public Management sought to decentralise public services, harness market forces to drive improvements, and focus on outcomes (Ferlie et al., 1996). The impact of these New Public Management-driven reforms has in many places led to a separation of purchasing and provider roles, with an array of non-governmental organisations being contracted to deliver public services. In the process this has sometimes meant that front-line workers are no longer employed on traditional public

8  Research handbook on public management and COVID-19 service contracts, with a rise of insecure working conditions for some professions (Macdonald, 2021). These processes have also seen a hollowing out of the state (Peters, 1993) and concerns being raised about the capacity of governments to effectively manage public services (O’Flynn, 2021). Within the broader economies of a number of countries we have seen changes to industrial relations and working conditions. These include a fall in union membership (Dinlersoz and Greenwood, 2016) and a rise in insecure working arrangements such as zero hours contracts (Farina et al., 2019). More recently we have seen the expansion of the gig economy, where employment is not guaranteed but is provided on demand. While such shifts were initially promoted on the basis that this would provide flexible employment opportunities for individuals, there are concerns about the degree of control that workers actually have in these roles, and about income levels and quality of jobs (Kaine and Josserand, 2019). Alongside shifts in broader employment we have also seen welfare services become increasingly targeted in an attempt to curb spending and limit it to those viewed as most deserving. Through a range of techniques such as means-testing, selectivity, conditionality, residual welfare and rationing (Spicker, 2005), governments have sought to funnel spending to those groups seen as more deserving of benefits. Such approaches are founded on the idea that restricting provision of benefits to those who are able to work should expand the numbers of individuals active in employment. However, against a backdrop of rising inequities in a number of countries, it increasingly seems that many welfare systems have moved from being safety nets to poverty traps (Thornton et al., 2020). There have been calls to restore welfare systems to more universal provision or even to move to a system of universal basic income where each individual is guaranteed a modest regular income that is not dependent on means-testing or a work requirement (Haagh, 2019). In summary, there have been shifts in both the capacity of public services and socioeconomic inequality within many countries. Taken together, this meant that when COVID-19 hit we saw significant challenges in governments being able to respond to this crisis, and in individuals’ ability to weather the disruptions and further inequities that the pandemic brought. For some time there has been broad agreement within the public management literature that the New Public Management experiment has not succeeded and has created a series of negative impacts (Simonet, 2013). Concepts such as New Public Governance (Osborne, 2006) and Public Value (Moore, 1995) have emerged to attempt to deal with the limitations of New Public Management, but none has been wholeheartedly embraced by the field. Against this background, some scholars have suggested that public management is itself in somewhat of a crisis and the work of this field is not able to support public managers and public institutions to do the work that is needed (Ansell et al., 2021; O’Flynn, 2021; Perry, 2016; Van Dooren and Noordegraaf, 2020). In this sense, the crisis may be as relevant to the field of study as to the pandemic itself. Indeed, Ansell et al. (2021) write about the pandemic as being an opportunity: “We hope that when looking back we will see the current pandemic as an important game changer that stimulated research on turbulence and robustness” (Ansell et al., 2021: p. 956). Others have noted that the pandemic has created an inflection point where public management as a field should reorient itself towards bigger societal issues, reckon with its past, and draw issues of empathy and humility into the centre (O’Flynn, 2021, 2022). In other words, the pandemic could be a huge opportunity to revitalise the field of public management and ensure that it is fit for purpose within the increasingly complex and turbulent twenty-first-century world we find ourselves in (Van der Wal, 2020).

Introduction   9

WHAT THIS BOOK IS ABOUT As outlined earlier, the pandemic has had a truly global impact and has touched every single person and public organisation around the world. It has laid bare many challenges with how existing public management structures and systems operate and are equipped to manage, particularly in relation to complex and wicked challenges. As we have also suggested, the pandemic might also provide an opportunity for the field of public management to think differently about its role and how it equips governments and public managers. In this book we aim to capture both relevant events and approaches to managing in a time of crisis and encourage authors to think what this might mean for public management in the future. When we were approached in April 2021 about the possibility of editing a text on public management and COVID-19, we were excited about the potential to make a significant contribution to public management thinking at a time when a number of scholars were suggesting we might see somewhat of a transition in the field. At the same time, we must acknowledge that pulling together a text of this size in the midst of a global pandemic was not an entirely straightforward endeavour. At times we had to be flexible with deadlines as contributors or their families got sick, classes moved online and then back to the classroom again and, as outlined above, the pandemic shifted and changed in new ways. Several chapters were withdrawn as authors navigated the reality of a global pandemic. As a group we confronted all the challenges that COVID-19 bought with it. Final versions of chapters were accepted over a 12-month period, and this has implications for the themes and events captured by each. In Australia in April 2021, we were yet to receive COVID-19 vaccinations and many still held out hope that following these efforts we would see reduced rates of infections and move into a post-COVID era. If that were to happen, we would be able to put together a collection that explored the ways that public management and public managers had responded to the pandemic, the ways that the field had changed as a result of this, and some indications of where we might go in the future. As we outlined in the background section, this proved to be a highly optimistic prediction and two years on we are still living with significant levels of COVID-19 infection within our communities and attending to the myriad issues that have been highlighted and accelerated by this experience. In some senses this is an incomplete project and there are many more contributions to be made on this topic, but we believe that the various chapters assembled within this book are a good demonstration of many actions and challenges that emerged in the first few years of the pandemic, as well as providing a comprehensive account of the limitations of public management in addressing these. Perhaps unsurprisingly, many of the accounts in this text relate to the things that did not work well and the limitations of governments and public managers in responding to the pandemic. The broad public policy literature has tended to overwhelmingly focus on failures and rarely has much to say about policy successes (Compton and ‘t Hart, 2019) – although there has been the recent emergence of the Positive Public Administration movement (Douglas et al., 2021), which is attempting to balance this. While many of the chapters in this book do relate to challenges, some – such as Althaus et al. on strengths-based management in Australian Indigenous communities or Steen et al. on co-production – celebrate successes or largely positive themes. While the text was intended to be international, it suffers from many of the common challenges of the public management field more broadly in this sense, which has often been seen to focus on ideas associated with Western liberal democracies (Haque, 2019). While the book

10  Research handbook on public management and COVID-19 has contributions from Africa, South America, the Caribbean and Pacific, and Indigenous Australians, the majority of the chapters explore experiences in the UK, the US, Western Europe, Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand. This is a limitation of the book. This lack of engagement from mostly lower income countries is perhaps not surprising in a crisis context, and yet given that it is a feature of the broader literature this may yet be another inequity that the COVID-19 pandemic has thrown into stark relief. As we have already outlined, the COVID crisis is far from over and any future iterations of this book would benefit from a more truly global perspective. We originally intended that the final section of the book would be spent reflecting on the future state of the field as a discipline and a profession, with consideration of some of the important issues for public servants. Despite some early interest, we were unsuccessful in attracting chapters that dealt with these issues. Perhaps induced by pandemic fatigue or being constantly in a reactive mode, contributors felt more comfortable in documenting and analysing what had happened rather than what this might mean for the future of the field. However, as an editorial team we have focused on this in our concluding chapter to offer some indication of a route ahead.

BOOK STRUCTURE The book is split into four main sections along with a final chapter where we seek to bring together the learning and reflect on the implications. Some of these chapters provide a deep-dive into particular jurisdictions, exploring how issues relating to COVID-19 and implications for public management played out within particular contexts. Others draw on evidence from multiple jurisdictions in comparing how and why COVID-19 responses and actions of public managers played out differently across these settings. Part I of the book incorporates five chapters that explore the challenges of COVID-19 and how they have challenged public managers and political leaders in their established roles. This section of the book discusses the ways that COVID-19 has fundamentally challenged what it is that public managers do, what we need to see in the future as a result of this experience, and what role the field of public management might play in supporting this. Boin and ‘t Hart explore the difficult role that public managers play in decision-making in crises. They outline two crisis management ‘playbooks’ that public managers need to negotiate through and find particular gaps for public managers in terms of navigating the incubation phase of crises. They ultimately argue that while it can be tempting to return to business as usual quickly, there will need to be lessons learned and implemented from COVID-19. Van der Wal considers how the COVID experience has reshaped ideas of what public managers actually do and, in particular, the work that is often done ‘behind the scenes’. The chapter argues that administrative capacity is crucial and outlines three key competencies that need further development so that public managers are well-placed to deal with crises: leveraging stakeholder input, anticipating and leveraging political cues, and maximising collaborative potential. Kapucu and Moynihan focus specifically on the US and the implications of President Trump’s populist style of governing in terms of failures around decision-making, communication, collaboration and coordination. The President’s approach to government prioritised loyalty to the leader and disdain for expertise, which had significant implications for the space

Introduction   11 public managers had to develop appropriate public health interventions and trust in public institutions. Over the long term they argue that this has implications for public servant morale and motivation, and also the normalisation of dishonesty. Bromfield also draws on the US in his chapter, although in this case he presents a comparative analysis with the United Kingdom and Australia. In particular, he focuses on the dynamics of uncertainty and ambiguity in crisis management and how these framed the responses that public managers were able to take. Bromfield argues that having an institutional venue where the varying competing frames of the pandemic play out can help alleviate some of the worst effects of uncertainty and ambiguity. The final chapter in this section, from Williams, focuses on the Australian experience of the COVID-19 pandemic, asking how this country went from being a relative success story with its zero-COVID strategy to “letting it rip”. Like Kapucu and Moynihan, Williams focuses particularly on the political leadership of the Morrison government, arguing that the ideological positioning of this government prioritised economic growth and individual freedom over collective well-being and social responsibility. She argues that even with the election of a new national government, dominant ideologies shaped public discourse in a way that restricted the possibilities for public servants in developing policy responses. The second part of the book brings together six chapters that discuss how COVID-19 challenged fundamental concepts of public management. Allen starts this section by exploring how COVID-19 illustrated many of the issues that have long been associated with procurement and public spending. She draws on examples of strategic public procurement from Australia, Aotearoa New Zealand, the US and beyond, showing how COVID-19 amplified weaknesses in contracting capacity and capability. Namely, that contracting is highly vulnerable to corruption, that innovation can emerge from urgency, but also that international mechanisms for procurement have demonstrable weaknesses. Allen calls for more attention to be paid to effective guidance of public procurement. Durose, Perry and Richardson turn to the topic of citizen participation in public management. They examine the COVID-19 experience in England and find a simultaneous retreat or default to traditional expertise in the context of crisis, along with shifting forms of citizen voice and influence. Ultimately the authors argue that questions of citizen participation should not be sidelined and that there are possibilities for more radical or emancipatory forms of citizen participation where the terms are not set or led by the state. Importantly such opportunities are often missed in the public management literature as they fall outside of Western liberal democracies. Osborne, Cucciniello and Cui explore COVID-19 vaccination programs through the use of a Public Service Logic framework. In doing so they argue that research into vaccination programs should not be undertaken simply from a logistics and operation perspective, but instead as a service that creates value at individual and societal levels. Such an approach would incorporate institutional, societal, organisational and individual values and beliefs. This would allow vaccination programs to acknowledge and challenge alternative value propositions, such as vaccine hesitancy/resistance. Such an approach also has implications for how we measure the success of these programs, rather than simply focusing on logistical deployment. Steen, Brandsen and Hoppen argue that a positive of the COVID-19 pandemic has been the many instances of co-production where citizens and professionals joined forces to deal with the emergency. As earlier noted by Durose et al., co-production has been a key aspiration for public services for some time. They outline three conditions that are essential for co-production to be sustained over time: a supportive regulatory framework and structural allocation of funds; complementarity; and a sense of urgency among those concerned. In

12  Research handbook on public management and COVID-19 sustaining co-production, public servants need to make choices about where best these efforts might be placed. Williamson and Colley turn their attention to the impact of COVID-19 in managing public sector employees. The pandemic led to a mass working from home experiment for many public servants and they examine how the pandemic changed management practices as employees and teams work from home. An NPM environment has arguably exacerbated incoherence in human resource management practices regarding working from home, but the pandemic experience may lead to a reconsideration of these practices. However, such changes will only be maintained if there is sufficient managerial capability to oversee public servants. The final chapter in this section is from Ashworth and Farrell and evaluates the impact of COVID-19 on the governance of public services. They argue that it was inevitable that a crisis such as the pandemic would lead to adaptations to governance systems and they seek to explore whether these changes brought positive or negative impacts for citizens. Drawing on research evidence from a range of countries, the authors find some innovations that have enhanced governance, particularly in terms of transparency and accessibility and inclusion of some groups (e.g., women, people with disability). Yet flaws were also illustrated, often relating to pre-existing governance problems. The chapter concludes by calling for research to continue to track and assess the value of doing governance differently in order to inform future mechanisms that widen access and inclusion. Part III comprises 10 chapters that explore success, failure and in-between – what the COVID-19 pandemic tells us about a range of different population groups and topic areas, what public management needs to do differently in these areas, and how this might be done. The first of these chapters is from Althaus, Casey and de Toca and is a success story outlining how a strengths-based approach was taken to responding to COVID-19 in Australian Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities. First Nations people are among the at-risk populations in a pandemic context but over the first 18 months of the pandemic infection rates and deaths were lower in this population than the non-Indigenous population. The chapter outlines how recognising and facilitating resources to support self-determination was crucial to this outcome. This demonstrates the benefits of a strengths-based approach to public management, one that the authors believe can be repeated across other populations to achieve better outcomes. There are also positive lessons in the chapter from Davies, who is Chief Superintendent in the Greater Manchester Police in the UK. He uses complexity theory and particularly the principle of non-linearity in planning for extreme events. The chapter demonstrates how contingency issues were not resolved by pre-existing plans but the interconnectivity of human networks. There are important lessons here for how complexity theory might be operationalised in contingency planning but also more broadly across business planning activities. Fenton-O’Creevy, Miller, Selby-Fell and Bowles also report on policing in the UK. They draw on literature relating to high reliability organisation theory and argue that the policing response was largely successful. This was driven by a number of factors including commitment to resilience, reluctance to oversimplify, ensuring sensitivity in operations and sensitivity to operational vulnerability. In addition, the informal use of lateral networks also played a significant role in increasing diversity of perspective and conceptual slack. Ultimately these authors conclude that an important lesson for public management is to place a premium on modes of planning that support the capability to monitor and adapt rather than predict and plan.

Introduction   13 Hannah, Attwell and Tchilingirian turn to the issue of trust and capacity-related challenges faced by governments in managing COVID-19 vaccine rollouts. Drawing on international evidence of vaccine rollouts they argue that crisis response is difficult if governments lack existing capacities and reserves of trust. In the case of the COVID-19 pandemic, countries that lack an existing effective system of childhood vaccination struggled with their COVID vaccination processes. Moreover, even within particular countries, entrenched local economic or social inequities further impeded these efforts. They conclude that rather than winding down health programs after the acute crisis, governments should pay attention to how they maintain momentum so that future crises will have reserves of capacity and trust to build on. Pérez Martín examines the governance of food security in Argentina. While this country is the third largest global exporter of food, moderate and severe food insecurity is rife and this only intensified during the pandemic. This has illustrated the challenges in governance of food security in this country, where the private sector is dominant and government has limited capacity to oversee complex markets. One positive to come out of the pandemic is the creation of new organisations that could play a role in securing domestic food supply, but it is too early to say what impact these will have. Bice focuses on the topic of infrastructure in her chapter, arguing that this has been a pandemic-recovery rallying cry in many countries that see investment in these initiatives as a way to stimulate the economy. This is not a new pattern, but one we have seen historically as a means of fiscal stimulus to create jobs and bolster public optimism in a better future. But in the rush to realise infrastructure developments, all too often sacrifices are made in project design, community acceptance, environmental security and long-term sustainability. The chapter uses Australian cases of infrastructure developments in the pandemic to draw out what the key lessons are for public managers leading such initiatives. Thani then features Ubuntu philosophy, which promotes the welfare of collective society and the maintenance of human dignity. The chapter argues for the expansion of Ubuntu principles in public management theory and practice in response to the challenges raised by the pandemic. In the Ubuntu tradition, the explicit acknowledgement and recognition of both the person to be served and the community that will benefit from the service promote interdependence and social responsibility. Thani makes the case that embracing an Ubuntu philosophy could have been a way to drive a more effective response to COVID-19 in Africa. It may have broader applications than this, given the similarities with a strengths-based approach as outlined by Althaus et al. Moloney turns to the published scholarship on COVID-19 in 19 small island states of the Caribbean and the Pacific. Small states are often overlooked by policy and administrative scholars, despite encompassing 20 per cent of the world’s states. Moreover, small states are often at the forefront of responding to crises such as climate change. Many outperformed their larger neighbours in the pandemic, seeing fewer infections and deaths. The chapter deploys a multilevel analytical tool to explore reasons for this success, but finds limited interrogation of the policy design and implementation levers in the research literature. Moloney argues for more research in small states to understand the drivers of this success. Zavattaro turns to the issue of death management and how public servants deal with this and families who have lost loved ones. The bureaucracy of death is often complex, yet the public management scholarship is largely silent on this topic. The COVID-19 pandemic significantly altered how many different cultures typically practise burial and mourning, especially during the acute phase. Drawing on research from the US with cemetery managers and medical examiners and coroners, Zavattaro finds more attention needs to be paid to the mental health of these public servants

14  Research handbook on public management and COVID-19 and sets out several areas where capacity needs to be more actively built in this workforce. Without this we are likely to see increasing levels of burnout and people exiting the workforce. The final chapter in Part III is from Dickinson and Smith, who explore the deployment of robot technologies in the pandemic. While these technologies are not new, the pandemic context has sped up calls for and adoption of these innovations. After all, robots do not get sick and cannot transmit COVID-19 to people so were seen as having the potential to fill workforce gaps and slow the spread of the virus. The public management literature has a tendency to be ‘techno-optimistic’ and while there are many positives that could be realised by these technologies, they are not without challenges. The chapter summarises the challenges for public management in terms of policy capacity, workforce and ethics. Part IV includes four chapters that use the COVID-19 pandemic as a lens that has revealed systemic inequalities, but can also be an opportunity to address the inequalities. Matthews and Edmiston explore the experiences of LGBT+ people during the pandemic. In doing so they argue that policy and public management responses typically appeal to the circumstances, needs and preferences of the majority in designing services and distributing resources. This can have unintended and exclusionary consequences, which they illustrate through research examining the experiences of LGBT+ people in the UK. They conclude the chapter by setting out a number of lessons that can be drawn on to help ‘queer’ the field of public management and in this process better serve this population. Yates and Dickinson focus on another group that are typically marginalised in public management – people with disability. This group is more at risk in a pandemic context for a range of health, social and economic reasons. The authors argue that these risks have been further intensified in the Australian context through the personalisation of disability services via individual funding mechanisms. Drawing on research from Australia they focus on two particular public management challenges in meeting the needs for people with disability: working across boundaries, and policy capacity. While there are some examples of positives for this group to come out of the pandemic, without a focus on these challenges disabled people remain at risk now and in future crisis situations. Dopazo, Daels and Henderson focus on the issue of gender mainstreaming and collaborative public management in Argentina. They argue that while there have been longstanding calls for action to address socio-economic inequities for women, the COVID-19 pandemic has given further traction and legitimacy to the movement as the care crisis was revealed. The Argentinian government adopted an approach to stimulus spending that recognised gender inequality and sought to deliver care infrastructure as part of the pandemic response. However, the authors argue that existing inertia in public management means that these initiatives may not realise their full intents. Lastly, Williams, Robinson, Smith, Kapiriri and Dickinson explore the topic of resource allocation and examine how useful priority setting processes are in an emergency. The COVID-19 pandemic meant that often hidden or implicit processes of resource allocation were forced to become explicit in demands for scarce resources such as PPE, vaccines, tests and intensive care services. Drawing on international evidence, the authors argue that while some of the issues faced by public managers were novel given the extent of demand, many of the challenges echoed those typically faced. The pandemic has merely exposed areas of under-investment and exacerbated both patterns of need and the challenges of meeting them. Unless priority setting is embedded in routine management and decision making it is unlikely to provide answers to resource allocation in times of crisis. In the final chapter we reflect on the key lessons of the various contributions in the book. We do this through six cross-cutting themes that position us to think about the future of the

Introduction   15 field: the implications of operating in a world increasingly marked by volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity (VUCA); central trade-offs and tensions raised by governing during the pandemic; what the pandemic has revealed about government capacity; who is talking and who is listened to during the pandemic era; the entrenched disadvantages revealed and exacerbated by COVID-19; and temporality and our ability to plan for protracted crises. Ultimately, we argue that the COVID-19 pandemic offers an opportunity for the field of public management to reflect and reorient, using the pandemic experience to address issues that the field has long faced.

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PART I PUBLIC PROBLEMS AND PUBLIC MANAGERS: THE CHALLENGES OF COVID-19 AND HOW THEY HAVE CHALLENGED PUBLIC MANAGERS IN THEIR ESTABLISHED ROLES

2. Pandemic challenges for public managers: juggling parallel crisis playbooks Arjen Boin and Paul ‘t Hart

PUBLIC MANAGERS IN TIMES OF CRISIS: KEEPING THE SHOW ON THE ROAD Public managers are tasked with running the nation’s administrative systems. Much has been written about the challenges they typically encounter when those systems confront a major crisis (Rosenthal et al., 1989; Boin et al., 2016). Public managers with little or no crisis experience may be overheard to say that every day has plenty of crises in store for them. They have a point. Many public managers are, indeed, skilled at ‘issue management’: dealing with news stories or research reports that cast the spotlight on some form of problem or dysfunction, carrying the potential for political embarrassment for responsible minister(s) and reputational damage to their agencies. They have learned to wield administrative, communicative and political tools to make such news-cycle-driven political commotion go away and protect their ministers. But crisis challenges are of a different order of magnitude. There is palpable danger, threat, fear, and possibly outrage; the urgency is very real. Key community values and aspirations – safety and security, prosperity and sustainability, justice and dignity, the peaceful resolution of conflicts – may be endangered if something is not done. An aroused community is looking to its government for answers and action that help mitigate the damage and restore a sense of normality as fully and as quickly as possible. Politicians have to make critical decisions and they have to do it now. Policymakers and public managers will have to act, in a high-stakes context and without a clear handle on the problem. They cannot buy time by commissioning a study or setting up ‘a process’, and have no fit-for-purpose scripts to guide them. They will have to ‘navigate’: improvise, adapt, experiment, learn as they go along, taking risks along the way (Stern, 2009). Public management researchers speak of a crisis when government and/or community actors recognize three particular features in an event or a development (Rosenthal et al., 1989). First, they realize that something really bad has happened or is about to happen, which can damage vital interests, structures or values, and therefore requires a robust response that is commensurate to the gravity of the threat. Second, they feel that there is no time to lose to initiate a response aimed at doing something about the threat or damage. There is no time for conventional processes of organizational and political problem-solving (research, committees, consultations, plans). Third, they are confronted with a plethora of ‘unknowns’ about what is going on; what the social, economic, institutional and (geo)political ramifications of the threat might be; and what can be done in response, now and later on. This combination of perceived threat, urgency, and uncertainty tends to rattle public managers (Boin et al., 2016). Their systems are built to deal with complex problems, reduce uncertainties and manage risk. But these only work – and they may work very well – when there 19

20  Research handbook on public management and COVID-19 is plenty of time to research, analyse, design, negotiate and forge compromises on policies, programs and projects. In crises, public managers don’t have time (or don’t take it). They are expected to act quickly and decisively, which some may embrace as an opportunity while it may discombobulate others. The pressures of being in a position of responsibility under such trying circumstances can run high. Depending on the level of stress evoked in them, the quality of their performance may vary. Experimental as well as historical research has revealed that there is a curvilinear relationship between levels (and duration) of ‘arousal’ and the performance of individuals, teams and organizations. When challenged beyond the boundaries of business as usual, they may at first rise to the occasion. But when the pressures become too high or last too long, their stress-tolerance limit is exceeded and they start to display coping behaviours – impatience, short-termism, stereotyping, overreliance on historical analogies, cognitive heuristics and cultural biases, escalation of commitment, aggression – that diminish rather than enhance their ability to perform effectively (Janis and Mann, 1977; Holsti 1979; Janis, 1989; Lebow, 1981). Are public managers prepared to deal with such debilitating stress? Post-mortem inquiries often provide evidence of poor preparedness, institutional vulnerabilities and fragile leadership. All too often risk management and emergency planning efforts are focused on ‘routine’ emergencies: those that have occurred before or are momentarily considered the most salient threat scenarios. Narrowing contingency planning in this manner keeps those actors that make up the heart of emergency response systems well within their comfort zones. It also prevents them from coming to terms with the much broader and more challenging demands of cascading mega-crises such as hurricane Katrina, the Boxing Day tsunami, the Icelandic volcanic ash crises, and COVID-19 (Helsloot et al., 2012; Parker, 2015; Boin et al., 2019, 2021b; Capano et al., 2022). As a result, they may well find themselves resorting to precisely the kind of dysfunctional coping behaviours that crisis planning and capacity-building efforts are supposed to mitigate.

PARALLEL PLAYBOOKS Decades of social-scientific research on government responses to natural and man-made disasters, terrorist attacks, civil unrest, economic breakdowns, institutional scandals and other forms of acute disruptions show that public managers draw from two markedly different playbooks: a technical–managerial and a strategic–political playbook (‘t Hart, 1993; Houlberg-Salomonsen and ‘t Hart, 2020). Think of these playbooks as mindsets, mental maps, and scripts that public managers use in times of crisis (see Table 2.1 for a summary). The technical–managerial playbook builds on the assumption that public managers are increasingly bound to encounter crises during their career and will experience them as highly challenging episodes. They must act and adapt in response to unexpected, undesirable, unimaginable, and often unmanageable situations. Crises test professional capabilities and improvisation skills, as they unleash pressures that far exceed those emanating from the normal hustle and bustle of executive life. Public managers are, of course, always in the business of balancing competing desiderata: delivering policies that are substantively sensible (‘evidence-informed’), broadly supported by their authorizing environments, and reasonably efficient given the perennial scarcity of critical resources (including their own attention). In crises, however, these desiderata have to be met

Pandemic challenges for public managers   21 Table 2.1

Two playbooks for public crisis management

The technical–managerial playbook:

The strategic–political playbook:

Crisis management as containment and restoration

Crisis management as purposeful navigation and exploitation

Essence:

Essence:

Acting and adapting in response to unexpected, undesirable,

Surviving and thriving in an episodic institutional vacuum, in

unimaginable, and often unmanageable situations.

which incumbent elites and extant structures, policies, and beliefs are questioned.

Crisis phase:

Crisis phase:

Making decisions, mobilizing resources, coordinating

Shaping crisis responses in the light of political, economic,

effort, communicating and delivering public services under

societal and agency values and interests, and in the context of

high-pressure conditions.

a momentarily de-legitimized institutional status quo.

Post-acute phase:

Post-acute phase:

Organization and delivery of long-term support and recovery

Manoeuvring in a plethora of formal and informal inquiry,

programs.

accountability, and learning exercises that pit defenders of the status quo against advocates of reform and renewal.

Ethical compass:

Ethical compass:

Value-rational – deontological (do your duty), care (do no

Goal-rational – consequentialist (do whatever it takes) and

harm) and constitutional (uphold institutional values).

opportunistic (pursue outcomes that protect strategic interests).

while the community and the government system are in a state of high arousal, confronted as they are with ‘real and present danger’, deep uncertainties, and no time to spare. The technical–managerial playbook emphasizes the need to legislate, plan, train, staff, and organize for these trying episodes. Rooted in age-old systems of emergency rule and civil defence, crisis preparedness has become a central objective of public management (especially since 9/11). The endeavour of crisis preparedness is to enhance both the robustness and the resilience of public service systems. Robustness refers to the ability to continue to effectively perform key functions of public administration even under trying and turbulent conditions (i.e. expanding the size of the peak performance part of the curve). Resilience pertains to the ability to ‘bounce back’ after having incurred debilitating hits exceeding the span of robustness (i.e. the ability to climb back on the right-hand side of the curve), for example through replacing rules-based administration by judgement-based improvisation, allowing frontline professionals to engage in workarounds and bottom-up coordination, deploying of slack resources, and rotating key personnel in and out of response operations (Roe and Schulman, 2008; Boin and Bynander, 2015). The technical–managerial playbook directs public managers to move the system back to ‘normality’ – preferably the status quo as it existed before the crisis. To that effect, they can seek to wield the considerable resources of government to organize and deliver long-term support and recovery programs. The pre-crisis status quo provides a clear aim; the required tools are ready at hand. The challenge is to protect the effort against the winds of change that inevitably rise in the wake of crisis. The technical–managerial playbook also offers an ethical compass for public managers. It emphasizes duty to organizational values and responsiveness to political imperatives. The latter strengthens a utilistic approach to governance, which also happens to thrive in the ‘normal’ life of a democracy. It is this utilistic approach that can push public managers towards making decisions that in hindsight will appear insensitive and even unethical. The strategic–political playbook takes as a starting point the goal of political survival in an episodic institutional vacuum. In a crisis, incumbent elites and extant structures, policies

22  Research handbook on public management and COVID-19 and beliefs may end up in the public and political firing line. By exposing fragility, biases, injustice, and other forms of institutional failure, crises offer an intricate mix of potential threats and opportunities for political actors. This playbook reminds public managers that they must serve and protect their political masters as they navigate this mixed-motive, high-stakes environment. This playbook instructs the public manager to cast her gaze not exclusively (or even primarily) on the operational realities and problems – what the crisis is doing to ‘real people’ and vital societal structures and processes – but also on the reputational, institutional, political ramifications of the crisis. They must scrutinize signals that help understand what the crisis is doing to the public mood, to the balance of power between competing advocacy coalitions in the policy arena, to the political capital (credibility, support, legitimacy) of key political leaders and parties, and to the institutional reputations of the various policy, regulatory, and delivery agencies involved. The premise in the strategic-political playbook holds that crises expose conflicts or vulnerabilities in the status quo, generating feelings of hurt, loss, betrayal, anxiety, anger and an appetite for change. This genie cannot be returned to the bottle without some form of social and political catharsis: remembrance and recognition, blame and penitence, reform and innovation. The strategic–political playbook directs the public crisis manager to view ‘events on the ground’ through the prism of the political processes by which those events are framed and given meaning. It is through so-called ‘framing contests’ that the futures of leaders, policies, and institutions are being (re)negotiated (Boin et al., 2009). Depending on the course of both on-the-ground events and the public and political discourses about what’s happening, why it’s happening, how well the system is coping with it, and what implications might flow from it moving forward, any crisis may harbour both threats and opportunities for governments, agencies and their leaders. In the strategic–political playbook, crisis management must take into account that societal and agency values may have come under threat. Public managers are guided to ‘uphold or realize a public agenda, function, or value in the face of the challenge and stress from turbulent events and processes through the flexible adaptation, agile modification, and pragmatic redirection of governance solutions’ (Ansell et al., 2021, p. 952). They can achieve this through a resilient approach, in which they ‘abandon the idea of restoring a past equilibrium, instead engaging in an adaptive search for a new, emerging order’ (Ansell et al., 2021, p. 952). Crisis management therefore involves not only ‘containment’ behaviours geared towards restoration but also ‘exploitation’ behaviours geared towards ‘creative destruction’ of pre-existing elites, policies and institutional arrangements (Boin et al., 2009; Boin and ‘t Hart, 2022). The strategic–political playbook focuses on the rebuilding of legitimacy in the post-crisis phase. This requires deft manoeuvring in a plethora of formal and informal inquiries, accountability, and learning exercises that pit defenders of the status quo against advocates of reform and renewal. The playbook does not prescribe revolution or conservation as a strategy, but directs public managers to contemplate which strategy best serves the legitimacy of the agency and its political master (cf. Boin and ‘t Hart, 2022). The strategic–political playbook can offset the ethical guidelines offered in the technical–managerial playbook. Public managers are cast as political actors serving political principles yet also concerned with their agencies’ reputations and interests. This consequentialist–opportunistic philosophy drives out the concerns for institutional responsiveness that the technical–managerial playbook highlights.

Pandemic challenges for public managers   23 Table 2.2

Crisis management playbooks and key concerns of public managers

Governance functions

Technical–managerial

Strategic–political

Sense-making

What is going on ‘on the ground’? What might

What’s the narrative in the media, political and

happen next and later?

public arenas?

Deciding and coordinating How can we mobilize operational capacity, and

Meaning-making Ending and accounting Learning

How can we initiate a response that is considered

get its component parts working in tune to stop

effective by victims, citizens, media, politicians and

the crisis and minimize its effects?

stakeholders?

How do we inform and engage the public to

How do we craft believable stories about past,

promote order and resilience?

present and future in the ongoing framing contest?

How do we restore the system by rituals of

How do we navigate between dampening and

inquiry, accountability and catharsis?

deepening the perception of crisis?

How can we improve our capabilities for

How can we leverage debriefs, inquiries and political

prevention, preparedness and response?

debates to adapt pre-existing practices, policies, and rules of the game?

The two playbooks clearly predispose towards different ways of running a crisis response. Depending on which playbook they rely on, public managers will approach the key executive tasks of crisis governance – sense-making (diagnosing the situation), decision-making and coordinating (getting things done), meaning-making (public communication), ending and accounting (moving towards closure), and learning (articulating implications and bedding them down) – in markedly differently ways. Table 2.2 summarizes the differences in approach for each executive task. In the remainder of this chapter, we illustrate the resulting tensions and challenges for public managers in the context of the COVID-19 crisis (Boin et al., 2021a). For space reasons, we can only elaborate on two of the five key tasks: sense-making and decision-making.

MAKING SENSE OF THE PANDEMIC In a crisis, public managers lead a collective effort of understanding its causes, dynamics, and potential consequences. The underlying idea – rarely questioned – is that better understanding leads to better policies. Public managers typically marshal the full resources of government to collect and analyse as much data as possible, in the shortest amount of time. This is, of course, a Herculean task. They have to create an ‘evidence base’ for policy at warp speed, knowing that misunderstandings may give rise to detrimental outcomes. As if this technical–managerial task is not hard enough, public managers must also follow the strategic–political playbook. This playbook sensitizes public managers to the reality that ‘objective knowledge’ does not exist, that what counts as accurate and relevant information is contestable, and that this contestability is part and parcel of unfolding crisis politics. Here, we point to three tensions in the sense-making process that materialized widely during the COVID-19 crisis. In a standard disaster scenario, where uncertainty is palpable at the outset, the machinery of government usually succeeds in taming that uncertainty in a matter of days and weeks. In the earliest stages of what later became the pandemic, medical practitioners, hospital staff, local and regional public health administrators in China, and then in other countries such as Japan, South Korea, Italy and Iran, faced patients with pneumonia symptoms triggered by an unknown viral agent. They needed to interpret scattered data of limited numbers of patients in real time, and decide whether and how to scale up their responses to it. National centres for

24  Research handbook on public management and COVID-19 disease control and university researchers jumped in to help understand. Knowledge about the new virus accumulated rapidly and was disseminated widely, often on a global scale. Even so, public managers produced starkly different assessments of the evolving threat. For example, policymakers in Wuhan initially downplayed the threat and muzzled doctors who begged to differ. In the Netherlands, doctors and managers in one particular hospital in Breda, in the hard-hit south of the country, were much quicker to grasp the scope of the unfolding threat and adjust their operations accordingly. They actively tried to shake the complacency of national health authorities, who initially persisted in a wait-and-see stance, by conveying the enormity and urgency of what was happening. Over time, the most striking sense-making feature – and analytical puzzle – of the pandemic became the persistence of surprise: experts, policymakers and public managers alike were ‘caught out’ not just in the (northern hemisphere) winter of 2020 but on numerous occasions thereafter; they were consequently slow to adjust their policies and governance arrangements and messaging in the face of changing threat ontologies. Even countries that pre-COVID-19 had been classified by the WHO as being highly prepared for pandemic contingencies were no exception. What Public Managers Need to Know versus What Politicians Choose to Focus On The technical–managerial playbook is clear: sense-making pertains to gathering all types of information that will help to understand the crisis. That will inevitably lead to a blurred picture of the situation, certainly in the early phase of a crisis. There are simply too many unknowns. The strategic–political playbook, by contrast, tells public managers to focus on what can be measured – and what counts politically. The one thing that was both easy to measure and politically relevant (providing a rough measure of success) was the number of intensive care beds filled with COVID patients. In countries where politicians prioritized the protection of public health facilities, that number became the yardstick of the response. If a measure could bring down the number of intensive care patients, it would receive priority status on the decision-making agenda. Other, harder-to-measure indicators of crisis consequences (think of youth wellbeing or long COVID) were ignored or took a back seat. This sense-making strategy helped to cut through the mountain of unknowns, and provided a clear criterion for assessing arguments and prioritizing proposed courses of action (will this bring the number of intensive care patients down?) Politically, this played well at the outset, when case numbers spiralled and levels of fear and anxiety in the population were high. But it also created for some politicians a cognitive groove and a policy mantra that proved difficult to abandon for public managers, even if it became less and less suited for understanding and navigating what rapidly became a multifaceted socio-economic crisis. Deference to Experts versus Politics of Expertise The pandemic presented public managers with an opaque, fast-moving and continuously mutating health threat with the potential to overwhelm the health system. The capacity to track and trace the virus was limited; the behaviour of the virus continued to surprise. Response strategies had to be invented on the fly. Public managers were confronted with a sense-making void.

Pandemic challenges for public managers   25 The void had to be filled by real-time expertise, drawn from and stitched together in (formal and emergent) networks. Government science bureaucrats and academic experts were suddenly thrust into critically important and highly visible roles in the sense-making process (e.g. Prettner et al., 2021). Chief medical officers became designated sensemakers-in-chief. These hitherto anonymous public health officials became household names by virtue of the massive media coverage of their analyses and the advice they provided to government leaders. Many became fixtures at government press conferences and parliamentary briefings. Some performed their scientific authority so well in the public spotlight that they were hailed by uncertainty-ridden publics as ‘evidence-loving rockstars’ who – unlike their political masters – could be relied upon to let the facts speak at all times (Cherneski, 2020). Public managers had to yield to the ‘real experts’. The halo of experts was soon undermined by the virus regularly outpacing their diagnostic capacity and predictions while the concerns about the social, economic and psychological ramifications of social distancing, lockdowns and curfews mounted strongly. These twin pressures eroded the expert monopoly initially granted to ‘white coats’: government dashboards were expanded and the range of expertise present in their advisory systems was broadened. It gave public managers an opportunity to reinstate control over the sense-making process. The addition of economic, behavioural and social-scientific experts created a more pluralistic and contentious sense-making process. While this may have contributed to more robust and wide-ranging diagnostic work, it also created new forms of uncertainty, new knowledge claims, and new policy advocacy (cf. Rosenthal and ‘t Hart, 1991). And it robbed politicians of a handy trope – ‘we follow the advice of our virologists’ – to justify far-reaching policies. It certainly created an even more complex knowledge environment for public managers, providing them with extra work and unforeseen opportunities to recalibrate techno-rational and strategic-political rationales. Acknowledging Protracted Uncertainty versus Providing Hope The technical–managerial playbook directs public managers to strive for facts and clarity while maintaining a wary eye on current unknowns and a range of future scenarios. In the strategic–political perspective, protracted uncertainty is hard to handle: it demonstrates that the authorities are (still) not in control, and it opens the door to policy controversies (Schön and Rein, 1994). In seeking a way out of this uncomfortable place, public managers may fall prey to motivated misperception (Jervis, 2017): seeing what they want to see, rather than acknowledging the reality of ongoing not-knowing. Policymakers found themselves on the horns of this sense-making dilemma when the public’s fear of the virus waned, fuelling impatience with lockdowns and other restrictions. Their experts were telling them that it was too early to tell whether the virological threat was subsiding. Pressing questions arose. How were they to weigh the ambiguous epidemiological picture against the equally opaque socio-economic and political picture? Were they to toe the technical–managerial line they had embarked upon at the outset of the crisis, or were they to become more responsive to the pervasive demand from businesses and citizens for the provision of ‘roadmaps’ out of the crisis? The strategic–political pull of convenient concepts such as ‘new normal’ and ‘post-COVID futures’ proved hard to resist, even though they put governments and communities alike on a treacherous path of believing that the worst had passed – an

26  Research handbook on public management and COVID-19 assumption that was shattered as the virus continued to morph, create new uncertainties and force governments to renege on their promise of imminent freedom.

MAKING CHOICES AND GETTING THINGS DONE Critical decision-making in times of crisis is the province of political leaders. Public managers play an important role in preparing the decision-making agenda and executing the decisions that crisis leaders make. The tandem of the efficient public manager and the political leader who dares the make the call is a key to crisis management success. The public manager’s task is hardly completed when the decisions are made. The art of orchestrating a response network is an additional, time-consuming challenge that falls within the lap of the public manager. In fulfilling these tasks, the public manager has to deal with and negotiate two sets of tensions, which flow from the two playbooks that vie for attention in a large-scale crisis. Constitutional versus Utilistic Decision Premises Making things happen under pressure is served by a utilistic mindset, which emphasizes that the end justifies the means. The strategic–political playbook helps to sustain this mindset. But public managers negate part of their professional self when they subjugate their loyalty to organizational and/or professional core values to the achievement of an overarching, short-term aim. Initial action focused on preserving lives by ‘flattening the curve’ and purchasing and distributing personal protective equipment (PPE) such as face masks. Following the technical– managerial playbook, public managers experimented with a variety of non-pharmaceutical interventions, seeking to find the physical resources and behaviour modification strategies that were deemed essential to mitigate the spread of the virus in the absence of a technical fix that would help eradicate it altogether. It became clear soon enough, however, that the prolonged imposition of non-pharmaceutical interventions might be perceived as a threat to various longstanding political aims with regard to economic wellbeing, education, the cultural sector, and societal safety. Public managers operating in these non-health domains found themselves torn between loyally implementing the intensive care-driven, public health pandemic response measures, and their growing concerns that the values, interests and voices of groups and sectors that were endangered by those measures were not given due consideration in the policymaking process. These tensions deepened as the crisis extended, and new infection peaks were met with new waves of prolonged restrictions. Moreover, during the Omicron stage of the crisis, local mayors and police leaders felt the squeeze of having to enforce a continued regime of restrictions in the face of dwindling public fear, which eroded support for and compliance with that regime. The imposition of vaccination mandates also illustrates this clash of ethical perspectives. From a utilistic perspective, vaccination mandates were a no-brainer. Every case prevented was a step towards the goal of controlling the pandemic. A constitutional mindset, however, demands that public managers also consider the proportionality of the crisis measures they impose. The heavy-handed nudging of vaccination-hesitant citizens via the imposition of vaccination mandates was one such measure that aroused intense opposition on the grounds of their alleged disproportionality. Again, local civil servants and authorities bore the brunt

Pandemic challenges for public managers   27 of having to decide whether and how to enforce these measures in a climate of eroding public support. They had to balance the constitutional value of safeguarding the legitimacy of the political system against the technical–managerial utilitarian imperative of increasing vaccination rates. Collaborative versus Competitive Coordination Most (but not all, for example Sweden) nations feature some type of legal provision that when a pandemic is called, executive powers are centralized both horizontally (within local, regional and national government) and vertically (sub-national authorities becoming subjected to a nationally driven crisis response operation). In the early months of the pandemic, this legal route to centralized policy coordination was matched by a groundswell of public and political support for public leaders – the so-called rally-around-the-flag effect. Centralized power was seen as instrumental to address acute problems. For instance, many countries set up a centralized purchasing and warehousing system to buy, buy, buy in order to resolve the glaring PPE shortages, across the world and as soon as possible (Wallenburg et al., 2022, pp. 32–33). The urge to get big things done quickly unleashed a licence to operate not only in public health but also in social and economic policymaking. Overnight, European governments abandoned commitments to budget deficit norms (even countries that had fought so hard to impose them during the Eurozone crisis), paving the way for the rapid creation and implementation of business and income support packages of unprecedented size. National economies were kept afloat by these massive, targeted cash injections. Public managers used their techno-rational skills to create fungible programs almost overnight, and rapidly obtained political authorization to roll them out. Remarkable improvisations were performed by policy departments working alongside delivery agencies, with economic and social policymaking joining up seamlessly with unprecedented ease and speed. In short, the pandemic saw many instances of public bureaucracies operating at the positive peak of the stress–performance curve. They belied the conventional wisdom that bureaucracy is the antithesis of agility and adaptivity, and synonymous with stovepipes (Jansen and Van der Voort, 2020). But as in all of the dozens of crises we have studied, in the pandemic too, there were also plenty of instances of tiresome coordination struggles (cf. Rosenthal et al, 1991; Boin and ‘t Hart, 2012; Boin and Bynander, 2015) that raise questions about both the technical–managerial professionalism and the strategic–political acumen of politicians and public managers alike. In the Netherlands, for example, the system of ‘regulated competition’ between care-providers ‘complicated cooperation between healthcare providers, particularly when production was at stake’ (De Graaff et al., 2021, p. 11). A tie-breaking intervention in the form of a national-level coordination centre for (COVID) patient distribution was launched by the sector itself, but even then there had to be ‘near constant negotiations with regions and hospitals to provide the necessary data and care to make distribution possible’ (De Graaff et al., 2021, p. 12). Similar patient flow coordination structures and processes were set up in other countries, triggering similar innovative solutions (e.g. Lunsmann et al., 2022) but sometimes also eliciting considerable interorganizational and inter-jurisdictional wrangling (Waring et al., 2021). Once the honeymoon period of generous public and political support for leaders had run its course, the relations between national, regional and local crisis response actors required ongoing high-maintenance. The strategic–political playbook dictated both the importance

28  Research handbook on public management and COVID-19 of keeping centralized powers in place and returning power to local officials. The technical– managerial playbook emphasized a functional adaptation to crisis needs (or lack thereof). The negotiation of these tensions caused an awkward yo-yo dynamic between political leaders, public managers and local officials. As soon as the curve had been flattened, response authority could be redelegated – at least from a technical-managerial perspective – to regional and local authorities. Having been surprised once or twice before, however, the strategic–political perspective cautioned against a quick scaling-down of centralized crisis arrangements. Implications for Research: COVID-19 Puzzles for Public Management Scholars The COVID-19 pandemic gave rise to countless instances of prudent contingency planning, astute improvisation, rapid innovation, responsive facilitation of community self-help initiatives, and courageous leadership (e.g. Independent Investigation Commission, 2021; OECD, 2022). The bigger picture, however, is that this transboundary, compound, fast-moving and protracted crisis exposed significant limitations in the robustness and resilience of public managers and their administrative systems, no matter which version of the crisis management playbook they were using. We recognize two critical questions that call for an intense research effort to help public managers prepare for future crises. First, we need to study the specific political–administrative challenges that are generated by creeping crises (Boin et al., 2021b). A crisis that emerges slowly yet in full view pitches the two playbooks against each other from the start. From a technical–managerial perspective, it is always clear when to intervene (e.g. when the threat reaches a certain threshold). From a strategic–political perspective, the definition of crisis is a political act. To understand how public managers can negotiate this tension, we need to bring together research findings from the risk management field, political science (framing and attention), crisis management (detection), and ethics (the prevalence of precautionary principles). The COVID-19 pandemic has demonstrated that public managers do not have a foundational perspective to negotiate the incubation phase of crises. Second, we need to study how public managers should prepare for a protracted acute crises and the shifting character of challenges that flow from it. Most countries have political– administrative crisis arrangements in place, but these are predicated on the assumption that crises are short-lived events. Little thought has gone into the maintenance of formal crisis arrangements for longer periods of time, prioritizing strategic–political over technical– managerial playbooks. It all becomes infinitely more complex when problems accumulate and cross administrative boundaries, evoking the need for improvised coordination arrangements that defy the idea of crisis centralization. It is up to the public manager to make all this work. Third, it follows that we need to study how public managers can return public administration to a sense of normalcy in the ‘long shadow’ that crises cast (cf. ‘t Hart and Boin, 2001). A quick return to business as usual is tempting, but also impossible. Lessons must be learned and implemented. The technical–managerial playbook comes in handy for this task. But there will be a series of inquiries and investigations that will mix ‘lessons learned’ with demands for accountability. The strategic–political playbook will remind public managers that this particular task must be handled in a very prudent way if public managers want to prevent the erosion of political and institutional legitimacy during bruising periods of public inquiry and possibly legal proceedings. We need applied research that helps public managers navigate these treacherous waters in a responsible way.

Pandemic challenges for public managers   29

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3. Reconsidering public management in a post-COVID world Zeger van der Wal

INTRODUCTION The ongoing COVID-19 pandemic is seen as one of the biggest crises since the Second World War. What started out as a mere public health issue, quickly morphed into a political, economic, and societal crisis of epic proportions. To this day, with the pandemic having gone through more and less intense and disruptive phases, these various interrelated crises rear their head in different shapes and forms, and with different impacts in various parts of the world. In addition, the pandemic has accelerated, initiated and also reversed global megatrends (Van der Wal 2017b) related to technology and the future of work; work–life balance, office environments and their interplay with housing and infrastructure needs; and the functioning of global supply chains amidst geopolitical shifts and signs of deglobalization, to name a few. Since the start of the pandemic in February 2020, government responses differed considerably depending on regime type (more authoritarian versus more democratic), geographic setting (island states versus landlocked countries), development stage, healthcare governance, and a multitude of other contextual and cultural factors and constraints (Skilling 2021). As a result, public health and economic outcomes have differed considerably between countries and regions. At the same time, it may still be early days to declare a particular response strategy superior or ‘best’. Major evaluation exercises are underway, but it is unclear whether we may still be in the midst of a new phase of this protracted crisis that may continue to challenge us for years to come. All this means we are currently far from able to assess the learning capabilities of the public sectors of various countries, and how these capabilities will affect future responses to either resurgent waves of the pandemic or new pandemics altogether. However, what has become clear once more is the significance of administrative capacity and public sector excellence as major factors in determining whether societies will emerge from this unprecedented situation with resilience and optimism, or despair and disconnectedness, and whether trust in government will increase or decrease. Autonomous and competent public managers who helm agencies, hospitals, emergency services, and key policy and strategy departments at the national, regional, and municipal level, are key producers of such administrative capacity. Not only do they design the response strategies communicated by their political principals to the larger public they also critically advise the same principals about the pros and cons of the policy options available. At least as important is the role of public managers in ensuring regular services continue to operate and administrative processes are maintained, adapted and improved in order to provide stability, reliability, and continuity of governance. This book chapter focuses on those public managers, the unsung administrative heroes leading us through times of crisis, and peacetime for that matter, from behind the scenes. Building on the state of the art in public management research with the aim of formulating 31

32  Research handbook on public management and COVID-19 practitioner recommendations as well as scholarly implications of the COVID-19 crisis, this chapter identifies three key leadership skills paramount to public managers in times of crisis: 1. 2. 3.

Engaging both supportive as well as adversarial stakeholders with the corresponding vocabulary and platform to leverage their input and buy-in; Responding strategically and proactively to cues from political players; and Harnessing and optimizing the potential of collaborative networks consisting of actors with divergent yet complementary worldviews, working styles, and interests.

ADMINISTRATIVE CAPACITY AS KEY COMPARATIVE ADVANTAGE Clearly, from the start of the pandemic onwards, governments across the globe have been struggling to come to terms with how they can most effectively respond to ongoing events, while being overwhelmed by competing expert assessments, key public value trade-offs and capacity constraints. Administrative capacity is a major factor in determining whether societies will emerge from this unprecedented situation with resilience and optimism, or despair and disconnectedness, and whether trust in government will increase or decrease. However, media attention almost exclusively concerns political leaders operating in the spotlight; the front stage of government. The backstage of government hardly receives attention – until there is disaster or inquiry, upon which the bureaucracy is almost without exception negatively portrayed. Moreover, common discourse often undervalues the importance of well-functioning bureaucracies, or even takes the form of ‘bureaucrat bashing’ (Garrett et al. 2006; Goodsell 2018). As a result, we hear little about the public managers who helm our public agencies and service delivery chains critical to the success or failure of politically forged crisis strategies, which they had to frantically translate into law and policy and implement to the best of their abilities. Traditionally, they do so behind the scenes, in accordance with long-established traditions of separating politics from administration (Nalbandian 1994; Svara 2001; Wilson 1887). Making claims about which countries have employed the best mitigation and recovery strategies remains tricky to this day. However, countries that consistently occupy the top rungs of global governance rankings, such as Singapore, New Zealand, Australia, Taiwan, and Denmark (Rothstein 2011; Van der Wal 2017a, 2019) seem to have addressed the COVID-19 crisis relatively swiftly, effectively, and competently, at least in terms of fatalities and infection rates while balancing economic damage. Clearly, the quality of government matters, perhaps more than ever before. Autonomous and competent public managers are primary actors contributing to the quality of government (Fukuyama 2013). This certainly also goes for healthcare emergency situations, as studies have shown (Henderson 2013). This chapter addresses those public managers, the unsung administrative heroes leading us through times of crisis, mainly from behind the scenes. Translating the state of the art in public administration literature, it identifies three key competencies paramount to public managers in times of crisis which may reshape our thinking about what public managers (need to) do in the years and decades to come. First, this chapter outlines the characteristics of the current operating environment for public managers. It then discusses why stakeholder engagement

Reconsidering public management in a post-COVID world  33 and communication, political astuteness, and collaborative capacity are essential for sailing the ship of government through times of crisis. Lastly, it provides a set of action points for public managers seeking to further perfect and apply these competencies, and some suggestions for our scholarly understanding of public management and how we study it.

A VUCA OPERATING ENVIRONMENT The operating environment created by the COVID-19 pandemic bears all the characteristics of a VUCA world (Bennett and Lemoine 2014; Johansen 2007), characterized by volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity. Indeed, the VUCA concept first emerged in military circles in the post-Cold War environment of the early 1990s (Hartley 2018), precisely to stimulate thinking about planning and preparing for operating environments increasingly characterized by so-called wild cards and black swans. These are unlikely, high-impact events that are complex, expensive, and seldom politically expedient to anticipate and plan for (Ho 2008, 2010; Petersen 2000). The COVID-19 pandemic clearly is such an event, if there ever was one. It presents governments with a super wicked problem (Levin et al. 2012). The VUCA concept stipulates that managers have to deal with a range of ‘known unknowns’ and ‘unknown unknowns’, not only in terms of projected outcomes, but also in terms of the required skills, strategies, and parameters. Issues surrounded by volatility and uncertainty are more ‘known’, but challenging in their own right. They require a certain degree of flexibility and adaptiveness as well as foresight and strategic planning capabilities. Situations characterized by complexity and ambiguity are least ‘known’, requiring experimentation and piloting as well as the engagement of unconventional expertise. Clearly, a VUCA operating environment creates challenges for public managers tasked with crafting responses to events for which no clear solutions exist. At the same time, however, such environments also provide exciting opportunities for innovation in public service delivery and governance arrangements, in collaboration with citizens and vanguards of change from other sectors. The cliché ‘never waste a good crisis’ is often heard these days. In order to turn various new challenges into opportunities, public managers need to master and display a variety of competencies. The remainder of this chapter discusses three essential competencies deemed crucial in times of crisis, as suggested by research evidence: being able to interact with a wide variety of stakeholders and communicate major policy shifts in a timely and strategic way; leveraging and sometimes anticipating political cues in a context of immense public scrutiny and a degree of crisis weariness; and maximizing collaborative potential within and beyond the public sector. The prominence, as well as operationalization of the three competencies, is illustrated with practical examples in the context of the COVID-19 crisis.

34  Research handbook on public management and COVID-19 Table 3.1 Level of allegiance Advocates

Stakeholder allegiance worksheet How to manage ● Keep on side through active engagement ● Use their input directly and visibly in policies and proposals

Followers

● Increase their understanding of benefits ● Avoid temptation to exploit or take support for granted

Indifferent

● Identify and address knowledge gaps ● Keep informed and updated across platforms

Blockers

● Court and convince of mutual interests and agendas ● Actively explain and frame to overcome fears

Adversaries

● Counter frames and arguments ● Develop deep understanding of their values and interests

THREE KEY COMPETENCIES FOR PUBLIC MANAGERS IN TIMES OF CRISIS Leveraging Stakeholder Input Explaining and selling unprecedented and unpopular measures to a wide variety of increasingly anxious and impatient stakeholders is a Herculean task. Clearly, public managers need to sensibly assess how stakeholders may respond to plans and programs, and how they can move stakeholders in the desired direction and acquire exchange legitimacy and influence legitimacy (Suchman 1995). Classification and prioritization are key here, as they largely determine engagement and participation strategies (Bryson 2004; Fung 2015; Nabatchi 2012). After mapping stakeholder dynamics and interrelationships, public managers need to come up with strategies to manage their stakeholder allegiances, in order to enlarge their support base while minimizing the number of adversaries as well as the adversaries’ powers to derail strategies and decisions. Strategic stakeholder management ultimately aims to grow allegiances by convincing indifferent stakeholders to become followers or even advocates. In the past few years, we have been able to observe first-hand just how challenging this proves to be. For instance, in the polarized political environment of the United States, where individual cities and states communicate, implement, and phase measures differently, small groups of ideological adversaries of differentiated lockdown measures may be largely unresponsive to evidence-based counter frames. At the same time, widely respected epidemiologists and virologists who are among the few senior bureaucrats operating centre-stage now should seek to maximize their credibility in acting as advocates of sensible lockdown measures, largely based on the latest medical know-how, to enhance the follower category, nudging indifferent stakeholders to move over to the follower category. In the US, the chief medical officer to the President, Anthony Fauci, was the classic example of having to shift between centre stage and backstage depending on then President Donald Trump’s mindset, and the subsequent change of administration. For many, he became a lightning rod for views on the ‘right’ policies and practices during COVID. Table 3.1 provides a basic stakeholder allegiance worksheet that shows how managers can manage and engage stakeholders at various levels of allegiance in times of crisis (Van der Wal 2017b, 71). Interestingly, much of the ‘traffic’ is likely to take place towards the indifferent category, the average citizen or silent majority, where public managers may have to compete

Reconsidering public management in a post-COVID world  35 with other actors seeking to co-opt these stakeholders into their sphere of influence and support. An illustrative example here is how the administrative leadership of the Singapore Tourism Board (STB) all of a sudden had to deal with the complete stop of foreigners travelling into the highly globalized city-state, whose success narrative has been built on being an entrepôt and ‘perennial stop-over city’ with people travelling in and out 24/7. Their CEO explains (City Nation Place 2020): The SARS crisis has taught us the importance of frequent and transparent communications with both our industry partners and visitors from the onset of the crisis. Since the start of the COVID-19 outbreak, we have regularly shared the latest health and travel advisories, kept up our engagement with them to explain our policy decisions and reassured them that Singapore remains committed to our long-term partnership. Apart from stepping up our communications efforts overseas, we know it is critical to support the industry in a timely manner during times of need. Another significant difference from SARS is the prevalence of digital and social media, which are key channels for us to communicate with Singaporeans and the international community. We have to manage these channels in real-time, as that is the expectation from our audiences today.

Indeed, in order to maximize allegiances in the current operating environment, public managers have to develop antennae for stakeholder dynamics, and become active storytellers who communicate in real-time on all platforms they have at their disposal. These new competencies will have to complement, and in some cases replace, more traditional ones such as bargaining and negotiating (Rhodes 2016), as governments can no longer assume they start from a position of superior authority, power, and information. Moreover, communication between public managers and stakeholders consists of bi-directional exchanges (Mergel 2010, 2012), with public managers having to monitor, respond, and adapt, rather than simply broadcast their points of view (Garnett and Kouzmin 2007). In other words: they have to skilfully frame their messaging. In political science and the communication sciences, the topic of framing has received ample scholarly attention (Chong and Druckman 2007; Jacoby 2000), dating back to McLuhan’s (1967) seminal work, The medium is the message. More recently, public administration scholars have started to show interest in framing (De Bruijn 2011). Even though most of their examples concern politicians, particularly in times of crisis, public managers have to increasingly ‘go out there’ themselves to persuade other public, private, and civic actors to support their policies, programs, and proposals (for an overview of international examples, see Van der Wal 2017b). An additional crucial communicative tool is the ability to successfully brand policies and programs (Eshuis and Klijn 2012, 11–12). Brands bind because they create loyalty among actors and networks (Eshuis and Klijn 2012). Indeed, right after it became clear that the protracted crisis environment required severe measures and thus long-term stakeholder buy-in, various governments began to frequently and consistently communicate uniting, and at the same time sometimes country-unique, slogans and labels such as ‘Intelligent Lockdown’ and ‘Beating Corona Together’ (the Netherlands), ‘Let’s All Do Our Part’ (Singapore), and ‘Stay Home, Save Lives, Protect the NHS’ (the United Kingdom). Such deliberate policy branding aims to evoke a sense of belonging, positive association, and collective identity across stakeholders with sometimes competing interests.

36  Research handbook on public management and COVID-19 Anticipating and Leveraging Political Cues Public managers in times of crisis have to be politically astute in order to critically advise their political masters; to speak truth to power without risking getting side-lined. This competency, defined by Hartley and colleagues (2015, 198) as ‘deploying political skills in situations involving diverse and sometimes competing interests and stakeholders, in order to achieve sufficient alignment of interests and/or consent in order to achieve outcomes’, is relevant to managerial work across sectors, particularly for those in more senior positions (Hartley et al. 2015). Being neutral about political outcomes, political astuteness pertains to ‘small p’ as well as ‘big P’ politics – the informal as well as the formal, according to Hartley et al. (2015, 197). Although the use of ‘political’ extends to political interactions across a wide range of issues, arenas, and stakeholders; reading and accommodating the styles, agendas, and stakeholder allegiances of administrative and political bosses is particularly crucial. We see these dynamics playing out on our TV screens every day. Moreover, an ever-important responsibility of public managers in times of crisis is to keep their heads cool, to maintain the long view, and to ensure a degree of institutional continuity and policy consistency. It is far from easy to successfully enact this response to the current turbulence bestowed upon us by the pandemic, not in the least given how political leaders respond to and often add to this turbulence. Indeed, the crisis places increased responsibility upon public managers to maintain a sense of continuity and neutrality in managing institutions and policies, both in terms of situational ‘emergency management’ as well as institutional ‘crisis leadership’ (‘t Hart 2014, 137). In other words, being politically astute does not mean one can neglect to safeguard important institutional qualities and values in times of turbulence. At the same time, crises provide opportunities for maximizing bureaucratic power and influence (Frederickson and Matkin 2007; Partridge 1974) by consistently pushing sound policy proposals and maintaining order, continuity, and collegiality in turbulent times. Indeed, public managers have always derived much of their legitimacy and authority from domain knowledge and experience, and studies show that expertise is among the values considered most important by public managers in various countries (Van der Wal 2008; Yang and Van der Wal 2014). Politicians, often lacking such expertise, depend on public managers for authoritative advice and support (Aberbach et al. 1981), and political executives eagerly outsource the organization of sufficient expertise to their administrative apparatus. However, the perceived importance of domain expertise for public managers has ebbed away as a consequence of increasing job rotation and emphasis on managerial skills within senior executive services across the globe, and increased political populism and polarization (‘t Hart and Wille 2006; Van der Wal 2017b). This, in turn, may have weakened their positions of authority vis-à-vis political bosses. Particularly in times of crisis, various clusters and ‘camps’ of public managers and their constituents will always compete for attention and authority. In the Netherlands, for instance, the Prime Minister characterized the recommendations of the Outbreak Management Team (OMT), populated by highly credentialed leaders from the medical space, as ‘sacred’ during the first two months of the crisis. Particularly when it became clear that the crisis would be protracted and morph into the stages of economic recovery and long-term social adjustment (Boin et al. 2016), academic experts, other parts of the bureaucracy, and opposition parties argued for an Impact Management Team (IMT), to provide a more diverse inflow of advice.

Reconsidering public management in a post-COVID world  37 Table 3.2

Public managers as authoritative experts: challenges and strategies

Challenges

Strategies

1. Open data

Filter, translate and broker public data presented to political and

Data from a wide variety of sources are publicly available and

administrative masters.

easily accessible. 2. Competitive advice

Collaborate with but set conditions and norms for external

Consultants, international agencies, interest groups, lobbyists,

advisors to your masters, and penalize non-compliance.

and colleagues eagerly offer expertise to political and administrative bosses. 3. ‘Politics of expertise’

Organize channels and allegiances of expertise, rather than losing

Political and administrative bosses and professional groups

energy over continuous battles with actors that may be hard to

contest expertise and evidence, certainly in times of crisis

convince anyway.

So far, no such team has been formally established, but the government has broadened the circle of experts it consults (Kieskamp 2020). In addition, the abundance of publicly available data, made accessible by information brokers with more or less altruistic intentions, completes the picture of today’s competitive public sector information landscape. As a result, competing streams of information and policy advice find their way up to the highest echelons (Pollitt and Bouckaert 2017). Table 3.2 lists three key challenges for public managers striving to remain authoritative experts, and suggests actions and approaches for mitigating these challenges. Clearly, both expertise and managerial skills are important, but the importance of being viewed as a politically astute expert should not be underestimated if public managers want to remain relevant, legitimate, and authoritative when managing up, certainly in a crisis context in which evidence and expertise are constantly disputed. Maximizing Collaborative Potential A crisis forces public managers to more closely collaborate within different, sometimes ad-hoc networks consisting of state and non-state actors – citizens, NGOs, businesses, charities, and social enterprises. For over two decades, scholars have argued that collaborative public management is not just a necessity, but an inevitability (Agranoff 2006; Emerson et al. 2012; McGuire 2006; Bryson et al. 2015). This is not to say, however, that public managers and their political masters wholeheartedly embrace this notion. In fact, the urge to simplify, reduce, monopolize and bureaucratize super wicked problems such as the COVID-19 pandemic is still omnipresent. Effective collaboration requires managers to bring together widely divergent agendas, norms, working styles, world views, and opportunistic motives of partners. Just think of the initial battles between and within governments over the purchase of medical equipment, the support of specific industries, and attempts to acquire vaccines: while individual governments would have benefited from more collaboration, they behaved in the exact opposite way in the context of ‘every country for itself’. Various producers of medical equipment utilized the environment of scarcity to increase prices substantially. Moreover, various entrepreneurial initiatives emerged, with individuals and ad-hoc business ventures without any experience in producing medical equipment assertively offering their services to many European countries, some well-intended but others much less so (Witte

38  Research handbook on public management and COVID-19 2020; Lin and Xiao 2020; Clark 2020; Sexton 2020). In many cases, public managers became reluctant to engage with citizen initiatives as well as unknown producers in other countries for fear that amateur contributions would degrade service quality, an observation congruent with earlier research (Alford and O’Flynn 2012, 132–133). As the crisis now moves into a different phase, we witness increasing collaboration between and within bureaucracies with regard to the major policy challenges that now present themselves – such as the nature of collectively funded stimulus packages (BBC 2020), funding of transboundary research into medical and non-medical aspects of the COVID-19 pandemic (Mervis 2020; European Parliament 2020) – and between public and private actors in developing and providing access to vaccines (European Commission 2020). One important issue that is sometimes overlooked in the vast literature on collaborative management is worth mentioning in the current context: public managers struggle first and foremost with getting collaboration going within their own government, certainly when the ‘we’re in this together’ sentiment present during the initial crisis phase fades (Boin et al. 2016). As public managers assume that the interests and agendas of non-governmental partners differ from theirs, their expectations for these partners may be lower but also more easily exceeded (Van der Wal 2017b). Despite years of talking about ‘whole of government’ and ‘joined up government’ (see Christensen and Lægreid 2007), this is still not the norm, even more so for collaboration in supranational, multi-level and cross-national settings such as the United Nations, the World Health Organization or the European Union, as displayed all too painfully in this present time. As such, many of the challenges and competencies discussed here apply just as much to realizing intra-governmental and inter-governmental collaboration – a key precondition for successful multi-sectoral partnerships (see also Howes et al. 2015). Practical Lessons The COVID-19 crisis has created a range of challenges for public managers in practice but also brought to the forefront important lessons for the craft of public management. From the overview in this chapter, five action points for public managers in times of crisis are as follows. 1. Invest in communicative capacity and social media skills to complement more traditional administrative crafts, through recruitment as well as the development of existing cohorts. 2. Genuinely make efforts to engage stakeholders (supportive and adversarial), as winning them over can produce significant long-term gains in terms of legitimacy and support. 3. Maintain a nodal position in competing streams of advice targeting political masters, as providing credible and usable information in a timely manner allows for a more critical stance when needed. 4. Develop the mindset needed to balance control and flexibility in collaborating with other actors and sectors, while realizing not all risks can be mitigated in seeking added value from (ad hoc) partners. 5. Invest in knowledge management tools and systems in order to optimize streams of evidence and advice needed in advising political principals on the best policy options, as well as counter assaults from assertive stakeholders on the expertise and experts employed for policy evidence.

Reconsidering public management in a post-COVID world  39 None of these is easily achieved; however, each is important in building the administrative capacity to cope with increasingly complex times. Moving Forward: Implications for our Field of Study The COVID-19 experience and its significance for public managers further exacerbate the need for innovative scholarly thinking about the competencies and roles of public managers in the years ahead, which will undoubtedly be turbulent. Geopolitical and economic events, as well as the continuing challenges posed by climate change, seem to be shaping an ‘age of disruption’ that requires high-level administrative capacity in areas such as foresight and building institutional resilience. What does this disruptive organizational environment imply for the way in which we conceptualize and study public management and public managers? First, the COVID-19 experience has shown the importance of being able to blend traditional, Weberian administrative craftsmanship with skills such as counselling, stewardship, prudence, judgement, diplomacy, and political nous (Rhodes 2016, 638), with efficient, performance and contract-based managerial behaviour (Lynn 2006), as well as collaborative leadership focusing on relationship-building and advancing cross-sectoral networks (Agranoff 2006; McGuire 2006). It is not one size fits all or one set of administrative skills simply replacing another. Resilient and adaptive public managers will have to flexibly combine and switch between repertoires, which implies that public management scholars too should refrain from all too easily suggesting chronological, universal shifts between paradigms, let alone being dogmatic in their approaches. Second, the past few years have not just reiterated how much administrative capacity matters, leading some to proclaim that ‘the state is back’. Moreover, the current disruptive environment and the innovative and creative solutions it requires should urge us to rethink the traditional ways in which public management scholars have conceptualized boundaries between sectors, organizations, and the skills and values required to excel in public, private, as well as third sector environments. Boundaries will shift and be redrawn, in ways which are sometimes unimaginable today. Privatization of certain sectors and industries may be followed by de-privatization, divestiture or public reinvestment, and new types of networks may come and go alongside the challenges they seek to address. Increasingly, tri-sector collaboration will prove to be a potent mode for tackling the major policy challenges of our era (see, for example, Lovegrove and Thomas 2013). These developments will provide exciting new avenues for scholarship, with multi-disciplinary efforts combining insights from public administration, management, business studies, design studies, charity and social impact studies reshaping fields and scholarly thinking about what organizations and managers are and can be.

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4. What COVID-19 showed us about populism, democracy, and performance: the case of the United States1 Naim Kapucu and Donald Moynihan

Crises are times when people look to their political leaders for action, as these figures are ultimately responsible for and accountable to the public. For a president who was a master of shaping political narratives, COVID-19 offered United States President Donald Trump an opportunity to use his messaging skills to steer the public response. Instead, the pandemic revealed President Trump’s longstanding inability to manage governance processes, as reflected in a series of failures in decision-making, communication, collaboration and coordination, and control. These failures were partly a function of Trump’s populist approach to government, which emphasized a disdain for expertise, prioritized political loyalty to the leader, and embraced conspiratorial misinformation. The federal crisis response and management system in the United States (US) is polycentric with multiple decision-making centers; this requires collaborative leadership at the top to facilitate collective action to coherently implement national policies and plans. Early recognition of the threat helps leaders’ decision-making during crisis response. Making timely decisions and effectively communicating those decisions with other partner agencies and the public at large will help, for example, control the spread of COVID-19. During the pandemic, the haphazard national leadership in these domains and lack of coordinated action at the federal level caused similar inconsistency among emergency management and public health counterparts at state and local levels. The absence of effective presidential leadership encouraged substantially conflicting perspectives and methods among state and local governments and undermined trust in public institutions. This chapter examines the leadership qualities needed to successfully manage crises from a public management perspective and compares those qualities with President Trump’s actions during the COVID-19 pandemic in the US. The impact of the president’s populist strategies will also be highlighted. The chapter will address the critical role of decision-making, communication, collaboration and coordination, and control at the federal level in response to the COVID-19 pandemic crisis in the US. We will also outline the emergency and crisis management system and context, showing how policies and frameworks were (or were not) implemented in the US in response to COVID-19.

A POPULIST PRESIDENT At the beginning of 2020, Donald Trump’s re-election prospects looked promising. He weathered an impeachment without losing support among his base. The economy continued to prosper. His constant fundraising since becoming president had established a forbidding 43

44  Research handbook on public management and COVID-19 financial advantage over Democrats still searching for an opponent. While President Trump was a uniquely divisive figure, the coalition that elected him four years earlier looked to be in place for 2020. By the end of 2020 President Trump lost the electoral college by the same margin he won by in 2016 and lost the popular vote by an unprecedented seven million votes. About 60 percent of Biden voters identified COVID-19 as a top issue (Altman, 2020). Voters had reason to be upset. By the time President Biden was inaugurated, 400,000 Americans had died, more than any other country in the world. The US response appeared chaotic and disjointed. The type of intense lockdowns of physical movement seen in European and Asian countries were not attempted, and even milder versions faced protests. Low-cost public health measures such as mask-wearing were controversial. Bureaucracies struggle with novel tasks, especially ones that do not fit neatly into the responsibility of any single unit or level of government. In these situations, the importance of political leadership is magnified. Leaders play an outsize role in providing a sense of urgency and direction to public officials, in communicating to the public, and in making strategic decisions in complex and chaotic conditions (Blondin and Boin, 2020). There is no doubt that any US political leader would have struggled amidst the pandemic, and that aspects of the US political system – intense polarization in an intergovernmental system that divides power and a strong emphasis on personal liberties – made a coordinated response harder. But President Trump presented himself as a businessman rather than a politician; even his critics acknowledged his ability to shape media narratives. Such skills seemed readymade for a crisis that involved steering a public response and reassuring nervous citizens. Trump’s failure can be partly attributed to an undisciplined and chaotic leadership style (Moynihan and Roberts, 2021) (see also Bromfield, this volume for a discussion of the Trump administration’s handling of uncertainty and ambiguity in the COVID-19 response). But just as Trump’s political appeal was intertwined with populism, so too was his leadership style. An influential contemporary definition of populism is a thin-centered ideology that considers society to be ultimately separated into two homogeneous and antagonistic camps, ‘the pure people’ versus ‘the corrupt elite,’ and which argues that politics should be an expression of the volonté générale (general will) of the people. (Mudde and Kaltwasser, 2017, p. 6; see, Bauer et al., 2021 for a longer treatment of populism and public administration)

The definition of populism underlines certain traits that can be observed in Trump’s management of the crisis. Bureaucrats and experts serve as a foil – part of “the corrupt elite” to rail against. Bureaucratic public health directives based on expertise will be taken less seriously by the populist leader who has built a following by attacking bureaucrats. While downplaying expertise, populists instead rely on loyalty as the primary basis for rewarding followers. Those questioning the leader are apt to be sidelined and punished even if their claims are evidence-based, while unquestioning loyalists will be promoted and rewarded even if they lack qualifications. Populists are also more apt to exploit and traffic in conspiracies about shadowy elites trying to control the people, a tendency at odds with the need for clear and evidence-based communication in public health crises. The “them vs. us” nature of populism also eroded Trump’s ability to craft a unifying message alongside his trademark divisive attack on perceived political enemies. As we shall demonstrate, it was not just Trump who showed such traits – they also extended to many of his political team tasked with stopping the pandemic.

What COVID-19 showed us about populism, democracy, and performance  45 Kay Goss (2016), former Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) assistant administrator, considers the following in determining the roles of presidents in emergency and crisis management: “personal experience, knowledge base, appointments, vision, speech, personal time, and compassion.” A president’s personal experiences as an elected official at the state or local level or as a citizen can impact his or her effectiveness in crisis response. Presidents might have a basic knowledge of emergency and crisis management, but they should learn the national preparedness system and core polices and practice. Additionally, appointing competent professionals to critical emergency and crisis management roles and having a clear vision for emergency and crisis management agencies help determine a president’s emergency governance success. The president appoints over 4,000 top federal employees, more than 1,200 of whom require US Senate approval (Kettl, 2020). It did not help that President Trump kept senior positions unfilled or appointed people who were either hostile to the mission of federal government or lacked the competence to run the agency. Trump’s distrust of qualified candidates with expertise necessarily diminished the size and quality of the pool of potential hires. Trump also denigrated the credibility of public service professionals (Moynihan and Roberts, 2021). All of this provided an inauspicious backdrop to the COVID-19 response. Evaluating leadership responses to crises is always a somewhat risky endeavor in the counterfactual. Crisis response research (Boin and ‘t Hart, 2003; Comfort, 2007; Kapucu et al., 2011; Van Wart and Kapucu, 2011) emphasizes the following categories of crisis leadership qualities, which we use in this chapter to evaluate Trump’s leadership during the COVID-19 pandemic in the US: ● Decision-making: anticipate potential risks, make timely and evidence-based decisions in conjunction with key stakeholders. ● Communication: provide consistent, scientific, and evidence-based messages, use multiple media forums, be transparent about progress and challenges. ● Collaboration and coordination: large scale crises are beyond the capacity of any single public agency, or even government, and therefore require the capacity to coordinate key actors, especially in the intergovernmental setting of the federal system. ● Control: eventually flattening the curve and taking full control of the spread of the virus and recover to return to normal operations as quickly as possible. Before we examine the Trump administration against these four standards, we briefly summarize the evidence on the COVID-19 spread in the US and outline the existing crisis response frameworks and infrastructure.

COVID-19 IN THE UNITED STATES The COVID-19 outbreak was novel, silent, and undetected for months, becoming a global health crisis that posed unprecedented challenges to public health and the economy. A novel coronavirus emerged in China late in November 2019, spreading exponentially across the globe by early 2020. President Trump declared a national emergency on March 13, 2020. Figure 4.1 depicts the spread of cases from that first case until the US reached a grim 500,000 death milestone on February 23, 2021. After initially “flattening the curve” in April, the US saw major surges that coincided with national holidays in early July (Independence

46  Research handbook on public management and COVID-19 Day), November (Thanksgiving holiday), and December (Christmas and New Year celebrations). We also observed a continuous decline during late January and February in 2021 (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 2022). Compared with other countries, the substantial increase in COVID-19 cases in the US between late October 2020 and early January 2021 was a clear outlier.

Source:

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention COVID Data Tracker.

Figure 4.1

COVID-19 cases in the US

In responding to a crisis such as a pandemic, the president is responsible for leading, to varying degrees, 15 cabinet-level departments, including the Department of Homeland Security (DHS) and the Department of Health and Human Services (HHS), and over 60 independent agencies and government corporations. As we observe substantial increases in the number of crises and catastrophes, emergency management and crisis response have become a quintessential role of government (Waugh, 2000). The government’s primary responsibility is to reduce the vulnerability of and risk of harm to its citizens (Ansell, 2019). Crises that are uncertain, dynamic, multi-scale, complex events are a serious test for leaders and can define their administration. Leadership failure to prevent or reduce the impact of crises will substantially delay recovery and a return to normalcy (Kapucu and Van Wart, 2008). Presidents in the US are ultimately crisis managers but ones who lack the time, expertise, and experience to govern crisis operations. Instead, their professional appointees actually manage crises. Presidential crisis leadership requires the competency to distinguish the needs and priorities of unexpected shocks of crises, the selection and appointment of well-qualified

What COVID-19 showed us about populism, democracy, and performance  47 emergency and crisis management professionals with a strong training and background, and the execution of programs, plans, and frameworks that facilitate federal coordination. Successful execution of crises management has a direct correlation with a leader’s overall experience, reputation, and approval by the public and experts (Kapucu et al., 2011).

CRISIS DECISION-MAKING Decision-making is one of the most critical competencies of crisis leaders (Blondin and Boin, 2020; Van Wart and Kapucu, 2011). A lack of competent decision-makers will increase the negative impact of crises. Decision-making depends not just on how governments respond to data, but also on whether they had the foresight to collect key data in the first place and bring experts who can make sense of it to the table. The Obama administration, which preceded the Trump administration, laid out a pandemic preparedness plan for Trump officials, and even ran a transition pandemic training event. Of the 30 Trump administration officials who participated in the training, only eight remained when COVID-19 arrived, none of whom had a public health or a crisis response background, a reflection of the instability among Trump appointees (Goodman and Schulkin, 2020). Trump also cut funding for global health programs that could have improved preparation for the response, as well as public health positions based in China intended to offer early detection of disease outbreaks. Crisis leadership demands timely recognition of the threat (Boin et al., 2010) and cognition of its severity. In this context, cognition is defined as the “capacity to recognize the degree of emerging risk to which a community is exposed and to act on that information” (Comfort, 2007, p. 189). The Trump administration missed signs about the seriousness of COVID-19, including intelligence reports beginning in late November 2019 which warned that the virus could be cataclysmic (Comfort et al., 2020). But the National Security Council was not well-positioned to act on these warnings. President Trump’s National Security Adviser John Bolton shuttered the National Security Council Directorate for Global Health Security and Biodefense and jettisoned National Security Council members with expertise in global health security and emergency preparedness. Good decision-making demands rationality – to rely on evidence and apply scientific standards where appropriate (Ansell et al., 2010). Such standards were not always in ready supply within the Trump administration, even in scientific agencies. Before the pandemic, scientists at the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) saw funding cuts and were told to avoid the use of the terms “evidence-based” and “science-based,” reflecting the populist tone of the administration (Moynihan, 2021). Political appointees expressed mistrust towards agency scientists, categorizing them as “deep state” (Lipton et al., 2020) and speculating that they were trying to damage the president (Diamond, 2020). Appointees also blocked CDC public guidance on travel and social distancing that conflicted with the administration’s desire to re-open the economy, posted less stringent testing guidance that had not been approved by CDC scientists (Mandavilli, 2020), and demanded the right to review and change CDC scientific reports (Diamond, 2020). The quality of decisions reflects the degree to which expertise and competence are valued relative to other attributes, such as political loyalty, in populist regimes. Had it not arisen at the most politicized moment of an already politicized administration, the response to the pandemic might have been better. Not only was 2020 a presidential election year, but the materialization

48  Research handbook on public management and COVID-19 of COVID-19 coincided with the conclusion of President Trump’s first impeachment.2 Trump was convinced that the impeachment was a result of disloyalty within his administration. Thus, he set out to sideline or rid himself of anyone viewed as suspicious, which in the context of COVID-19 meant spreading messages that might hurt the president’s re-election campaign (Moynihan, 2022a). As part of his effort to ensure loyalty, President Trump gave inexperienced White House liaisons, some of whom had not completed their college degree, power over his own appointees and career officials, with a license to police for any perceived disloyalty in the CDC or its parent department, HHS (Moynihan, 2022a). One whistleblower scientist said he was ignored and excluded from meetings when he raised alarms about severe shortages of medical supplies, and was ultimately moved to another position when he resisted pressure to make untested drugs promoted by the president widely available (Abutaleb and McGinley, 2020). Four former CDC Directors wrote an open letter headlined: “We ran the CDC. No president ever politicized its science the way Trump has” (Frieden et al., 2020). The White House task force was created on January 27, 2020, and became the basis for the national response. Medical advisers on the task force, such as Doctors Anthony Fauci and Deborah Birx, would gradually lose access to President Trump and influence in the decision process as they became viewed as too alarmist. The task force killed a plan in April to distribute masks to every household using the US mail service, reflecting the White House’s skepticism of masks. President Trump himself downplayed the need for masks, noting “I don’t wear masks like him” in his debate with presidential contender Joseph R. Biden. (It was later revealed that Trump had tested positive before the debate (Parker et al., 2021).) When Doctors Fauci and Birx asked him to encourage the use of masks in November to flatten a spike related to Thanksgiving travel, their pleas went unheeded. Even Vice President Pence, the head of the task force, was reluctant to forcefully advocate for masks. Trump and his political advisers saw an opportunity to treat masks as “a cultural wedge issue” (Abutaleb et al., 2020).

CRISIS COMMUNICATION Communication connects the sender and receiver of the message in a shared platform (Luhman, 1989). Intensive communication and feedback mechanisms allow multiple actors in crisis to create shared mental models or cultures, learn, adapt to changing conditions, and build resilience (Kapucu, 2006; Littlefield, and Quenette, 2007). Effective crisis communication in response to major extreme events or catastrophic disasters provides opportunities for presidents to engage the public in political persuasion (Neustadt, 1960). The credibility of the message and messenger is essential. The communication aspect of COVID-19 response was probably the area in which President Trump most clearly failed. In some respects, COVID-19 was a crisis made for someone who rose to political prominence by virtue of his communication skills. After all, since COVID-19 was a novel threat, people did not hold strong pre-existing beliefs about it. A president who could command the spotlight could use those skills to frame the threat, create a sense of national unity and shared sacrifice, and deploy basic public health messaging. And in some cases, President Trump followed such standards. Early in the pandemic, President Trump held daily briefings that drew huge audiences before his staff ultimately decided they were doing more harm than good. He promoted positive messaging, discouraging large gatherings, travel, and eating out and

What COVID-19 showed us about populism, democracy, and performance  49 encouraging physical distancing in mid-March. He praised federal responders and state and local officials. But, at different times, he also more forcefully promoted the opposite of these messages, undermining his own communications and those of his government by instinctually returning to the communication style that made him successful: a tendency toward conspiracism, divisiveness, blame avoidance, and anti-government messaging. Conspiracism President Trump nursed presidential aspirations for decades, but it was not until he started promoting a false claim that President Obama had been born in Kenya, and was thus ineligible to be president, that he built a political constituency sufficient to make himself a national contender. One element of Trump’s conspiracism was a skepticism toward scientific claims that did not align with his desire that the crisis soon be over. During COVID-19, President Trump pushed untested medical theories about potential solutions, such as hydroxychloroquine or ingesting bleach during one press conference (Chiu et al., 2020). Disinformation about the virus was an immediate problem, such that FEMA created a website in mid-March to combat conspiracy theories. But President Trump worked at cross-purposes to such efforts to provide scientific and evidence-based information. Divisiveness A trademark of President Trump’s communication style was to portray the world in Manichean terms, where the good people that he represented were threatened by outside forces, often aided by a corrupt elite. For example, his 2016 presidential candidacy announcement portrayed Mexican immigrants as killers and rapists, an anti-immigrant theme he maintained through his presidency. This framing is, of course, a mainstay of populist communications (Mudde and Kaltwasser, 2017). It is also unhelpful in a crisis that requires coordinated action. As the crisis worsened, President Trump’s divisive rhetoric seemed like a substitute for a competent response. His White House soon started labeling COVID-19 as the “China virus” or “Wuhan flu” in press conferences and rallies. If the intent was to shift blame to the Chinese government, the effect was to increase racial animus toward Asian Americans (Darling-Hammond et al., 2020). The divisiveness did not end there. Daily press events often devolved into heated attacks on reporters who dared to ask uncomfortable questions. Blame Avoidance While President Trump sometimes acknowledged the cost of the disease, he did not center expressions of empathy or acknowledgments of loss in his messaging. He often compared COVID-19 to more routine illnesses, for example, saying “We lose thousands and thousands of people a year to the flu... we have to get back to work” on March 24, 2020 (Beer, 2020). Indeed, the White House never undertook an event or commemoration that acknowledged the scale of the loss. By contrast, President Biden marked his inauguration in January 2021 by holding a COVID-19 memorial event. A desire to claim credit and avoid blame is natural in politics, and especially in crises when the risk of blame is high (Moynihan, 2012). President Trump’s blame avoidance strategies, like those of some other populists such as Bolsonaro in Brazil, undermined the sense that the

50  Research handbook on public management and COVID-19 government grasped the scale of the problem or was committed to solving it. His strategy of redirecting blame by using exaggerated claims and bluster, which worked reasonably well in political cycles when a new story would displace last week’s scandal, was a disaster for federal messaging. While most members of the task force and CDC warned that the pandemic would get worse and not be easily resolved, President Trump consistently promised that the virus was under control and would rapidly disappear. Although Trump sometimes conveyed appropriate levels of uncertainty in the early months of the pandemic, he defaulted to optimistic proclamations that invariably were proven wrong. At one point he proposed that Easter (April 12, 2020) represented a realistic date to relax pandemic protections. Such rosy predictions undermined government credibility. Indeed, President Trump’s repeated insistence during his re-election campaign that the country was “rounding” a “corner,” “turn,” or “bend” became a grim punchline punctuated by growing death tolls (Solender, 2020). While the creation of the task force in 2020 could be seen as an attempt to put distance between President Trump and the management of the crisis, he frequently undermined its efforts, putting himself at the center of communications. The credibility of President Trump, the task force, and other public health officials was hurt in the process. Indeed, President Trump would frequently contradict public health figures. A content analysis of just over a month of White House briefing transcripts found that self-congratulations, often based on exaggerations or falsehoods, were the most common utterances of the President (about 600 times). He also blamed others more than 110 times. By comparison, he expressed empathy or appealed to national unity only about 160 times (Peters et al., 2020). Anti-government Crises require leaders to coordinate faith in public institutions (Kapucu et al., 2022). This proved difficult for Trump, who was not just suspicious of bureaucracies, but had campaigned on the idea that a “deep-state” elite ran the country to the detriment of the public (Moynihan and Roberts, 2021). As president, he sometimes returned to this trope in framing progress during the pandemic. In August 2020, President Trump accused the Food and Drug Administration (FDA) of delaying COVID-19 vaccines to hurt his re-election chances. He also became harshly critical of Democratic governors who had enforced more stringent shutdown measures, undermining their capacity to maintain participation in such measures among Trump supporters. As anti-lockdown protestors appeared at state capitals, President Trump championed their cause, tweeting about Michigan protestors who stormed their state Capitol that “These are very good people, but they are angry. They want their lives back again, safely! See them, talk to them, make a deal” (Cathey and Keneally, 2020). A group of Trump supporters were later arrested for plotting to kidnap the Governor of Michigan. Effective crisis communication also sets the stage for facilitating coordination and collaboration among stakeholders, which we turn to next.

CRISIS COORDINATION AND COLLABORATION Coordination and collaboration can be defined as the facilitation of diverse actions taken simultaneously to achieve a shared goal in crisis response. While coordination is more mandated, formal collaboration has more of a voluntary aspect. The collaboration competency is

What COVID-19 showed us about populism, democracy, and performance  51 critical for effective crisis leadership, especially for large and novel crises in an intergovernmental system and shared governance model (Blondin and Boin, 2020). In dealing with COVID-19, each country was challenged to make timely decisions about executing national plans and policies and matching their national response system to the crisis’ unprecedented requirements in order to slow down or control the spread of the virus (Comfort et al., 2020). International transboundary pandemics require collaboration at a cross-national level. Such collaboration was at odds with President Trump’s populist isolationism in the international context and divisive messaging intended to shift blame domestically. President Trump attacked the World Health Organization (WHO), tasked with coordinating the international response, accusing it of bowing to Chinese interests. He formally withdrew the US from the organization in July 2020 (President Biden rejoined the WHO in January 2021). Delayed coordination between federal agencies and state and local governments on the distribution of medical resources, supply chain stabilization, and later vaccinations contributed to the failed response. President Trump also frequently found himself in conflict with governors, especially those of Democratic states. Not only did he encourage protests of their more stringent lockdown procedures, but he also blamed the governors for a more rapid spread of the virus. For example, President Trump said “I don’t take responsibility at all” when asked about the lagging testing capacity (Oprysko, 2020). Instead, he attacked Democratic governors for the lack of testing capabilities and spikes in illnesses and deaths, sometimes noting they were not “appreciative” enough when they asked for more federal supplies (Kumar, 2020). The president’s son-in-law, Jared Kushner, was given charge of a shadow task force that worked with states and tried to procure protective health materials and speed up testing. Those with ready access to Kushner could find their problems solved, but the process appeared ad-hoc, dependent on connections (Abutaleb et al., 2020). President Trump himself appeared to discourage widespread testing, saying at a rally “You’re going to find more cases, so I said to my people, ‘Slow the testing down, please’” (Lozano, 2020). Where the Trump administration deserves credit was in prioritizing vaccine development through Operation Warp Speed, a public–private partnership that guaranteed funding for producers and sped up FDA approval processes. The success of vaccine development was in contrast with the Trump administration’s resistance to simpler public health solutions, such as masks and social distancing. It also contrasted with the vaccine rollout. The Trump administration chose not to undertake a federally led distribution process, instead delegating the task to states, which in turn depended greatly on private actors such as pharmacies and doctors to dispense the vaccines on their premises. Moreover, the federal government provided no real guidance for states on vaccine distribution, such as identifying standards for rapid and safe distribution. Trump’s promotion of vaccines was, at best, half-hearted. Republicans were more likely to believe that the COVID threat was exaggerated, and to believe conspiracies about vaccines, contributing to polarization in vaccine take-up, where counties with the highest Trump support had dramatically lower vaccine take-up rates (Hamel et al., 2021). Ultimately, this meant that even though vaccines became more freely available in the US relative to most other countries and saw an aggressive roll-out under the Biden administration from January 2021, the US would fall behind other countries in no small part because of political polarization around vaccines that began under Trump’s leadership (see Figure 4.2).

52  Research handbook on public management and COVID-19

Source:

Our World in Data (2022).

Figure 4.2

Vaccination rates in the United States compared with other countries

CRISIS CONTROL To establish control of a crisis requires that leaders orchestrate an increased governmental capacity and/or mobilize existing capacity and resources to limit the threat and maintain regular societal operations. The COVID-19 crisis response necessitated jurisdictional and global coordination and collaboration in controlling the spread of the virus. For COVID-19, control implies “achieving a reasonable balance between mitigating the spread of the infection, building health care capacity, and managing a safe level of economic and social activity” (Comfort et al., 2020, p. 617). A well-established emergency management system could have been effectively utilized in controlling the spread of the virus. However, the Trump administration failed to do so. The Trump administration never really offered a coherent response to COVID-19. By the conclusion of the administration in January 2021, more people than ever were dying. Trump increasingly listened to medical advisers who effectively proposed a herd immunity strategy, allowing the disease to spread through the population, which matched President Trump’s re-election plan of re-opening the economy. The sense of a lack of control was compounded by White House officials ignoring federal public health guidance by holding campaign events with thousands of participants (though frequently outdoors), failing to wear masks, and hosting indoor White House events. Not only did President Trump and family members catch COVID-19, so did dozens of White House staff and members of his campaign team. White House events such as a reception for a Supreme Court nominee and an election night party appeared to have been super-spreader events. According to one senior officials:

What COVID-19 showed us about populism, democracy, and performance  53 Here, you have Fauci and Birx saying: wear a mask, keep your distance, avoid congregate settings and indoor crowds, particularly indoors. And then you have these events at the White House where nobody is wearing a mask, they’re having an event inside and then coming outside, if there ever was a complete confusion of messages. (Abutaleb et al., 2020)

CONCLUSION Politics is inseparable from how public health crises are managed. In this case, it was not just that politics got in the way of public health concerns: a particular form of populist politics as represented by Trump hurt the ability of the US to pull off the big, complicated, but essential task of protecting its citizens. Communication was President Trump’s biggest missed opportunity. He repeatedly downplayed the risk of the virus and sent mixed messages about basic public health guidance. The result was not just to undermine the credibility of the federal government among those who saw him as untrustworthy; it was to create a false sense of security among his supporters who did trust him. Many shared his worldview, coming to believe that the risks of the pandemic were exaggerated, that the masks that Trump generally disdained offered little efficacy, that existing medical treatments could solve the disease, and that basic public health measures were an assault on their liberty. Trump reinforced these views at various times. As such, a huge number of people who had no strong prior opinions about this novel disease adopted beliefs that made them vulnerable to its spread. While the presidential election in November 2020 offered a verdict, of sorts, on Trump’s leadership, the model of divisive, anti-government, and conspiracy-minded politics he exemplified remains and will likely undermine future crisis response efforts. His successor, President Biden, faced a public deeply polarized on public health measures and vaccines, and a Republican Party that in many places adopted populist policies, limiting his ability to curb the spread of the pandemic. While it is tempting to think of the effects of populism as like a light-switch, where the light can be easily restored after a period of darkness, this metaphor may be misleading. Instead, populism may work more like an acid, still eroding both capacity and faith in governing institutions long after the initial spill. The COVID-19 pandemic offered not just a visible illustration of the costs of populism to governing, but also a warning about the corrosive effects of populism in less visible policy areas. What about other ways that populism affects governance (Bauer et al., 2021)? It is harder to document erosions of capacity: the decline in public servant morale and motivation, those who quit their jobs, or never join the public sector at all, the ethical shortcuts imposed and gradually normalized. Public sector honesty is partly a function of the broader environment, and as that environment spoils, dishonesty becomes normalized (Olsen et al., 2019). Once in place, it becomes hard to root out. Documenting those effects and their sources represents both a research and normative challenge for the field of academic public administration (Moynihan, 2022b). Much of the contemporary study of public administration assumes a stable democratic base, that politicians are motivated to generate good public sector performance, and that they view a neutral and competent public service granted some measure of autonomy as a means to that end. Such assumptions need, at a minimum, to be explicitly reconsidered.

54  Research handbook on public management and COVID-19

NOTES 1.

This chapter draws from an earlier publication of the authors: N. Kapucu and D. Moynihan (2021). Trump’s (mis)management of the COVID-19 pandemic in the US. Policy Studies, 42(5–6), 592–610. 2. The United States Constitution provides Congress the authority to impeach and remove the President, Vice President, and all federal civil service personnel for treason, bribery, misdemeanor, and other criminal offenses. The impeachment power of Congress is an important check on the executive branch of the United States government. The House of Representatives voted to impeach President Trump for abuse of power and obstruction of Congress on December 18, 2019.

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56  Research handbook on public management and COVID-19 Neustadt, E. R. (1960). Presidential power: The politics of leadership. John Wiley & Sons, Inc. Olsen, A. L, Hjorth, F., Harmon, N., and Barfort, S. (2019). Behavioral dishonesty in the public sector. Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory, 29(4), 572–290. Oprysko, C. (2020). “I don’t take responsibility at all”: Trump deflects blame for coronavirus testing fumble. Politico, March 13. https://​www​.politico​.com/​news/​2020/​03/​13/​trump​-coronavirus​-testing​ -128971 Our World in Data. (2022). Coronavirus (COVID-19) Vaccinations. https://​ourworldindata​.org/​covid​ -vaccinations Parker, A., Dawsey, J., and Diamond, D. (2021). Trump tested positive for coronavirus before first debate with Biden, three former aides say. New York Times, December 1. https://​www​.nytimes​.com/​ 2020/​06/​03/​us/​cdc​-coronavirus​.html Peters, J., Plott, E., and Haberman, M. (2020). 260,000 words full of self-praise from Trump on the virus. New York Times, April 26. https://​www​.nytimes​.com/​interactive/​2020/​04/​26/​us/​politics/​trump​ -coronavirus​-briefings​- analyzed.html Solender, G. (2020). 250,000 lives lost: How the pandemic compares to other deadly events in U.S. history. Washington Post, November 19. https://​www​.washingtonpost​.com/​history/​2020/​11/​19/​ ranking​-covid​-deaths​-american​-history/​ Van Wart, M., and Kapucu, N. (2011). Crisis management competencies: The case of emergency managers in the U.S. The Public Management Review, 13(4), 489–511 Waugh, W. L. Jr. (2000). Living with hazards, dealing with disasters: An introduction to emergency management. M.E. Sharpe.

5. Uncertainty and ambiguity during a crisis and the challenge for public management: COVID-19 crisis management in the United States, the United Kingdom and Australia Nicholas Bromfield

A core challenge for public managers and political decision-makers is to assess and respond to the uncertainty and ambiguity of policy choices when acting upon policy problems. But the urgency of this core task is amplified during a crisis. Uncertainty and ambiguity are heightened during crises as evidence regarding potential responses is frequently incomplete, uncertain or contested; policy systems are stressed; policy decisions are highly politicised; and the stakes are high for the impact on people’s well-being and lives. Policy decision-makers and public managers both respond to this context and contribute to its existence with their decision making and actions. This makes the assessment of uncertainty and ambiguity a crucial factor in the muddling through of a crisis and the success or failure of crisis management and governance. I assess the role of uncertainty and ambiguity during crisis management and the implications this has for crisis response success or failure in public management contexts. It is posited that during a crisis, lack of information and policymaker bounded rationality exacerbates uncertainty about threats; and unproductive, or even harmful, policy frames compete with the establishment of new and more appropriate crisis response frames, creating ambiguity regarding action. The chapter proceeds in three sections. First, ambiguity and uncertainty in the public policy and public management literature is reviewed. Second, the challenges and implications of uncertainty and ambiguity during a crisis are evaluated by examining indicative cases of evidence assessment and leadership response to COVID-19 in three Anglophone public management states (Pollitt and Bouckaert 2017): the United States, the United Kingdom and Australia. The third section is a discussion of these implications and factors that decision-makers and public managers should be aware of when responding to crises. This is followed by concluding remarks. The comparison of the US, UK and Australia finds that the existence of an institutional venue for crisis cooperation, coordination and collaboration helped alleviate the worst effects of uncertainty and ambiguity during the crisis in these public management states.

AMBIGUITY, UNCERTAINTY AND CRISIS IN PUBLIC POLICY AND PUBLIC MANAGEMENT Uncertainty and ambiguity are two factors that decision-makers and public managers need to negotiate in ‘normal times’, but especially during crises. Uncertainty is the condition resulting from a lack of information, which leads to imprecision in predictions about potential actions and outcomes (Feldman 1989; Zahariadis 2014). Ambiguity is ‘the state of having many ways 57

58  Research handbook on public management and COVID-19 of thinking about the same circumstances or phenomena’ (Feldman 1989, 5). Ambiguity is a simultaneously objective, but also value-laden, condition of interpreting given information under ‘bounded rationality’, where policymakers have limited evidence and cognitive capacity to make decisions (Cairney et al, 2016; Cairney 2016). Uncertainty and ambiguity are present across the policy stages of problem definition, policy design and implementation. Uncertainty and lack of information will hinder knowledge of a policy problem, the design of effective solutions and therefore the success of their implementation in practice. Ambiguity will likely cause both objective and value-laden contestation regarding the nature and cause of the problem, leading to the possible politicisation of potential policy designs. If ambiguity of problem definition and policy design become politicised, then implementation solutions in practice will likely founder on lack of legitimacy, poor uptake or non-compliance from aggrieved partisans (Christensen et al. 2016; Milosh et al. 2021). But ambiguity can also serve as a path to resolve these issues, if a design solution bargain can be struck that satisfies the value preferences of a plurality of parties and allows bargaining partners to claim a political victory (Zahariadis 2003). Uncertainty and the interpretation of ambiguity are factors that often shape the parameters of crisis theory. Consider the following prominent definitions: ● ‘In our definition of crisis, a social system – a community, an organization, a policy sector, a country, or an entire region – experiences an urgent threat to its basic structures or fundamental values, which harbors many “unknowns” and appears to require a far-reaching response.’ (Boin et al. 2016, 5) ● ‘A situation in which there is a perceived threat against the core values or life-sustaining functions of a social system that requires urgent remedial action in uncertain circumstances.’ (Rosenthal et al. 1989, 10) ● ‘A set of circumstances in which individuals, institutions or societies face threats beyond the norms of routine, day-to-day functioning, but the significance and impact of these circumstances will vary according to individual perceptions.’ (Drennan et al. 2015, 19) Some commonalties and complementariness can be drawn from these definitions about uncertainty and ambiguity during a crisis. The first two definitions emphasise that crises can be identified when ‘unknowns’ or ‘uncertain circumstances’ threaten core life-sustaining social functions, structures or values. A lack of information about threats is central to a definition of crisis in these examples because uncertainty, and its often-attendant complexity, pose part of the threat itself – what is the threat, and what can be done about it, lack clear answers and pose dangers as a consequence (Boin et al. 2016, 7; Christensen et al. 2016). But relatedly, ambiguity also constitutes part of each of the three definitions – ‘appears to require a far-reaching response’; ‘perceived threat’; and varying ‘according to individual perceptions’. Crises are ambiguous then because they require the perception of interpretable facts – forest fires, pandemics or terrorist attacks are real enough, but the perception of their significance, impact and what should be done about them (if anything) are not (Drennan et al. 2015, 18–19). The management of uncertainty and ambiguity in the contemporary context is conducted via governance. Governance involves a greater number of actors across government, the market and third sector than the traditional public administration of the past, and pragmatic, less hierarchical and performance based political direction, policy design and implementation (Treib et al. 2007; Bell and Hindmoor 2009). Governance is both descriptive and normative. It describes practices of policy design and delivery that incorporate an array of processes, actors and

COVID-19 crisis management in the US, the UK and Australia  59 institutions across public, private and civil society sectors but also serves as a recommended course of action to deal with the risks posed by uncertainty, ambiguity and complexity (Renn et al. 2011, 223). Applying risk governance principles to the management of crisis therefore entails similar descriptive and normative conceptualisations. Descriptive crisis governance involves the recognition, incorporation and coordination of the multiplicity and complexity of crisis management actors, institutions and processes; normative crisis governance reasons that applying a governance frame and actions to a crisis is both good and necessary as the ‘nature of many risks requires cooperation, coordination, and trust between a range of stakeholders who have diverging interests and different perceptions of the (potential) risks involved’ (Van Asselt and Renn 2011, 435). During normal times, management of uncertainty might be addressed by public managers and experts expressing clear certitude, rather than academic nuance, about evidence (Manski 2013) or by applying better processes of evidence dissemination to policymakers across the multilevel policymaking environments that characterise governance systems (Cairney et al. 2016). Ambiguity might be tackled using measurement to reduce interpretation by administrative arms and street-level bureaucrats (Noordegraaf and Abma 2003; Vakkuri 2010), or with wider processes of persuasion via activation of established policy frames, or building coalitions for change across policy stages and policymaking environments (Cairney et al. 2016). But crises create new pressures upon governance. Coordination across policymaking environments is made difficult by dispersal of responsibility and political control across these environments and the bureaucratic politics of inter-organisational relations. Cooperation with the third sector, and civil society more broadly, is potentially beset by problems of lack of professional expertise, lack of buy-in or fragmented communities (Drennan et al. 2015, 153). More critical perspectives have pointed to the way COVID-19 has revealed the lack of state capacity in neoliberal states (Jones and Hameiri 2022; Chodor and Hameiri 2023) or the failures of COVID-19 governance to account for a critical perspective on policy impacts, which have discriminated against the relatively powerless (Cairney 2021). Building upon these insights, we can question the efficacy of regular uncertainty and ambiguity management measures during crises. Expressing clear certitude in a developing evidence context is likely to lead to suboptimal policy design and outcomes (Manski 2020) and create confusion, politicisation and polarisation amongst policymakers and the wider community if policies and advice need to change and be communicated in a convincing and inspiring way due to new evidence (Boin et al. 2016, 17–18). Suboptimal handling of uncertainty is also exacerbated by the temporal, political and human-cost pressures to act quickly and decisively during a crisis, exaggerating the structures that produce bounded rationality under governance. Under these crisis conditions, policymakers limit their evidence sources, act upon emotions and rely upon familiar frames and ideologies instead of mobilising the normative ideals of trusted cooperation and coordination across stakeholders (Cairney 2016; Cairney et al. 2016). The interpretation of ambiguity is impaired under crisis conditions by the competition between new and (closer to) accurate policy framings with embedded and familiar, but inappropriate or inaccurate, policy frames, or the stereotyped social constructions of populations (Schneider and Ingram 1993; Cairney 2021). Ambiguity during a crisis is also likely to be exacerbated by the competing interests and values that the multiplicity of actors, scales and institutions will bring to interpreting the crisis under governance. Competition and contestation across these stakeholders will contribute to coordination problems during the crisis, worsened by the likelihood that communities with less power would be impacted disproportionately compared

60  Research handbook on public management and COVID-19 with those more powerful, leading to worse outcomes for the disadvantaged or vulnerable. Policymakers therefore have a tough task if they are to meet the normative crisis governance ideals of trust, cooperation and coordination across stakeholders necessary to successfully manage a crisis. In sum, uncertainty can be exacerbated during a crisis due to a lack of information about threats and the particular conditions of policymaker-bounded rationality that contemporary dispersed governance produces. Ambiguity can also be heightened during a crisis because new frames about crisis causes and solutions need to be established and compete with unproductive or harmful older frames that likely reproduce inequitable power dynamics and poor outcomes for the less powerful. But the crisis management normative ideal also points to a positive, if imperfect, model that can serve as the basis for crisis management success if the challenges of uncertainty and ambiguity can be negotiated.

THE EVOLUTION OF UNCERTAINTY AND AMBIGUITY DURING THE FIRST YEAR OF THE COVID-19 CRISIS This section uses indicative comparative examples from the first year of COVID-19 governance in the United States, the United Kingdom and Australia to unpack the dynamics and implications of uncertainty and ambiguity during crisis management. The section begins by examining the governance context of each country and how each country then initially dealt with uncertainty and ambiguity at the beginning of the crisis via leadership and institutions. The comparison finds that the mitigation of the worst effects of policymaker uncertainty and ambiguity can be explained by the presence of effective, or dysfunctional or absent, institutional venues for crisis cooperation, coordination and collaboration. It then argues that as greater scientific certainty and solutions evolved, policy ambiguity and politics decreased and vaccination emerged as the settled measure to exit the acute phase of the COVID-19 crisis towards the end of 2020 and the beginning of 2021. It is argued that vaccines permitted a combination of scientific certainty regarding a course of action with a political bargain that reduced ambiguity regarding the solution to the crisis, allowing proponents of opposing economic and health frames to both agree to the solution and claim political victory. Initial Uncertainty and Ambiguity – the United States An account of COVID-19 and the management of uncertainty and ambiguity in the US needs to begin with leadership, specifically the presidency of Donald Trump. The US had the governance and resource capacity to deal with COVID-19 but failed to do so largely because of Trump’s administrative style (Kapucu and Moynihan 2021; see also Kapucu and Moynihan, this volume). Trump delegitimised and undermined normal good governance principles by demanding total loyalty from public servants, and personalised and politicised management over competence or due diligence. He also demonstrated questionable separation of his personal business dealings from the office of the President, and hostility and disregard towards accountability (Moynihan and Roberts 2021). While attacking the administrative arm of the state via rhetoric and action is a common Republican Party trope, Trump extended and deepened it with conspiracist criticism of the ‘deep state’ (Rutledge 2020) and scepticism towards

COVID-19 crisis management in the US, the UK and Australia  61 any scientific evidence that did not advance his own political interests and objectives (Kapucu and Moynihan 2021). Before the pandemic arrived in the US in early 2020, Trump’s administrative style had already caused the demoralisation of career bureaucrats, the high turnover of personnel, and the filling of positions with personal loyalists. The overall effect was an expertise drain from federal US bureaucracy (Rutledge 2020; Moynihan and Roberts 2021). In other words, the US federal administrative state had already experienced the erosion of good governance ideals and its effects were already evident before COVID-19 hit. This record of poor governance continued during the initial response to COVID-19 in the US. The Trump administration’s response to the pandemic, dominated as it was by Trump himself, was poisoned by lack of trust between parties and failure to cooperate and coordinate with the multiple federal and state-level actors and institutions relevant to the management of the crisis. Additionally, Trump and his administration’s decision making was disinterested, and crisis communication was conspiracist, divisive and displayed blame games. Overall, the response failed to control the virus, leading to high infection, disability and death rates (Kapucu and Moynihan 2021). A similar picture is evident when examining the Trump administration’s initial management of COVID-19 uncertainty and ambiguity. Regarding uncertainty, three factors can be identified that undermined efforts to reduce uncertainty. First, the Trump administration displayed deep mistrust of scientific evidence regarding the virus and the expert scientific network that provided advice. The administration appointed Trump loyalists to key federal agencies dealing with the crisis and openly questioned scientific and expert recommendations (Cairney and Wellstead 2021; Kapucu and Moynihan 2021). This distrust further extended to Trump’s inexplicable conspiracist medical statements about the effectiveness of hydroxychloroquine and injecting bleach as potential COVID-19 treatments. Second, there was a lack of capacity to receive, or even interest in receiving, the relevant COVID-19 briefings and advice necessary to reduce uncertainty in the administration. Capacity had been reduced in 2018 when the pandemic response office within the National Security Council was disbanded and Trump himself continued his general disinterest in being personally briefed, missing warnings about the potential severity of COVID-19 in his President’s Daily Brief and memos from advisers through the end of 2019 and January 2020 (Rutledge 2020). Third, there was a general lack of cooperation and coordination amongst key crisis agencies and levels of policymaking and government, with Trump’s confrontational personal management style often causing tensions between himself and federal agencies or state governors. Trump’s confrontational and conspiratorial management style had the effect of limiting the coordination of relevant authorities and public managers across agencies and layers of government, hindering the management of uncertainty about the virus and cooperation on solutions. The Trump administration’s management of ambiguity demonstrated similar characteristics of crisis mismanagement but was more strongly influenced by the United States’ comparatively high levels of polarisation and distrust of the state (Cairney and Wellstead 2021). The US, as did the UK and Australia, grappled with competing health versus economy frames regarding the appropriate response to the acute phase of the pandemic in 2020. The Trump administration, and Republican governors, promoted the economy frame, promised the reopening of the economy by Easter 2020, attacked the World Health Organization and China, and encouraged protests against Democratic state governors who were slower to reopen their jurisdictions (Cairney and Wellstead 2021; Rutledge 2020). In contrast, higher levels of trust in scientific advice amongst Congressional Democrats and Democratic state governors con-

62  Research handbook on public management and COVID-19 tributed to their adoption of a health frame to the pandemic response (Cairney and Wellstead 2021). The lack of institutional intergovernmental forums to coordinate between federal and state administrations, combined with the deep mutual polarisation and hostility between Democrats and Republicans, saw the competing health versus economy frames play out in a patchwork of responses across US states, hindering the overall response to pandemic control (Downey and Myers 2020). In sum, Trumpism as an administrative doctrine was structurally ill-equipped to deal with the challenge of uncertainty and ambiguity that the COVID-19 crisis posed. This, in combination with the United States’ higher levels of polarisation, distrust, and dispersed institutions created the conditions for competing ambiguities to play out, to the detriment of controlling the virus in 2020. Initial Uncertainty and Ambiguity – the United Kingdom The context preceding the outbreak of COVID-19 in the United Kingdom was dominated by three interlinked features – Brexit and the United Kingdom’s withdrawal from the European Union, the December 2019 General Election victory of Prime Minister Boris Johnson and the Conservative Party, and the effects of a decade of austerity politics and policy on the United Kingdom’s capacity for effective governance. Johnson and the Conservative Party had won the 2019 election on the back of a promise to ‘get Brexit done’, where Johnson had displayed a personal leadership style characterised by optimism and nationalism (Lilleker and Stoeckle 2021). The apparent success of this appeal saw Johnson, who had only just taken over as Prime Minister from Theresa May in mid-2019, and the Conservative Party, which had been in power since 2010, win the General Election with a substantially increased majority of 80 seats. Having only been in power as Prime Minister for half a year, and spending much of that time in campaign mode, meant that Johnson had not had much time to define and embed his administrative style and personnel. There had been a large turnover in ministers and their advisers after May was defeated as Party leader, in favour of conservatives loyal to Johnson. Johnson himself was a hands-off, command and control leader, aided in this style by his chief adviser Dominic Cummings (Boswell et al. 2021). But the new core executive also inherited the governance capacity consequences of austerity. Like the US and Australia, crisis planning had been instituted and capability to handle a crisis was superficially evident. But austerity and governance fragmentation had undermined the United Kingdom’s capability to deliver policy across the multilevel policymaking environment to the street-level (Eckersley and Tobin 2019) and to the health sector (Jones and Hameiri 2022). The Johnson government’s crisis management of COVID-19 also demonstrated significant failures regarding coordination, cooperation and responsiveness, leading to one of the world’s worst infection and death rates in 2020. Johnson’s optimistic and permanent campaign style saw his government dither on the enactment of authoritative policy tools (Hood 1986; Howlett 2019) to control the virus and consequently squander the trust the public initially invested in the government to respond to the virus effectively (Lilleker and Stoeckle 2021; Weinberg 2022). In many ways, the Johnson government’s handling of uncertainty superficially demonstrated the implementation of good crisis management principles. In particular, the relationship between the core executive and expert advice was cooperative, if limited to a small group of like-minded actors, with the government receiving advice from UK Chief Medical Officers and the Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies (SAGE). The government also supported

COVID-19 crisis management in the US, the UK and Australia  63 these measures with crisis communications that emphasised and promoted scientific evidence (Cairney and Wellstead 2021). The difficulty was that the response was reactive and delayed. Johnson himself also often oversold the measures being taken to control the virus with what Manski (2013, 13) describes as incredible certitude, a circumstance where ‘policy analysis tends to sacrifice [nuanced or contested] credibility in return for strong conclusions’. A pattern then emerged where measures sold as certain solutions ultimately needed to be walked back as the response proved to be ineffective and new strategies were implemented to muddle through the crisis (Joyce 2021; Lilleker and Stoeckle 2021; Boswell et al. 2021). For example, the initial response to the pandemic followed the UK influenza pandemic preparedness strategy 2011 and the recommendations of government advisors such as SAGE supported this. This course of initial action was based upon the view that COVID-19 was unlikely to be contained or eliminated and that mitigation should be the policy goal (a view contested by experts outside the government adviser circle). This view also aligned politically with Johnson’s libertarian tendencies and reluctance to impose authoritative policy measures on the public (Cairney and Wellstead 2021; Joyce 2021). The response quickly proved to be inadequate to control cases and Johnson dithered in imposing the March 2020 lockdown that ultimately brought infection rates back under control by mid-2020. But a whole-of-government solution to managing the pandemic after this initial government error was also hindered by a decade of government austerity that had run-down pandemic preparedness, fragmented governance across policy sectors, and engendered public–private contracting failures. The failure to implement an effective centralised test-and-trace system and ‘problems of multi-level governance, inhibiting a spirit of cooperation and practical coordination with devolved administrations, regions and localities’ were prominent examples of the way the Johnson government muddled through the uncertainty posed by the pandemic (Joyce 2021, 551). Ambiguity also helps explain the difficulties the Johnson government had in adopting an appropriate response frame and solutions to the pandemic. Johnson’s promise to deliver on Brexit informed the economic and libertarian frame of the UK’s initial response to the pandemic: Johnson exuded a sense of confidence and optimism, downplaying the severity of the virus invoking a patriotic belief the UK was able to withstand any challenge and so he appeared to focus purely on evidence supportive of his ideological opposition to tighter restrictions on the society and economy … . Implicit in the language was the libertarian philosophy which underpinned the Leave side of the Brexit debate, and we suggest this was the sole focus of government with the emerging pandemic seen as an opportunity to live the brand as opposed to being a threat. Restrictive measures were anathema to the Johnson-led brand of Conservatism and the spirit of post-Brexit Britain, freedom outside of the EU’s restrictions could not be replaced by new, tighter regulations and restrictions. (Lilleker and Stoeckle 2021, 5)

Johnson was reluctant to drop this frame, even as more authoritative policy tools were implemented with success at curbing the virus. This impacted his relations with the devolved governments of the UK, and the transition out of lockdown in mid-2020 proved to be fractious as the governments of Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland complained they could not get Westminster to respond to their health-framed concerns. Like the US, the UK lacked institutionalised intergovernmental forums that could have been employed to alleviate ambiguity, build trust and potentially strike bargains to facilitate coordination and cooperation.

64  Research handbook on public management and COVID-19 In sum, the UK’s response to uncertainty and ambiguity was mixed, demonstrating tendencies towards reaction, delay and muddling through, but also demonstrating openness to scientific evidence to grapple with the crisis. The UK case demonstrates how the ideals of crisis management can fail, as even fairly minor delays or errors can snowball into bigger crises when they encounter a context of reduced governance capacity. Initial Uncertainty and Ambiguity – Australia Australia encountered the COVID-19 pandemic just as the unprecedented Black Summer bushfire crisis began to resolve as the weather turned milder. This crisis was on a scale not seen before, taking the lives of 33 people, destroying 3000 homes and burning almost twice the land of any previously recorded fire season (Bromfield et al. 2021). But, more importantly, the federal government’s management of the crisis, and in particular, the leadership of Prime Minister Scott Morrison, had come under extraordinary scrutiny and pressure as the Commonwealth declined to coordinate or extend adequate assistance to the state governments’ efforts at suppressing the fires. Morrison had provoked public outrage as he holidayed in Hawaii with his family during the crisis and doubled down on his government’s failure to coordinate crisis management efforts by remarking ‘I don’t hold a hose, mate, and I don’t sit in a control room’ (Bromfield et al. 2021; Downey and Myers 2020). The Black Summer bushfire crisis was therefore largely caused by a combination of the unprecedented scale of the fires and the failure of federal leadership to adequately respond. However, unlike the US or the UK, Australia in early 2020 had not experienced the same degree of hollowing out of administrative capacity or undermining of good governance principles. The conditions for learning and adaption of crisis management when COVID-19 arrived in Australia were therefore present in a way that did not occur in the US under Trump or the UK after austerity. In the Australian context, crisis management was enhanced by adaption of crisis planning and the adoption of new institutional arrangements that alleviated the coordination, cooperation and trust problems inherent in crisis governance across stakeholders and layers of government. The most prominent of these reforms was adaption of the Council of Australian Governments (COAG) into the National Cabinet, a streamlined intergovernmental leadership forum for hammering out agreement regarding the coordination of federal and state crisis responses (Bromfield and McConnell 2021; Downey and Myers 2020). The context of pandemic planning arrangements and adapted institutions in these initial stages created a forum for the descriptive ideals of managing uncertainty to play out in Australian COVID-19 management, even if the normative spirit was less evident. Australia’s dispersal of institutional relations across federalism, but high degree of government and public trust in scientific expertise, meant that Australia struck somewhat of a middle path between the United States’ distrust and disregard of evidence and the United Kingdom’s close incorporation of a small cohort of evidence experts (McConnell 2020; Goldfinch et al. 2021). This meant that each government at the state and federal level was addressing uncertainty by receiving its own individual advice from public managers and policy experts and was bringing that to bear at National Cabinet in service of their interests. So, whilst significant contestation and combative relations were evident between the states, and between the states and the federal government, National Cabinet did provide the institutional forum for those interests to be understood and negotiated into coordinated certainty about COVID-19 causes and solutions (Bromfield 2023). Uncertainty was also addressed by the creation of institutional

COVID-19 crisis management in the US, the UK and Australia  65 forums during the initial phase of the crisis that liaised with the private and third sectors. For example, the National COVID-19 Coordination Commission (subsequently called the National COVID-19 Commission Advisory Board) brought together business and government leaders into an advisory forum; and the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Advisory Group on COVID-19 incorporated Indigenous public sector and third-sector stakeholders and public health experts to advise upon and recommended policies co-designed with Indigenous peoples (see Althaus et al., this volume). While both arrangements attracted criticism,1 they do demonstrate the way Australia’s management of COVID-19 during these initial stages of the pandemic addressed uncertainty according to crisis management principles of coordination, cooperation and (relative) trust. These institutional reforms also helped address the ambiguity that COVID-19 and its potential responses produced. After contestation between centres of authority across the federation, Australia settled on a ‘politically filtered’ aggressive suppression strategy (Bromfield and McConnell 2021). This strategy saw broad intergovernmental agreement regarding border restrictions and quarantine measures to control entry of the virus into the country, lockdowns and restrictions on movement and social activities to manage virus outbreaks and transmission, and welfare reforms to support businesses and individuals affected by the economic consequences of the pandemic and these crisis response policies (Bromfield and McConnell 2021). In the Australian circumstance, the institution of National Cabinet facilitated the political bargaining needed to settle the competition between health and economy frames. Of course, we should not be naïve about the very political interests that drove the negotiation of these bargains, or the way Morrison and his conservative federal government had to be brought to agreement, often against their wishes, by the states who held much of the constitutional power over pandemic policy. But the descriptive ideals of crisis governance – communication, coordination and cooperation – were evident in Australia’s COVID-19 management, reducing ambiguity and aiding agreement on a common policy response. In sum, Australia had learnt from the failures of the Black Summer bushfire crisis and instituted adaption of pandemic planning via institutional reform and National Cabinet. These actions helped address both uncertainty and ambiguity for policymakers and public managers during the initial acute phase of the crisis and largely met the descriptive ideals of crisis management of coordination, cooperation and trust across the multitude of stakeholders and layers of government. Resolving Uncertainty and Ambiguity I argue in this section that vaccinations became the means to resolve the issues posed by uncertainty and ambiguity in all three countries examined. Regarding uncertainty, the key point is that an effective vaccine to curb transmission and protect against severe illness was the solution to the acute phase of the crisis that did not have to resort to authoritative tools that limited the right to freedom of movement, like lockdowns and border restrictions. In the US, May 15, 2020, saw Trump announce Operation Warp Speed, a public–private partnership (PPP) that was developed between the Department of Health and Human Services, the Department of Defense, and the private sector. This PPP streamlined and guaranteed funding for vaccine producers and accelerated the approval process (Kapucu and Moynihan 2021). In the UK, the government acted early to secure AstraZeneca vaccines and Pfizer vaccines in June and July 2020, three months earlier than Australia or Europe (Baraniuk 2021). The promise of wide-

66  Research handbook on public management and COVID-19 spread vaccination largely settled the uncertainty of the acute phase of the crisis and its rollout helped shift the pandemic into a recovery phase in all three countries. To their credit, the governments of the US, UK and Australia moved promptly to accept and secure vaccination as an evidence-based solution when it became clear that this was a means to exit the COVID-19 crisis, though controversy in Australia emerged over the timeliness of securing of mRNA vaccines to supplement the cornerstone AstraZeneca vaccine. And whilst the implementation of the vaccine rollout in the US and Australia faced delays and coverage problems, the UK was quite successful in its implementation of the rollout. Nonetheless, Australia became widely vaccinated by the end of 2021, and the US modestly vaccinated, although still evidencing some patterns of partisanship and polarisation in vaccine uptake between Democratic and Republican supporters (Kapucu and Moynihan 2021; Bromfield 2021; Lilleker and Stoeckle 2021; Wallace et al. 2022). The resolution of uncertainty about the crisis solution also proved to be the means to address ambiguity and the political tensions and contestation it prompted. This does not mean that the health versus economy frames identified above disappeared – frames link to worldviews and are therefore embedded and sticky (Rein and Schön 1993). Instead, the resolution of uncertainty in the form of a scientific solution provided a resolution that satisfied a coalition of decision-makers from both frames. Vaccinations, from the point of view of the health frame, can be interpreted as providing a scientific and evidence-based means to protect people from the worst effects of a COVID-19 infection. On the other hand, vaccinations from an economic frame can be interpreted as providing a means to inspire confidence for consumers to return to economic activities, getting workers back to their jobs and stimulating economic growth after a period of supply-chain issues and severe contraction. The congruousness of these interpretations of the vaccine solution smoothed the path towards decision-maker consensus regarding vaccination as the means to exit the acute phase of the pandemic, rather than continued authoritative tools or other non-pharmaceutical interventions. But the vaccine solution to uncertainty and ambiguity also had the effect of crowding out non-pharmaceutical solutions (e.g. mask mandates, clean air filtration or continued welfare payments and measures) that could augment vaccines in curbing transmission and protecting vulnerable communities. The resolution of uncertainty and ambiguity also therefore locked-in pre-existing power differentials and impacts upon the vulnerable (see also Williams, this volume).2 In sum, the creation and rollout of vaccines was the key factor that resolved both uncertainty and ambiguity and prompted the transition out of the acute phase of the COVID-19 crisis in all three countries. Vaccines provided a solution to the uncertainty of how to effectively deal with the crisis without continuing authoritative measures to restrict movement and association. Vaccines also provided a resolution to the competing politics of health and economic frames to the response, allowing proponents to claim both frames had been satisfied. But the resolution of uncertainty and ambiguity via vaccines also marginalised other non-pharmaceutical policy solutions that would augment vaccines, creating uneven policy impacts upon vulnerable individuals and communities.

COVID-19 crisis management in the US, the UK and Australia  67

DISCUSSION AND CONCLUSION – UNCERTAINTY AND AMBIGUITY AND THE CHALLENGE FOR PUBLIC MANAGEMENT Earlier in this chapter, I outlined how addressing uncertainty and ambiguity during a crisis might be hindered under conditions of pressurised bounded rationality, and the challenges this poses in public management contexts. Regarding uncertainty, the usual expression of clear certitude about actions and outcomes would likely create confusion, politicisation and polarisation if policy change due to new evidence was required. We saw that this was especially evident in the UK case study, when the Johnson government undermined public trust in the crisis response by optimistically over-selling the initial mitigation strategy, only to have to change course weeks later as case numbers began to overwhelm the health sector. Bounded rationality during a crisis would also likely see policymakers limit their evidence sources, act upon emotions and rely upon familiar frames and ideologies instead of mobilising the normative crisis management ideals of trusted cooperation and coordination across stakeholders to address uncertainty. Instances of bounded rationality were evident in all the case studies, as leaders limited their evidence sources to a small number of trusted advisors (UK and Australia) or compliant loyalists (US); acted upon impulse, gut-feelings and emotions (especially Trump’s personalised and politicised management style, but also prominently evident in Johnson’s decision making and the combative and highly political bargaining of Australia’s National Cabinet); and fell back upon familiar frames and ideologies (the health versus economy frame played out in all the cases). To varying degrees, these features of uncertainty and bounded rationality hindered cooperation, coordination and trust during the initial crisis responses of the case countries. As touched upon above, I have also argued that the interpretation of ambiguity during a crisis is impaired by the competition of older, inaccurate and harmful frames with new frames that interpret the crisis more accurately or productively. In a public management context under governance, the multiplicity of actors, scales, institutions, and the competition of their values and interests, also exacerbates ambiguity. In all the cases examined, the health versus economy frame played out during the acute phase of the COVID-19 crisis. In the US, the competition of these frames was especially controversial, as Trump promoted reopening of the economy by Easter 2020, fought openly with Democratic congresspeople and state governors who advocated for a health frame, and consequently saw a patchwork of responses play out across the country, with deleterious effects on infection and death rates. In the UK, Johnson’s Brexit-informed libertarian tendencies influenced his framing of the crisis in economic terms and his government’s dithering in responses to ballooning case numbers and clashes with devolved governments. In Australia, the health versus economy frame was also evident, but the forum of National Cabinet provided an institutional venue for these ambiguities to compete and be resolved into the comparatively consistent ‘aggressive suppression’ frame across the country. Ambiguity, then, is an ever-present challenge during a crisis. Ambiguity can be addressed at a high level by providing a venue for institutional decision-makers to strike bargains and agreements. But at this high level, consideration of frames that incorporate the impact of a crisis upon vulnerable individuals and less-powerful communities is limited by the relative lack of agenda-setting and lobbying power of these groups.

68  Research handbook on public management and COVID-19 Lessons for Decision-makers and Public Managers What can decision-makers and public managers take away from these findings? Adaption of public policy and public management theory to crisis management theory can help us provide some answers: ● The interpretation of evidence during a crisis is likely to be negatively affected by conditions of bounded rationality (Cairney et al. 2016; McConnell 2020). Public managers should be aware that under these conditions evidence is likely to be partial, incomplete, prone to rapid change and filtered by the politics, values, interests and positionality of experts, advisors and decision-makers. As such, the provision of incredible certitude and uniform solutions to diverse situations should be avoided (Manski 2020). Manski (2020) suggests that the adaptive diversification of policy solutions during a crisis can help test various responses in the face of uncertainty, and aid the refinement and diffusion of the most effective crisis responses. ● Processes and plans can provide guidance that will inform a path forward in the face of uncertainty during a crisis. But the implementation of plans also needs adaption, not dogmatism. Adaption is ideally informed by assessment of evidence from a variety of sources that also reflects co-production with the diversity of affected communities (Eriksson and McConnell 2011). ● Institutions can both aid and hinder the addressing of ambiguity during a crisis. One of the major findings of the assessment of Australia’s successful initial management of the pandemic was that National Cabinet, despite intense political contestation, provided a forum to negotiate a bargain regarding crisis management that mostly limited economic frames and advanced health frames. Whilst this reflected the particulars of Australia’s system of federalism, and certainly notwithstanding the very real challenges of establishing effective and functional institutions, the fact remains that an institutional forum for crisis management provides lessons for cooperation and coordination across multilevel policymaking environments in the US and UK. ● Both the structure of governance context and the agency of leadership matter to crisis management success or failure. Proper execution or reform of both officially lies with elected governments, but public managers can work creatively to reduce ambiguity by designing and implementing processes and plans that create opportunities to cooperate and coordinate across levels of government and co-produce responses with stakeholders. To conclude, both empirical and theoretical public policy and public management work can provide guidance for public managers regarding the successful management of uncertainty and ambiguity management during a crisis. Keeping in mind the descriptive and normative ideals of crisis management – cooperation, coordination and trust – should be at the forefront of the development of any crisis management plans, strategies and processes.

NOTES 1. See especially Donohue and McDowall (2021) for how Australia’s COVID-19 responses repeated and reinforced Indigenous deficit discourses and continued law and order policies that curtailed Indigenous agency and sovereignty. The National COVID-19 Coordination Commission also

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2.

attracted criticism for advocating for fossil fuels and a ‘gas-led recovery’ to drive economic stimulus after the COVID-19 downturn. This posed ostensible conflicts of interest for Commission members linked to these carbon-emitting industries (Bromfield 2023). I am indebted to the reviewers for this insightful and important point.

REFERENCES Baraniuk, C. (2021). Covid-19: How the UK vaccine rollout delivered success, so far. BMJ 372 (February): n421. https://​doi​.org/​10​.1136/​bmj​.n421 Bell, S., and Hindmoor, A. (2009). Rethinking Governance: The Centrality of the State in Modern Society. Cambridge University Press. Boin, A., ‘t Hart, P., Stern, E., and Sundelius, B. (2016). The Politics of Crisis Management: Public Leadership under Pressure. 2nd edn. Cambridge University Press. https://​doi​.org/​10​.1017/​ 9781316339756 Boswell, J., Corbett, J., Rhodes, R. A. W., and Salomonsen, H. H. (2021). The comparative ‘court politics’ of Covid-19: Explaining government responses to the pandemic. Journal of European Public Policy 28(8): 1258–1277. https://​doi​.org/​10​.1080/​13501763​.2021​.1942159 Bromfield, N. (2021). Governance of the COVID-19 crisis in Australia: Public policy during crisis. In Australian Politics and Policy: Senior Edition 2021. Sydney University Press, 645–662. Bromfield, N. (2023). Crisis governance and COVID-19’. In Australian Politics and Policy: Senior Edition 2023. Sydney University Press. Bromfield, N., and McConnell, A. (2021). Two routes to precarious success: Australia, New Zealand, COVID-19 and the politics of crisis governance. International Review of Administrative Sciences 87(3): 518–535. https://​doi​.org/​10​.1177/​0020852320972465 Bromfield, N., Page, A., and Sengul, K. (2021). Rhetoric, culture, and climate wars: A discursive analysis of Australian political leaders’ responses to the Black Summer bushfire crisis. In O. Feldman (Ed.), When Politicians Talk, pp. 149–167. Singapore: Springer Singapore. https://​doi​.org/​10​.1007/​ 978​-981​-16​-3579​-3​_9 Cairney, P. (2016). The Politics of Evidence-Based Policy Making. Springer. Cairney, P. (2021). The UK government’s COVID-19 policy: Assessing evidence-informed policy analysis in real time. British Politics 16(1): 90–116. https://​doi​.org/​10​.1057/​s41293​-020​-00150​-8 Cairney, P., Oliver, K., and Wellstead, A. (2016). To bridge the divide between evidence and policy: Reduce ambiguity as much as uncertainty. Public Administration Review 76(3): 399–402. https://​doi​ .org/​10​.1111/​puar​.12555 Cairney, P., and Wellstead, A. (2021). COVID-19: Effective policymaking depends on trust in experts, politicians, and the public. Policy Design and Practice 4(1): 1–14. https://​doi​.org/​10​.1080/​25741292​ .2020​.1837466 Chodor, T., and Hameiri, S. (2023). COVID-19 and the pathologies of Australia’s regulatory state. Journal of Contemporary Asia 53(1): 28–52. https://​doi​.org/​10​.1080/​00472336​.2022​.2106883 Christensen, T., Laegreid, P., and Rykkja. L. H. (2016). Organizing for crisis management: Building governance capacity and legitimacy. Public Administration Review 76(6): 887–897. https://​doi​.org/​ 10​.1111/​puar​.12558 Donohue, M., and McDowall, A. (2021). A discourse analysis of the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander COVID-19 policy response. Australian and New Zealand Journal of Public Health 45(6): 651–657. https://​doi​.org/​10​.1111/​1753​-6405​.13148 Downey, D. C., and Myers, W. M. (2020). Federalism, intergovernmental relationships, and emergency response: A comparison of Australia and the United States. The American Review of Public Administration 50(6–7): 526–535. https://​doi​.org/​10​.1177/​0275074020941696 Drennan, L. T., McConnell, A., and Stark, A. (2015). Risk and Crisis Management in the Public Sector. 2nd edn. Routledge Masters in Public Management. Routledge. Eckersley, P., and Tobin, P. (2019). The impact of austerity on policy capacity in local government. Policy and Politics 47(3): 455–472. https://​doi​.org/​10​.1332/​0305​57319X1561​3701303511

70  Research handbook on public management and COVID-19 Eriksson, K., and McConnell, A. (2011). Contingency planning for crisis management: Recipe for success or political fantasy? Policy and Society, Success and Failure in Crisis Management 30(2): 89–99. https://​doi​.org/​10​.1016/​j​.polsoc​.2011​.03​.004 Feldman, M. S. (1989). Order Without Design: Information Production and Policy Making. Stanford University Press. Goldfinch, S., Taplin, R., and Gauld, R. (2021). Trust in government increased during the Covid-19 pandemic in Australia and New Zealand. Australian Journal of Public Administration 80(1): 3–11. https://​doi​.org/​10​.1111/​1467​-8500​.12459 Hood, C. (1986). The Tools of Government, 1st American edn. Chatham, NJ: Chatham House Publishers. Howlett, M. (2019). Designing Public Policies: Principles and Instruments, 2nd edn. Routledge Textbooks in Policy Studies. Routledge. Jones, L., and Hameiri, S. (2022). COVID-19 and the failure of the neoliberal regulatory state. Review of International Political Economy 29(4): 1027–1052. https://​doi​.org/​10​.1080/​09692290​.2021​.1892798 Joyce, P. (2021). Public governance, agility and pandemics: A case study of the UK response to COVID-19. International Review of Administrative Sciences 87(3): 536–555. https://​doi​.org/​10​.1177/​ 0020852320983406 Kapucu, N., and Moynihan, D. (2021). Trump’s (mis)management of the COVID-19 pandemic in the US. Policy Studies 42(5–6): 592–610. https://​doi​.org/​10​.1080/​01442872​.2021​.1931671 Lilleker, D. G., and Stoeckle, T. (2021). The challenges of providing certainty in the face of wicked problems: Analysing the UK government’s handling of the COVID-19 pandemic. Journal of Public Affairs 21(4): e2733. https://​doi​.org/​10​.1002/​pa​.2733 Manski, C. F. (2013). Public Policy in an Uncertain World: Analysis and Decisions. Harvard University Press. Manski, C. F. (2020). Forming COVID-19 policy under uncertainty. Journal of Benefit-Cost Analysis 11(3): 341–356. https://​doi​.org/​10​.1017/​bca​.2020​.20 McConnell, A. (2020). Evaluating success and failure in crisis management. Oxford Research Encyclopedia of Politics, 30 July 2020. https://​doi​.org/​10​.1093/​acrefore/​9780190228637​.013​.1633 Milosh, M., Painter, M., Sonin, K., Van Dijcke, D., and Wright, A. L. (2021). Unmasking partisanship: Polarization undermines public response to collective risk. Journal of Public Economics 204 (December): 104538. https://​doi​.org/​10​.1016/​j​.jpubeco​.2021​.104538 Moynihan, D., and Roberts, A. (2021). Dysfunction by design: Trumpism as administrative doctrine. Public Administration Review 81(1): 152–156. https://​doi​.org/​10​.1111/​puar​.13342 Noordegraaf, M., and Abma, T. (2003). Management by measurement? Public management practices amidst ambiguity. Public Administration 81(4): 853–871. https://​doi​.org/​10​.1111/​j​.0033​-3298​.2003​ .00374​.x Pollitt, C., and Bouckaert, G. (2017). Public Management Reform: A Comparative Analysis – Into the Age of Austerity. Oxford University Press. Rein, M., and Schön, D. (1993). Reframing policy discourse. In Reframing Policy Discourse, 145–166. Duke University Press. https://​doi​.org/​10​.1515/​9780822381815​-007 Renn, O., Klinke, A., and van Asselt, M. (2011). Coping with complexity, uncertainty and ambiguity in risk governance: A synthesis. AMBIO 40(2): 231–246. https://​doi​.org/​10​.1007/​s13280​-010​-0134​-0 Rosenthal, U., Charles, M. T., and ‘t Hart, P. (1989). Coping with Crises: The Management of Disasters, Riots, and Terrorism. C.C. Thomas. Rutledge, P. E. (2020). Trump, COVID-19, and the war on expertise. The American Review of Public Administration 50(6–7): 505–511. https://​doi​.org/​10​.1177/​0275074020941683 Schneider, A., and Ingram, H. (1993). Social construction of target populations: Implications for politics and policy. The American Political Science Review 87(2): 334–347. https://​doi​.org/​10​.2307/​2939044 Treib, O., Bähr, H., and Falkner, G. (2007). Modes of governance: Towards a conceptual clarification. Journal of European Public Policy 14(1): 1–20. https://​doi​.org/​10​.1080/​135017606061071406 Vakkuri, J. (2010). Struggling with ambiguity: Public managers as users of NPM-oriented management instruments. Public Administration 88(4): 999–1024. https://​doi​.org/​10​.1111/​j​.1467​-9299​.2010​ .01856​.x Van Asselt, M. B. A. and Renn, O. (2011). Risk governance. Journal of Risk Research 14(4): 431–449. https://​doi​.org/​10​.1080/​13669877​.2011​.553730

COVID-19 crisis management in the US, the UK and Australia  71 Wallace, J., Goldsmith-Pinkham, P., and Schwartz, J L. (2022). Excess death rates for Republicans and Democrats during the COVID-19 pandemic. Working Paper. Working Paper Series. National Bureau of Economic Research. https://​doi​.org/​10​.3386/​w30512 Weinberg, J. (2022). Trust, governance, and the Covid-19 pandemic: An explainer using longitudinal data from the United Kingdom. The Political Quarterly 93(2): 316–325. https://​doi​.org/​10​.1111/​1467​ -923X​.13131 Zahariadis, N. (2003). Ambiguity and Choice in Public Policy: Political Decision Making in Modern Democracies. Georgetown University Press. Zahariadis, N. (2014). Ambiguity and multiple streams. In P. A. Sabatier and C. M. Weible (eds), Theories of the Policy Process. Avalon Publishing.

6. The politics of “letting it rip”: why Australia went from zero-COVID to COVID-central Blair Williams

INTRODUCTION In the first year of the COVID-19 pandemic, Australia was the envy of the world. While other countries were overwhelmed by widespread transmission, staggering mortality rates and overrun health systems, Australia remained largely COVID-free. Dubbed the “hermit kingdom”, Australia quickly closed international borders in March 2020 and implemented nationwide “shutdown” measures to flatten the curve of transmission. Then-Prime Minister Scott Morrison begrudgingly abandoned his neoliberal commitment to balancing budgets and small government in favour of a Keynesian approach. Public health measures then started to ease in April 2020 as case numbers drastically decreased and Australia was globally hailed a COVID success. Australians emerged from 2020 with a newfound sense of camaraderie and hope for positive change after such a circuit-breaking catastrophe. Two years later, however, Australia faced widespread transmission, the new threat of long COVID, and a 13 per cent excess mortality rate in the first eight months of 2022. How did Australia transition so suddenly from zero-COVID to COVID-central? This chapter will explore the ideology underpinning the federal government’s decision to “let rip”. To understand the link between the political context and its impact on the actions and policies of government practice, I will begin by tracing the different approaches undertaken by the Morrison government, from the beginning of the pandemic to the Omicron wave. I will then identify three conjoined pillars of thought underpinning his “let it rip” policy – neoliberalism, prosperity gospel and social Darwinism. Lastly, I will examine the Albanese government’s response and the apparent acceptance of “living with COVID” by the Australian people, using a Gramscian analysis to explain this attitudinal shift.

THE AUSTRALIAN CASE: FROM COVID-ELIMINATION TO “LETTING IT RIP” The initial aim of the Australian government was not to eliminate COVID, which Morrison argued would carry too high an economic cost, but to achieve a balance between health and the economy by suppressing the virus as much as possible. Yet accidentally eliminating COVID proved popular (Tranter, 2022). For the first 18 months of the pandemic, Australia departed from other neoliberal Western nations by taking a “COVID elimination” approach (Lupton, 2022, p. 46). Morrison almost entirely abandoned his conservative commitment to balanced budgets and fiscal restraints, rolling out one of the most substantial economic support packages in the country’s history, in tandem with the unions (Williams, Forthcoming). He was criticised, however, for delegating much of the pandemic leadership to state premiers 72

Why Australia went from zero-COVID to COVID-central  73 and National Cabinet – a COVID taskforce including the Prime Minister and all state and territory leaders (Bromfield and McConnell, 2021). During this time, governments around Australia demonstrated a commitment to protecting the people. Aside from the second wave that hit Victoria from June 2020, which saw the state capital plunged into lockdown for 111 days, Australia remained relatively COVID-free by international standards. By 1 June 2021, Australia had recorded a total of 948 deaths – most of which occurred in the Victorian wave. Australia’s COVID-elimination strategy – which saw life return to near normal for the first half of 2021 – began to erode once the more infectious and virulent Delta variant arrived in Sydney. Abandoning the “go hard, go fast” strategies enacted by other states, the Liberal New South Wales (NSW) Premier Gladys Berejiklian relied on her state’s allegedly “gold standard” contact tracing and targeted self-isolation capacity, which ultimately proved too slow to prevent a city-wide lockdown. Outpacing contact tracers, the virus continued to circulate and soon spread to other eastern states where snap lockdowns throughout July contained the spread. NSW, Victoria and the Australian Capital Territory (ACT) enacted lockdowns until October while the rest of the country remained relatively COVID-free through the implementation of strict border restrictions with infected states and other protective measures, including mask mandates and snap lockdowns. At the end of July 2021, Morrison announced a four-stage roadmap out of COVID that would depend instead on vaccination levels. This signalled the beginning of Australia’s vaccine-only strategy. There were two overarching state approaches to the pandemic in 2021. First, the neoliberal technocratic approach, using data gathered from mobile apps and contact tracing while allowing continued participation in the economy. This was largely embraced by the Berejiklian NSW state government (Liberal) and federal government. Second, the interventionist lockdown approach, suspending economic activities and supplementing income through government support, closing borders and enacting strict quarantine requirements. This was adopted by the Andrews Victorian state government (Labor), McGowan Western Australian state government (Labor), Palaszczuk Queensland state government (Labor), Marshall South Australian state government (Liberal), and Gutwein Tasmanian state government (Liberal). Throughout 2021, Morrison and several members of the federal government publicly criticised the three Labor state governments, while ignoring the successful interventionist Liberal states and praising the NSW government. Just as the world started to recover from the highly transmissible and deadly Delta wave, the stealthier Omicron variant arrived. Australia’s response to this variant differed significantly. As outlined above, in 2021 Morrison began speaking of opening borders (which state governments insisted on keeping closed), reviving consumer spending and “returning to normal”. It is therefore unsurprising that Morrison ignored health advice and reduced government support with the onset of Omicron, fervently advocating for a “live with COVID” approach. Morrison’s roadmap, which depended on a vaccine-induced “herd immunity” and placed the responsibility of infection on the individual, followed the emphasis in the UK and US on “personal responsibility”, “freedom” from COVID protections and absolution of the state’s responsibility. Despite witnessing from afar the disastrous ramifications of this policy for both nations, which consistently led the global rankings for infection and death, Morrison, in tandem with the NSW government, decided Australia would be compelled to live with the virus, an approach that critics labelled “letting it rip”. Australia had well and truly abandoned elimination.

74  Research handbook on public management and COVID-19

THE THREE PILLARS OF “LETTING IT RIP” The “let it rip” strategy has allowed widespread circulation of the virus by removing protections such as mask mandates, isolation requirements, and access to state-subsidised PCR tests, while at the same time opening state and international borders. As a result, Australia shifted from having one of the lowest to one of the highest infection rates in the world in a fortnight, generating food and staff shortages and major supply chain disruptions. This received widespread criticism from medical experts. As I will argue below, the decision to “let it rip” is ideological, informed by three key pillars of thought: neoliberalism, prosperity gospel and social Darwinism. These ideologies, combined with the legacies of new public management, largely shaped the government’s laissez-faire decision-making response to the current stage of the pandemic. Neoliberalism Since the 1980s, Australia has been governed under a neoliberal political paradigm. First adopted by the Australian Labor Party, neoliberalism has since received bipartisan support (Andrew et al., 2020). J. Michael Ryan (2020, p. 83) defines neoliberalism as “simultaneously an economic, political, and moral approach to the understanding, development, and enactment of social and economic policies”. Economically, it promotes free market capitalism, corporate deregulation and the privatisation of public services and industries. Politically, it emphasises rugged individualism and a “bootstrap mentality to economic success” (Ryan, 2020, p. 83). Morally, profit is prioritised over people while market and economic indicators are championed over the lives and wellbeing of the population. The neoliberal ethos aims to reduce what remains of the Keynesian welfare state by reorienting public resources toward competition and efficiency rather than social justice and equity (Andrew et al., 2020; Lupton, 2022). In the name of “freedom”, redefined in commercial and consumerist terms, the mainstreaming of neoliberalism – as seen in new public management – has thereby led to a deterioration of public services such as healthcare and a weakened state capacity (Chodor and Hameiri, 2023; O’Flynn, 2007). Inequality is also rationalised as a natural reflection of the rich being rewarded for their “merit” while the poor are to blame for their own failures. In times of crisis, profits must be saved over lives (Chomsky, 1999). The “can-do-capitalist” rhetoric adopted by Morrison in response to the Omicron variant aligns with this neoliberal ethos. Economically, Morrison promoted a market-led response to both the health and economic impacts of the “let it rip” approach. The Morrison government “solved” staffing shortages caused by illness by scrapping isolation mandates in hard-hit sectors, such as food distribution and healthcare, rather than reducing community transmission. Likewise, as cases hit record numbers despite many struggling to access testing, Morrison resisted calls to provide free Rapid Antigen Tests (RATs) for all Australians, arguing that he didn’t want to “undercut” business and remarking that “the private market [can] stock their shelves with confidence that they won’t be undercut by the government” (Evans, 2022). According to the Morrison government, the free market was the solution and, as such, received priority over health considerations. Politically, “personal responsibility” gained favour over a collective systemic response. At the start of the Omicron wave, Morrison urged Australians to take individual precautions:

Why Australia went from zero-COVID to COVID-central  75 if you’re feeling uncertain, then it’s not compulsory to go out … It’s not compulsory not to wear a mask either … it’s just about being sensible, living with the virus, living confidently with the virus, living together with the virus. (Riminton, 2021)

In a pandemic context, the “personal responsibility” doctrine can be used to argue that individuals should be “free” to make their own judgements about the level of risk they are willing to accept and to implement their own protections, without government interference. Core to neoliberal ideology, this rhetoric preaches self-determination on the one hand while overlooking the social determinants of health (Lupton, 2022). Such individualisation of risk “might seem like freedom for the privileged and affluent, but for those with fewer personal resources, it amounts to considerable constraint on life choices” (Davis, 2022, p. 340). Morally, the decision to “let it rip” prioritised profit and the economy over people and healthcare. As explored above, Morrison framed “the pandemic response as a trade-off between public health and the economy” (Duckett, 2022, p. 5). This rhetoric intensified during the Omicron wave. The aim was for Australians to spend the savings they had accrued during lockdown to stimulate the economy. Once it became obvious that Australians were still spending less to avoid infection, however, Morrison doubled down with a false dichotomy, arguing that “You have two choices here: you can push through, or you can lock down. We’re for pushing through” (Grattan, 2022). Despite protests from the Australian Medical Association (AMA) and OzSage (an independent COVID-19 advisory panel comprising experts in a range of fields, such as epidemiology, health, and economics), and against health advice, the government insisted on transitioning to a “live with COVID” model, disregarding the potential ramifications for the almost one in two Australians living with underlying health conditions that place them at high risk of severe infection (Australian Bureau of Statistics, 2022). The Omicron wave thereby saw the rhetoric shift from saving lives to protecting the economy, denying the link between the two. Prosperity Gospel Morrison is also heavily influenced by his Pentecostal faith. When he won the 2019 federal election, he spoke of his “promise for Australia … Where you’re rewarded and respected for your efforts and your contribution” (MOAD, 2019). His “if you have a go, you get a go” mentality sits firmly within a core Pentecostal doctrine – “prosperity gospel”. Based on the idea that God is active in the world and wants His subjects to materially thrive, prosperity gospel holds that believers can ensure material fortune, good health, and success through their faith alone (Swoboda, 2015, p. 397). Previous scholars (Swoboda, 2015; Winslow, 2015) have shown that prosperity theology reinforces the existing capitalist order by alleging that fortune is contingent on personal actions, emphasising individual agency, self-reliance, and determination. Prosperity theology thereby creates a binary of the “worthy” and “unworthy”: God is good and wants you to be rich; if you are not, it must be because you have given into the devil who does not want you to be rich; thus, your problems are caused by your weakness, lack of faith, or lack of sacrificial giving. (Winslow, 2015, p. 274)

Prosperity theology discourages collective action or systemic responses in dealing with material circumstances – after all, sickness and poverty are the fault of the individual and it is up to them to resolve matters through their own actions.

76  Research handbook on public management and COVID-19 The mantra of “personal responsibility” that Morrison adopted during the Omicron wave is a clear demonstration of prosperity gospel. At the start of the wave, Morrison told Australians they must “make their own choices about their own health and their own lives” while “individual responsibility” and “common-sense” would be the guiding principles for managing the pandemic (Martin, 2022). This aligns with the belief in prosperity gospel that the individual has total agency to determine their fortune, ignoring the fact that “personal responsibility” during a pandemic is easier for the privileged – high-income, healthy and able to work from home – than for those who are older, have underlying medical conditions, are precariously employed or receive a low income. According to prosperity gospel, “unemployment, debt, and healthcare challenges cannot be blamed on anyone or anything but the solitary individual” (Winslow, 2015, p. 265). This mantra is evident in the government’s decision to exclude recipients of income support, such as JobSeeker, Austudy and even paid parental leave1 from the seven-day paid pandemic leave plan. Only those who lost more than 20 hours could claim the full $750. Those who lost between 8–19 hours of paid work received a reduced $450 payment while even this option was removed for those working less than 8 hours. This created a binary of the “deserving” and “undeserving” – only those who “had a go” would “get a go” while the rest were entirely to blame for their own misfortune. Social Darwinism The third pillar of Morrison’s approach is the doctrine of social Darwinism. Drawing from English naturalist Charles Darwin’s theory of evolution and natural selection, this doctrine applies these principles to individuals and society. In line with the credo “survival of the fittest” (Spencer, 1874), social Darwinism not only provides a natural justification for social hierarchies but holds that “tampering with them weakens humankind” (Rudman and Saud, 2020, p. 1141). Following this line of thought, prejudice against “inferior” groups is accepted as “inevitable, necessary, natural, and moral” (Crandall and Eshleman, 2005, p. 250). A binary is created between the “fit” and “unfit” based on race, class, health, intellect and power, deriving from pre-existing biases as well as social and political values. Social Darwinism was morally discredited following its use in Nazi Germany to justify the Holocaust yet, as Rudman and Saud (2020) note, the same principles have been used by certain contemporary political actors to justify systemic social inequalities and reject attempts to even the playing field. Morrison’s commitment to “staring down” the virus while acknowledging that many will die, and many more will be infected, repackaged this ideology. His four-stage plan to “return to normal” promised that border control, lockdowns, travel bans, and other “restrictions” would be removed once most of the population had received at least one dose of an approved vaccination. This placed great faith in the efficacy of vaccines while ignoring the needs of those who would remain at high risk of severe illness and death, despite being vaccinated. Morrison also refused to update the plan in response to the Delta and Omicron variants. When Omicron hit, he asked Australians to “respect” rather than “fear” the virus and remained committed to sensible, balanced rules [and] sensible precautions ... not shutting Australia away, not locking ourselves up, not destroying people’s livelihoods and bringing our society to a halt. That is not the future. That is the past. (Morrison, 2022)

Why Australia went from zero-COVID to COVID-central  77 Yet calling for a “return to normal” at the peak of a wave insinuates a hierarchy of worth, implying that the economy is more important than public health and that the freedom of (healthy) people from the burden of “restrictions” is more important than the lives of the vulnerable. Even the term “restriction” implies that curbing the transmission of COVID is a limitation on individual freedom. The use of this term reflects an individualistic worldview, whereas the more accurate “protection” promotes a collective response. For Morrison, the future is “living with COVID” despite the risks that this poses to the most vulnerable Australians, implying that some groups – older, disabled, immunocompromised – must be sacrificed for the “good of the herd” (Davis, 2022). Throughout the pandemic, the phrase “underlying health conditions” has likewise been used to justify excess deaths and reassure the “healthy”, especially during the Omicron wave. This rhetorical device has been adopted at both the federal and state level to minimise the harms of “letting it rip” and to establish “[a] division between ‘normal’ persons and those with additional pathologies [that reflects] a moral division, which relates one’s condition to desirable conduct or courses of action” (Abrams and Abbott, 2020, p. 169). As Greens Senator and disability rights advocate Jordon Steele-John argued from the floor of the Senate, the Morrison government “propagate[ed] the absolute lie … that our lives are acceptable to be lost in this pandemic – that anybody with an underlying condition can be and should be written off as collateral damage” (Steele-John, 2022). This rhetoric justifies the “reaping” of vulnerable groups, to use the phrasing chosen by Chief Medical Officer Paul Kelly in July 2022. Table 6.1

Similarities between social Darwinism, neoliberalism and prosperity gospel Social Darwinism

Competition

Neoliberalism

Prosperity gospel

The strong are innately better than Competition as the defining

“God’s providence will

the weak

vindicate the Elect and curse

characteristic of human relations

the Damned” (Winslow, 2015, p. 269) Reward

Success is proof of superiority

The market rewards merit and punishes

Health and wealth are God’s

inefficiency –the market ensures

rewards for faith while poverty

everyone gets what they deserve

and sickness are God’s punishments for a lack of faith

Fitness

Survival of the fittest

Inequality is virtuous – only the

Illness is a sign of sinful

“winners” succeed

behaviour and healing can be achieved through faith alone

Hierarchy Individual Blame

Hierarchy of human worth The “unfit” are a “burden” and

A natural hierarchy of “winners” and

Pious hierarchy of “the Elect”

“losers”

and “the Damned”

Those who fall behind become defined

Autonomy and self-direction:

should be sacrificed for the strong and self-defined as losers

the poor only have themselves to blame for their misfortunes

Three Aspects of the Same Ideology Neoliberalism, prosperity gospel and social Darwinism can therefore be regarded as three aspects of the same ideology. Several previous scholars (Rudman and Saud, 2020; Tienken, 2013, p. 305) have identified links between social Darwinism and neoliberalism, noting their shared “confidence in the unrestrained free market to choose winners and losers”. Others

78  Research handbook on public management and COVID-19 (Swoboda, 2015; Winslow, 2015) have identified prosperity gospel as a theological justification for neoliberalism, separating the “worthy” from the “unworthy” by emphasising individualism, competition, and individual accountability. The links between all three ideologies, however, have so far been overlooked. As demonstrated in Table 6.1, their proponents share a belief in hierarchies of worth, that competition is at the heart of society, and success or failure rests with individual responsibility. Social Darwinism is the overarching ideology from which neoliberalism and prosperity theology draw inspiration; neoliberalism is the economic manifestation of this theory; and prosperity gospel is the theological paradigm. In the socio-cultural context of a pandemic, all three pillars advocate individualism, personal freedom over collective effort, personal responsibility over government intervention, and material wealth and economic stability over the health and lives of the vulnerable.

COVID HEGEMONY, OR: HOW I LEARNED TO STOP WORRYING AND LOVE THE VIRUS The 2022 Australian Federal Election saw the defeat of the Morrison government and the victory of Anthony Albanese’s Labor Party. The Morrison government’s handling of the pandemic was a major factor harming the Coalition’s electoral chances – only 30 per cent of Australians approved of his policies (Cameron et al., 2022) – and so Albanese had the opportunity to redefine COVID leadership. Following his ascension to the prime ministerial role, however, he has shown a similar “let it rip” response that aligns with the tenets of neoliberalism and social Darwinism. This demonstrates not only the bipartisan support for neoliberalism, but the transformation of the Australian state from one of post-war “command and control” to a neoliberal “regulatory state” (Chodor and Hameiri, 2023). The Albanese government, in conjunction with National Cabinet, continued to abandon all public health interventions – such as testing and tracing, quarantine and isolation, border controls, public messaging, financial support and mask mandates – despite rampant transmission and increasing deaths. At the height of the BA.5 wave, Australia reported the third-highest per capita case and death rates in the world, yet the Albanese government ignored the calls from medical professionals to reinstate pandemic protections. In September, Albanese announced the end of isolation mandates for those who tested positive, as well as paid isolation leave – a decision made without consulting Australia’s health advisory committee. At the height of the Christmas wave, National Cabinet announced a “Strategic Framework for Transitioning COVID-19 Measures” to move to a “new normal” that breaks from “COVID exceptionalism”. Its guiding public health principles are to “move from public health orders to [a] work health and safety and individual behaviour change paradigm,” from mandates to “strong recommendations” (National Cabinet, 2022). Yet, as the AMA President Steve Robson argues, “easing restrictions or abandoning other protections signals to the community that things are over, and that’s not correct” (Makkar, 2022). COVID will now be managed like any other respiratory illness, despite being far more infectious and virulent. The total number of deaths that occurred under Morrison during the first two years of the pandemic were exceeded in just the first six months of the Albanese government. Yet he finished the year with his highest voter approval rating since taking office (The West Australian, 2022). This approval contrasts with public opinion in 2020 and 2021, when most of those surveyed expressed strong support for state-mandated protections (Tranter, 2022). One poll

Why Australia went from zero-COVID to COVID-central  79 surveying Australians’ attitudes towards Morrison’s four-phase reopening strategy found that almost half of those polled thought the aim should be to reduce cases to as close to zero as possible, with only 12 per cent comfortable with increased deaths and hospitalisations (Murphy, 2021). When asked how many deaths would be acceptable as part of a “living with COVID” model, 61 per cent said fewer than 100 deaths per year. What, then, might explain the transformation of Australians’ COVID outlook? To explain this shift in attitudes, I will now turn to Marxist philosopher Antonio Gramsci (1971), particularly his theorisation of hegemony. Gramsci defined hegemony as the creation and maintenance by the ruling classes of cultural dominance to impose their worldview so that the political, economic, and social status quo is perceived as natural, inevitable and advantageous to all. The exercise of hegemony depends on an equilibrated combination of force and consensus so that it “appears to be based on the consent of the majority” (Bates, 1975, p. 363). That is, the ruling classes maintain dominance by gaining the consent and even approval of the masses, persuading them to accept dominant moral and political values. This Weltanschauung is diffused through social and cultural institutions, informing societal values, norms, tastes, relations and political practices, and ultimately becoming “common sense knowledge” (Gramsci, 1971).2 When force is necessary, it must be cloaked so that its use accords with the masses to maintain the illusion of consent needed to successfully uphold hegemony. As Gramsci (1971, p. 80) notes: The attempt is always made to ensure that force will appear to be based on the consent of the majority, expressed by the ... organs of public opinion – newspapers and associations – which, therefore, in certain situations, are artificially multiplied.

Power, then, is enacted through consensus, compliance, and self-regulation rather than through enforced governance. A commitment to living with COVID has now become hegemonic not only in Australia but in many other comparable nations. Since the public release of the Great Barrington Declaration of October 2020 – an open letter sponsored by the American Institute for Economic Research that argues against so-called “zero-COVID” policies and for “herd immunity” (Angeli et al., 2021) – we have seen the normalisation of widespread infection and laissez-faire government responses. In Australia, certain media commentators, public intellectuals, and politicians have expressed vocal support for a “return to normal” (Duckett, 2022). This is most evident in some of the claims that have been repeated in public discourse, notably including assertions that new strains of the virus are “mild”, that those who have been infected and vaccinated will develop “hybrid immunity”, that COVID will become “endemic”, or even that “the pandemic is over”. These claims, many of which are unsupported by scientific evidence, tend to downplay the potentially more severe consequences of the virus and may perhaps lead many to believe that “the health consequences of COVID are minor, or even trivial” (Grafton et al., 2022). Nevertheless, the “let it rip” narrative to which they lend support has become hegemonic and so exercises a decisive influence over pandemic-related norms and behaviours. Gramsci foresaw the use of public opinion by the state to persuade the public into acceptance of an unpopular action by creating “the adequate public opinion” (Bates, 1975, p. 363). However, “rather than imposing preconceived ideologies from above, this requires a complex, negotiated process of working with existing beliefs, prejudices and predilections” (Williams, 2020, p. 97). To encourage the consent of the people, political leaders, the mainstream media

80  Research handbook on public management and COVID-19 and certain health experts have used the idea of “pandemic fatigue” – the exhaustion felt after months of sustained and unresolved adversity and disruptions, resulting in a lowered risk perception (World Health Organization, 2020) – to remove mandated protections. For example, National Cabinet’s Strategic Framework for 2023 plans to “mitigate pandemic fatigue” by generating “self-reliance, resilience and capacity building [to reduce] reliance on government interventions” (National Cabinet, 2022). Pandemic fatigue has become “public opinion” and has been used to justify both the return to normal and a laissez-faire approach. At the same time, as part of the “business as usual” model, the federal and state governments now provide access to a more limited range of COVID-related data. From September 2022, for example, daily updates of case numbers were reduced to weekly updates. Access to PCR tests used to generate these data has also been limited, with a change in legislation from 1 January 2023 prioritising access to these tests for certain at-risk groups through state-mandated testing sites while requiring all others to secure a GP referral. Australians are encouraged instead to use RATs, yet these are unaffordable for many and less efficacious as a diagnostic tool for newer strains of the virus. This limited access, in addition to the lifting of a previous requirement to report a positive RAT result, means that reported case numbers likely do not provide a full picture of community transmission. Furthermore, as ABC journalist Casey Briggs revealed in early 2023, much of the research and modelling that the federal government has commissioned to support their response to COVID has not been publicly released (Briggs, 2023). The public have therefore been persuaded to lower their personal risk perception and their expectation of the role that the state should take in protecting citizens from harm without access to all the facts, while those who continue to follow government advice to take “personal responsibility” are sidelined in public discourse. Many Australians have now committed to living with COVID. Widespread transmission has come to be seen as inevitable and a necessary sacrifice to return to a pre-2020 way of life, while most of the population – including up to 90 per cent of children – have experienced at least one brush with the virus (PAEDS, 2022). It is therefore unsurprising that public concern has eased, with only 42 per cent of those asked in a 2022 poll considering COVID a “critical threat” to the national interest in contrast to 76 per cent in 2020 (Lowy Institute, 2022). Most Australians now seem to prefer to return to “business as usual” and seldom acknowledge the great burden that unmitigated transmission and especially the impact of long COVID will place on society, the economy, and our individual and collective health and wellbeing (Grafton et al., 2022; Kompaniyets et al, 2022; Xie et al., 2022). Yet this lack of public action is arguably beneficial only for those who stand to gain the most from a return to the pre-pandemic status quo – the employers and business leaders who depend on the uninterrupted circulation of capital and commodities to which the pandemic at first presented an apparently insurmountable obstacle. A return to business as usual is also politically beneficial, as it transfers responsibility for reducing the spread of the virus and caring for those affected from the state to the individual, thereby precipitating what has been termed the “biggest victory for neoliberal public health policy in memory” (Wallace, 2022).

CONCLUSION Early in the pandemic, Australia followed an elimination strategy that allowed Australians to live in a parallel reality while the rest of the word struggled with uncontrolled infections and

Why Australia went from zero-COVID to COVID-central  81 mass casualties. However, as more infectious and virulent variants emerged, the Morrison government changed tactic. Following the direction of countries such as the UK and US, which both adopted a hyper-individualised “live with COVID” approach, Australia quickly transitioned from COVID-zero to COVID-central. In this chapter, I have shown how this decision was underpinned not by public health advice or empirical evidence, but an ideological predilection for small government, free-market solutions, competition, rugged individualism, and a hierarchy of worth. Morrison’s mantra of “personal responsibility” and his yearning for a “return to normal” are reminiscent of neoliberalism, prosperity gospel and social Darwinist doctrine, three aspects of the same ideology. Yet this was an unpopular decision for which Morrison paid the price at the 2022 federal election. The third year of the pandemic not only saw a change of federal government but also a transformation of Australians’ attitudes to the virus. The Albanese government adopted a similar neoliberal framing of pandemic protections as an imposition on business and individual freedoms. The re-opening of the nation while avoiding political fallout was always contingent on a shift in the national psyche. I have drawn on Gramsci’s notion of hegemony to explain this, arguing that the “organs of public opinion” gained the approval and consent of Australians by minimising the risk of the virus to encourage the idea that “the new normal” is in the public interest. The goal, however, was to lower expectations of government so that blame for the mismanagement of the pandemic could be transferred from the state to the individual. The response from both leaders reflects the legacies of the transformation to new public management in the late twentieth century, which prioritised small government, market solutions, competition, individual “consumer” choice and an efficient streamlined public service, eroding nation-state capacity to respond to a pandemic (Chodor and Hameiri, 2023; O’Flynn, 2007). The wholesale adoption of a “let it rip” approach by a socially liberal party is surprising, given this party’s history of championing universal healthcare and egalitarianism. Transmission must be reduced to avoid mass disability and death, which will increasingly pose a social and economic burden on the nation (Grafton et al., 2022). As the cracks of neoliberalism are exposed by this global pandemic, the Albanese government must replace neoliberal rhetoric with one that emphasises social solidarity (Duckett, 2022). Following expert advice, a population-level “Swiss cheese” model must be implemented (Jain et al., 2022), combining vaccinations, mask mandates, air quality safety standards, sufficient and accessible testing, infection isolation requirements and, most importantly, a swift adaptation to outbreaks and changing circumstances.

NOTES 1. Both JobSeeker and Austudy are income support payments. The former provides financial assistance to those who are unemployed, looking for work, or unable to work due to illness or injury, whereas the latter provides for full-time students and apprentices aged over 25. Paid parental leave is a government-funded scheme that provides up to 18 weeks of financial support at minimum wage to eligible working parents who take time off work to care for a newborn or newly adopted child. 2. Gramsci (1971, p. 419) contends that “common sense” – the “philosophy of non-philosophers” – is the “conception of the world which is uncritically absorbed by the various social and cultural environments in which the moral individuality of the average man is developed”.

82  Research handbook on public management and COVID-19

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PART II HOW COVID-19 CHALLENGED THE FUNDAMENTALS OF PUBLIC MANAGEMENT

7. Procurement and public spending: amplification and emergence of issues arising from COVID-19 Barbara Allen

INTRODUCTION The story of PPE purchasing is perhaps the most shameful episode of the United Kingdom government’s response to the pandemic. (Chair of the UK Public Accounts Committee – Dame Meg Hillier MP. House of Commons Committee of Public Accounts 2022a)

The UK Public Accounts Committee published a very detailed report setting out the disastrous procurement activity associated with COVID-19, claiming an outright failure to manage the crisis (House of Commons Committee of Public Accounts 2022b). This is not the only such incidence of problems with procurement during the pandemic, and the COVID-19 pandemic is not the first event to have serious problems with procurement activity (Wilkinson 2007; Atkinson et al. 2020). Pandemic or disaster-related procurement issues have, however, typically gained surprisingly little attention given that they shine a light on the enormous sums spent through government purchasing and the inherent challenges of accountability and reliability in the public management system (Atkinson and Sapat Alka 2012). It is also the case that there is little focus on the connections between actual government spending as it winds its way through public procurement policy and processes and the outcomes that government pursues. Much more emphasis has been at the front end of the procurement process, rather than the actual impact of these spending decisions. Public investment to support health, provide services, and to maintain infrastructure during times of crisis is in large part activated through public procurement. COVID-19 has put pressure on national systems – in addition to all the buying associated with protection and roll-out of vaccines, there has been a requirement for the stand-up of isolation facilities and wide-ranging social and business support programs. Procurement rules are in place to ensure that in a time of uncertainty, the public purse is protected; however, this can be undermined when there is urgent need in the system. Such rules, in situations of emergency, can also act as a barrier to responsiveness. These tensions between responsiveness and accountability are an enduring challenge for public managers in practice. This chapter is about strategic public procurement as a major ‘idea’ and activity within public management and explores the impact of the ‘COVID-19 effect’ on it, drawing on examples from New Zealand, Australia and elsewhere. The first section identifies strategic public procurement as a core concept in public management and links it to the activity of government spending and governance. The second section unpacks what was learned about strategic public procurement from the COVID-19 experience, specifically how health procurement (e.g. Personal Protective Equipment (PPE) and vaccines) came centre-stage. Part of COVID-19’s impact involved the use of infrastructure policy and implementation as an investment for eco86

Procurement and public spending  87 nomic recovery. Public procurement is directly implicated in planning for infrastructure and many of the known weaknesses in procurement such as contracting capacity and capability have emerged more publicly during COVID-19 (see Bice, this volume for an in-depth discussion of infrastructure spending for pandemic recovery). The final section considers the broad ramifications of what has been uncovered and potentially learned from this period and what this means for public management.

UNDERSTANDING PUBLIC PROCUREMENT The OECD’s definition of public procurement offers an easy explanation. It “refers to the purchase by governments and state-owned enterprises of goods, services and works. The public procurement process is the sequence of activities starting with the assessment of needs through awards to contract management and final payment” (OECD 2019). Expanded definitions increasingly point to the lifecycle and end-of-life product or service. For example, Circular Public Procurement is defined as the process by which public officials purchase goods, works and services that can contribute to close the energy and material loops within the supply chain system, and that can reduce and eliminate the negative environmental impacts and waste production throughout their life cycle (ICLEI 2017). As understanding of the circular economy grows, there is increasing pressure on public purchasers to think through the relationships between what is needed now and how that will result in future problems such as landfill or unmet needs (Sönnichsen and Clement 2020). This wider acknowledgement of the full cycle of procurement aligns with the concept of strategic procurement. Strategic public procurement is the use of public spending to achieve objectives beyond obtaining a good or service at lowest cost (Allen 2021a; Guarnieri and Corrêa 2019). It encompasses government spending for purpose – using the lever of government spending to pursue policy objectives that may include inclusive employment (Orser et al. 2019), obtaining innovative products or processes (Yukins and Racca 2019), supporting climate change initiatives (Olmsted 2020), promoting small businesses (Allen 2021b) and supporting the development of an Indigenous economy (Te Puni Kokiri Ministry of Maori Development 2021). In the next section I unpack the foundations of public procurement through two lenses: the economic lens and the legal lens. I introduce the relationship between procurement and good governance. The Economic Lens of Procurement The pursuit of economic efficiency has typically been the foundation for good public procurement. Although it is not often described in this fashion, one of the most well-known uses of the procurement lever to achieve specific objectives was in the United Kingdom with Thatcher’s Compulsory Competitive Tendering (CCT) policy. Originally applied to construction, building maintenance and highways under the 1980 Local Government Planning and Land Act, CCT was extended by the Local Government Act in 1988 and then again in 1992 to a wide range of services (Stewart 2000). This had institutional design implications for years to come in that it separated the role of the client from contractor, becoming known as the ‘purchaser-provider

88  Research handbook on public management and COVID-19 split’ (Alderwick et al. 2021). It also meant that public services would be exposed to market forces, and a whole series of shifts resulted in a ‘business-like’ approach to public provision. CCT was at the heart of the New Public Management paradigm which emerged from the growing influence of globalization and liberalization (Hood 1991; Dunleavy and Hood 1994). The policy direction of CCT was clear in the sense that above all, contracting and the purchase of goods and services by the government was to focus on economic efficiency and lower costs. The neoliberal paradigm privileged efficiency and effectiveness, largely viewed in economic terms, and more specifically in terms of the pursuit of ‘lowest cost’ through the introduction of competition into what were mainly public services provided by the state. The Local Government Act 1999 brought in Best Value legislation whereby an authority designated under the Act would be required to deliver ‘best value’, and authorities were required to demonstrate that the council was making arrangements that were economic, efficient, and effective, including the obligation to secure continuous improvement. Varied attempts to pursue social objectives and wider environmental ambitions through the procurement function have demonstrated some success (Erridge and Greer 2002; Erridge 2007; Bolton 2006; McCrudden 2004, 2007), but policy frameworks and trade agreements have been driven by the fundamentals of liberal markets and consequently so has public procurement. There have been efforts to measure social and broader outcomes (Hartlapp 2020) but the question arises as to whether they hold up if our fundamental assumptions about competition and markets do not change. There is mixed evidence as to the reality of least-cost based procurement effectiveness, and there is as yet little evidence with regards to that approach in combination with best-value or commissioning frameworks (Stake 2017; O’Flynn and Sturgess 2019). The evaluation of spending through procurement effectiveness remains poorly understood. This economic lens relates closely to the legal lens addressed in the next section. The Legal Lens of Procurement The legal lens considers procurement within its legislative, regulatory and trade frameworks. It considers how national, regional and international laws operate with respect to rules-based trade – such as European Union (EU) public tendering, Free-Trade Agreements with government procurement obligations and themes such as supporting small and medium enterprises. Underpinning this lens is one of the key features of neoliberalism, that more trade is beneficial and that all should be able to compete on a level playing field for government procurement. Much of this literature has looked at how and when there can be room for expanded procurement approaches within the trade agreement regimes (Kunzlik 2003, 2013; Hoekman and Mavroidis 1997; Hoekman et al. 2022; Arrowsmith 2009, 2010, 2012; Arrowsmith and Butler 2021; Trybus 2018). Specialist procurement legal scholars quickly produced an in-depth assessment of emergency procurement and regulatory responses early in the pandemic (Arrowsmith et al. 2021). The wider legal literature, especially in the EU, has grown rapidly, examining legalities and contracting possibilities around environmental objectives (Andhov 2021; Sjåfjell and Wiesbrock 2015). New Zealand is deeply embedded in the world trade regimes, being a partner in many multi-lateral and bilateral agreements (e.g. NZ-Australia Closer Economic Relations (CER); NZ-Malaysia Free Trade Agreement, Comprehensive and Progressive Agreement for Trans-Pacific Partnership (CPTPP); and the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership (RCEP)). Nationally, procurement is lightly

Procurement and public spending  89 Table 7.1

Spend of general government procurement as a percentage of GDP General government procurement as a percentage of GDP

Country

2007

2012

2017

2020

Australia

12.2

12.6

14.99

–

New Zealand

14.35

14.72

14.7

–

Canada

12.74

13.81

13.42

14.59

United Kingdom

12.93

13.92

12.98

16.11

Japan

13.68

16.04

16.09

–

Sweden

14.51

16.24

16.37

16.98

United States

10.67

10.56

9.48

–

Source:

Adapted from: OECD.Stat (2021).

regulated. The most recent Procurement Rules (New Zealand Government Procurement 2019) have embedded a set of ideas that promote the pursuit of public value, opening the possibility for strategic procurement to require much more evidence of social and environmental outcomes. The regulatory guidance attempts to drive innovation and performance with good commercial practice, to achieve objectives that fulfil ‘outcomes’, in addition to being effective and efficient (New Zealand Government Procurement 2019). Such developments signal potentially significant changes to how procurement is operating in practice, although ‘how’ to accomplish broader outcomes through collaboration and new ways of contracting is only beginning to develop (Bonomi and Cabral 2021; Niewerth et al. 2022). Procurement and Good Governance Strategic public procurement is increasingly recognized as having a central role in the effective governance of developed and developing nations (World Bank Group 2021). The OECD, through its Government at a Glance reports, show the scale of spend of general government procurement as a percentage of GDP (Table 7.1). In New Zealand for example, this amounts to approximately NZ$51.5 billion in annual procurement spend (New Zealand Government Procurement 2021). Aside from the sheer scale of the spend, procurement is implicated in good governance with respect to improving transparency and reducing corruption, pursuing ethical trade in supply chains and contributing to aid effectiveness (Hoekman 2018; Phillips et al. 2007; Hughes et al. 2019; La Chimia and Trepte 2019). Efforts have been made to demonstrate not only public procurement’s contribution to the economy but to national well-being outcomes more broadly (OECD 2022). In a report from the Nordic Council of Ministers (2022), public procurement is referred to as ‘the missing multiplier’, emphasizing that public procurement can impact all 17 Sustainable Development Goals. International organizations such as the OECD form an important network of knowledge repositories and avenues of support for middle- and low-income countries with ambitions to reduce corruption and spend more wisely. The work of the OECD includes a Public Procurement Network and numerous sets of guidelines such as ‘OECD Principles on Enhancing Integrity in Public Procurement’. The high level of activity directed towards improving procurement and consequently governments’ capacity and capability for good governance is remarkable in its breadth. Yet, the arrival of COVID-19 provided ample demonstration of the ongoing weaknesses in public procurement and the challenges in public management systems to shape, monitor, and improve spending through procurement.

90  Research handbook on public management and COVID-19

THE COVID-19 EFFECT I raise three key ‘COVID-19 effects’ with regards to strategic public procurement. The first was the dramatic upsurge in the requirement for governments to procure vast amounts of basic PPE, first for health professionals and later for the entire population. In this area we saw evidence of procurers working within traditional procurement ‘emergency’ exemptions, as well as in more flexible ways with respect to new requirements such as the stand-up of isolation facilities (Mak et al. 2022). The fundamental challenges to public procurement associated with transparency and corruption exposed weaknesses in contracting capability, notably in the UK (House of Commons Committee of Public Accounts 2022b). Second, the procurement of effective COVID-19 vaccines demonstrated the complicated and inequitable ways in which government spending is channelled to private sector companies and governments that can best afford to protect their nation’s public health. The third aspect of the COVID-19 impact is related to the policy ambitions of using investment in infrastructure for economic recovery. Across several nations, stimulus through infrastructure spend is being used in conjunction with procurement strategies to direct funds to support policies associated with inequalities, and the impacts of climate change (The Economist Intelligence Unit, 2020). Procurement of PPE I turn first to the dramatic activity associated with the procurement of PPE. By March 2020, it was becoming clear that demands on the health supply system were unprecedented; this was not a contained, singular national or regional problem, but one of global significance. Sadiq and Kessa (2020) note that the ‘emergency’ clauses in most countries’ procurement frameworks were actually insufficient and led to additional challenges, such as the need to rely on new international suppliers and increased corruption. Sanchez-Graells (2020) points to the ‘deactivation’ of procurement rules in the European Commission for COVID-19: “public buyers may negotiate directly with potential contractor(s) and there are no publication requirements, no time limits, no minimum number of candidates to be consulted or other procedural requirements” (p. 82). As early as April 2021, there was evidence that a fifth of UK government contracts awarded to respond to the pandemic in 2020 contained indicators of possible corruption. This included how contractors were chosen and inadequate enabling of scrutiny. Transparency International (2021) wrote that between February and the end of November 2020, they found 711 identifiable COVID-19 related contract awards worth £13.3 billion had only been reported after the 30 days legal deadline, £7.4 billion of which was reported more than 100 days after the contract award. The Department of Health and Social Care 2020–21 Annual Report and Accounts (House of Commons Committee of Public Accounts 2022b) found that there is now £4 billion of PPE in storage that will not be used in the NHS and the organization faces the costs of its disposal, which to date involves appointing two commercial waste partners to dispose of 15,000 pallets a month through recycling and burning to generate power. The involvement of political actors cannot be underestimated. A series of articles surrounding the UK PPE scandal reveals deep connections between high-ranking politicians and company owners whose access to the available contracts resulted in prodigious profits and a trail of waste (Lewis 2022; Siddique 2022; Wise 2021). In New Zealand, the Auditor-General agreed to independently review the Ministry of Health’s management of PPE during the early stages of the country’s response to COVID-19.

Procurement and public spending  91 They undertook a rapid and targeted scope that revealed distributed responsibility for PPE stock and a system that “did not lend itself to effective procurement in a competitive and internationally constrained market for PPE in the midst of a pandemic” (Auditor-General 2020, p. 6). An OECD stocktaking report (2020) on immediate public procurement and infrastructure response to COVID-19 outlined the immediate policy responses by governments in the OECD, the European Commission and non-OECD countries using publicly available information. In the United States, the first action was to get equipment and supplies out of the Strategic National Stockpile (SNS), the second was to increase production of medical supplies and equipment leading to a depletion of the stockpile by 90 per cent (Sadiq and Kessa 2020). New vendors posed problems due to lack of knowledge of public procurement processes and initially the US was exporting significant amounts of equipment, such as respirators and ventilators. The growth of public–private partnerships, such as that between the US government and Ford, who began to mass produce ventilators, is an interesting outcome of the new kinds of global demands (Siddiqui 2020). This demonstration of resilience dynamics presents new information and opportunities in terms of preparing for future procurement responsiveness and supply chain disruptions (Gereffi et al. 2022). Procurement of COVID-19 Vaccines The procurement and delivery of high-quality vaccines has implications for the ‘public good’ at international and national levels (Woodle 2000; Meijer et al. 2021). At the outset of the pandemic, ethical issues arose quickly in terms of fair procurement and distribution of the vaccines (Allen and Macaulay 2021). The pressure of increasing public frustration and growing numbers of cases resulted in over-procurement by some governments. This was despite existing volume commitments with suppliers (Teerawattananon et al. 2022). There are two key themes to explore briefly here. With respect to COVID-19, how countries buy, supply and deliver vaccines came to the forefront of national decision-making. Ten billion doses of a new vaccine became necessary overnight (Bollyky and Brown 2021). Global initiatives to secure vaccines for poorer countries came under scrutiny. Second, drastic inequity was revealed by the ways in which rich countries were able to use their market power or relative economic stability to produce and procure needed vaccines. Countries typically procure vaccines in three ways: participating in global initiatives, making arrangements directly with the vaccine developers, or they may be involved in early-stage research towards developing new vaccines (Fonseca et al. 2021), and all of these demonstrated issues associated with procurement. The COVID-19 Vaccine Global Access initiative (COVAX) “aims to de-risk vaccine purchasing by reaching agreements with a wide range of developers” (Fonseca et al. 2021, p. 2). The COVAX facility uses donor funds to provide vaccines at nearly zero cost to 92 poor countries, but many middle-income countries (MICs) are ineligible. High income countries and MICs who want to take part in the pooled procurement of COVAX must do so as ‘self-financed countries’ where doses are purchased from COVAX who secure them from developers. Between COVAX (led by the World Health Organization), the Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness and Innovation (CEPI) and GAVI (the Vaccine Alliance), collective efforts seemed promising with 167 countries signed up in early 2020. The hope was that the production and distribution of heavily subsidized vaccines would protect health workers and

92  Research handbook on public management and COVID-19 vulnerable populations even in poor nations (Sell 2020). Competition for vaccines ensued with high-income countries such as the United States making their own deals with the producing firms, signing contracts with individual companies to buy vaccines (Nkengasong et al. 2020). COVAX had challenges associated with the number of doses available and the timing of when the doses would be delivered. So countries of all income levels negotiated directly with vaccine developers for supplies (Wouters et al. 2021). Some high-income countries, like New Zealand and Australia, bought early access to enable purchases of large stocks of diverse portfolios of vaccines (New Zealand Government 2020). With much of the initial output already committed once efficacy information became available, MICs were competing over scarce doses, and then turned to less certain vaccines such as those developed by China, India, and Russia. Many governments already had legally binding deals with vaccine manufacturers, even before efficacy trial results of the first vaccine candidates were released. Manufacturers could not fulfil their contractual obligations, having had optimistic supply forecasts (Teerawattananon et al. 2022). Getting the vaccines produced at all involved directly influencing the market. Both the Trump and Biden administrations invoked the Defense Production Act, ordering suppliers of specialized inputs to vaccine manufacturing to prioritize contracts with companies making vaccines in the United States, leaving a contentious issue regarding halting exports of inputs to other countries that desperately required them: “On behalf of the vaccine industry outside the U.S., I humbly request you to lift the embargo of raw material exports out of the U.S. so that vaccine production can ramp up,” Adar Poonawalla, the CEO of the Serum Institute of India, the world’s largest vaccine manufacturer, tweeted at Biden on April 16 (Bollyky and Brown 2021, p. 2). The key point is that there was little in the way of global transparency of procurement and supply chain activity for COVID-19 vaccines and other inputs, and this impacted on the capacity of other countries to produce and manufacture their products. Weakness in the system of this ‘global public good’ suggests that COVID-19 uncovered “profound weakness in the structure of contemporary capitalism and offers an opportunity to re-think its role in shaping global health” (Sell 2020, p. 150). Public Procurement and Infrastructure Longstanding underinvestment in infrastructure became more obvious during COVID-19, especially related to public health in some countries such as the United States (Maani and Galea 2020). Public investment for infrastructure is channelled mainly through public procurement (OECD 2020). The OECD (2020) refers to the important role of ‘infrastructure governance’ garnering attention during COVID-19, the activity of identifying critical infrastructure, setting up new or temporary infrastructure, or repurposing existing infrastructure. Procurement was implicated as a regulatory tool that needed improvement (New Zealand Infrastructure Commission 2022a). Large projects underway before COVID-19, such as the Transmission Gully Public–Private Partnership Road project in New Zealand, had the spotlight aimed directly at them. Infrastructure projects were at the risk of coming to a complete halt during COVID-19 lockdowns; Transmission Gully experienced the repercussions of a force majeure contract exception – whereby contracts were halted, and companies claimed the provision in their contract that frees both parties from obligation if an extraordinary event directly prevents one or both parties from performing. The effects of this kind of contractual

Procurement and public spending  93 mechanism are project delays and delays in completion, disputes arising due to contract and cash demands, potential escalation of prices of materials, equipment and labour, work site security costs due to closures, project stoppage costs and exposure in sites of materials to natural factors (Alfadil et al. 2022). Both Australia and New Zealand had significant investment in infrastructure underway before the pandemic. Large-scale transport infrastructure projects across the Commonwealth and State Governments in Australia will have investment of AU$100 billion over 10 years from 2019 (Love et al. 2020, p. 1). The authors suggested that governments needed to “re-calibrate their procurement policies to future-proof their large-scale transport infrastructure projects”. Infrastructure Australia – ‘the nation’s independent infrastructure advisor’ – was a key player in the country’s recovery plan (Infrastructure Australia n.d.). Procurement is at the core of ten principles for the recovery plan, agreed to by the independent infrastructure bodies of Australian jurisdictions (e.g., Infrastructure Australia, Building Queensland, Infrastructure NSW, Infrastructure SA, Infrastructure Victoria, Infrastructure WA and Infrastructure Tasmania) along with input from the Northern Territory and the Australian Capital Territory. Across the Tasman, in April 2022, New Zealand announced its first long-term infrastructure strategy, Rautaki Hanganga o Aotearoa – New Zealand Infrastructure Strategy 2022–2052. This plan is intended to “transform New Zealand’s infrastructure”; it also refers to how to “enable net-zero carbon emissions, build liveable cities, and support our towns and regions to flourish” (New Zealand Infrastructure Commission 2022b, p. 1). NZ now has a National Infrastructure Pipeline, that “provides a forward view of planned infrastructure projects in New Zealand” (p. 2). Lessons have been learned: contract management frameworks, risk models and governance of infrastructure all need to be considered with respect to future procurement and preparing for crises.

STRATEGIC PUBLIC PROCUREMENT AND PUBLIC MANAGEMENT – WHERE TO NEXT? The issues with procurement in the UK that I began with have been further scrutinized as the new Procurement Bill makes its way through the House of Lords and the House of Commons (Hansard 2022). Procurement activity during the pandemic is being used to show how fraudulent action can easily emerge through public spending. This has, in a roundabout way, increased knowledge about procurement and shone a light on preparedness and contracting capability. Paradoxically, there are lessons about innovation and resilience emerging as well, notably associated with health products and preparedness. The UK situation is also a good example of how public procurement represents a nexus of policy and implementation challenges. The Procurement Bill debate is leading to in-depth discussions of how the public and private sectors intersect with health spending. The politics of procurement involves high-level choices about what to buy, whom to buy from and how much to spend, all within an increasingly complex environment of multiple, layered trade agreements and national requirements. The consequent national policy must balance the trade agreement requirements and the need to promote local economic development as well as pursue social value through purchasing. It is likely that the procurement spend figures will further increase from 2020, given the impact of COVID-19, supporting a recovery, the impact of fuel and energy prices largely caused by the war in Ukraine and recessionary trends throughout the world.1 Massive financial pressures

94  Research handbook on public management and COVID-19 may raise the prospect of government choosing to limit its strategic public procurement and retrench a least-cost approach with consequent impacts on the extent to which targets and preferences are used. This is making the need for a more strategic approach to procurement more relevant. COVID-19 has accelerated what was already happening with respect to procurement. The growing understanding of its importance and necessity of chief procurement officers being ‘at the top table’ is providing impetus to reform and improvement. A shock to the global system, such as the pandemic, drew attention to the mechanisms of purchasing and contracting and the state of preparedness. After the first year, the initial shock transformed into the ‘recovery’ stage, which involved government intervention to bolster and accelerate infrastructure-building programs. The realization from this was that building programs had been inadequately organized at a strategic level, and that resilience had to involve the development of the infrastructure pipeline approach in New Zealand and Australia, including reviews of procurement strategies and upskilling in contracting. Weakness in public procurement associated with infrastructure – contracting capability, project governance and planning, monitoring and evaluation – have all been compounded by COVID-19 and to some extent been recognized and brought to public attention. Strategic procurement extends to supply chains, as we learned with vaccine inputs and the UK contracting debacles. If increasing resilience associated with supply is critical, then issues in the supply chain become quickly apparent. For example, there has been a growing focus on modern slavery (Caruana et al. 2021; Arora and Stephen 2022) and this will continue to be an important issue going forward. In summary, while there has generally been limited, truly strategic public procurement, it does appear that the pendulum has swung, at least temporarily, towards a more sophisticated use and understanding of the procurement lever. While I did not cover social procurement directly in this chapter, public spending directed through social enterprises and enhanced understanding of how to encourage social outcomes through the use of socially minded organizations, has grown and holds some potential for improving the connection of public spending to public value (Allen et al. 2023). Public managers will be responsible for finding the balance between driving national competitiveness through effective public spending and supporting local social and economic development with appropriate procurement mechanisms. COVID-19 drove home the known issues associated with public procurement; that it is highly vulnerable to corruption, that innovation can emerge from urgency, but also those international mechanisms for procurement of health products such as vaccines have demonstrable weaknesses. Effective public management systems rely on good procurement and good procurement leads to good governance. COVID-19 has shone a light on this, and public managers would do well to pay more attention to public procurement.

NOTE 1. Spend through government procurement is, in New Zealand for example, estimated to be approximately 20 per cent of GDP based on 2019 data (New Zealand Government Procurement 2021). This is in line with comparable countries in the OECD. There has been increased spending (NZ$10 billion or 2 per cent of GDP since the 2017 figures based on 2014 data) on transportation services, health care, education, and wellbeing, and the establishment of new government agencies, and under the current government a clear recognition of the “increasingly important role public services

Procurement and public spending  95 have to play in driving greater public value and broader economic, environmental, social and cultural outcomes from their spending” (New Zealand Government Procurement 2021).

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8. Citizen participation in public management: activated, empowered, responsibilised, abandoned? Catherine Durose, Beth Perry and Liz Richardson

INTRODUCTION In this chapter, we analyse the differential impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic on citizen participation in the context of public management. The scope and form of citizen participation within public management has been a lively debate. Much of this debate has acknowledged the potential value of citizen participation in public management, in a context characterised by complexity, diversity, challenges to legitimacy, and often resource constraint. A proliferation of experimentation and reflection within public management should not, however, fail to recognise the limits of citizen participation. Designing and facilitating participation within public management requires skill to value different expertise and experiences, also to avoid replicating structures of exclusion (Durose and Richardson, 2016; Perry et al., 2019) which can render citizen participation within public management an ‘empty ritual’ (Arnstein, 1969). The pandemic has arguably intensified this tension between the potential and limits of citizen participation in public management. Whilst Marston et al. (2020, p. 1676) noted that participation was ‘crucial’ in a pandemic, as we were ‘far more likely – together – to come up with innovative, tailored solutions that meet the full range of needs of our diverse populations’, in practice, responses during the pandemic ‘largely involved governments telling communities what to do, seemingly with minimal community input’. Such perspectives reflect that the public health and economic emergencies engendered by COVID-19 have meant that decisions have ‘often been made quickly, with little involvement of stakeholders in the deliberation about which policies to pursue’ (Norheim et al., 2021), defaulting to a reliance on centralised leadership and scientific expertise. COVID-19 also enhanced practical challenges to citizen participation, for example, the lack of access to usual participatory spaces and need to change modes by working online or remotely (Munyede and Machengete, 2020). Whilst, on the one hand, the specific demands of a crisis context may highlight the fragility of citizen participation within public management, ‘central governments have never been exposed as more powerless and more dependent on their citizens’ (Steen and Brandsen, 2020, p. 851). So how do we make sense of what the pandemic means for citizen participation in public management? In this chapter, we will first outline some of the longstanding debates on citizen participation, highlighting the growing perception of a ‘participatory turn’ within public management and critical reflections on its limits. To further analyse how the constructed nature of citizenship (Scott, 1998) has informed citizen participation in public management, and how the pandemic impacted upon this, we employ Clarke’s (2005) distinction between ‘activated’, ‘empowered’, ‘responsibilised’ and ‘abandoned’ citizens. This analytical distinction allows us to render explicit the politics of citizen participation in public management, and to consider 99

100  Research handbook on public management and COVID-19 what citizen participation in the context of the pandemic means for how we think about public management. The chapter draws on the authors’ own research at the local level, primarily in England, along with international examples from primary and secondary research.

WHO IS A CITIZEN, AND ON WHOSE TERMS DOES CITIZEN PARTICIPATION IN PUBLIC MANAGEMENT TAKE PLACE? Recent decades have seen a rapid increase of scholarship within public management about the importance of citizen participation. From a normative perspective, such debates have sought to recognise the value of different forms of expertise, including lived experience, in addressing complex, dynamic and diversified policy challenges. In parallel, we can see a proliferation of experimentation with different democratic and participatory innovations (Elstub and Escobar, 2019) intending to give voice and influence to citizens about the decisions and policies that affect their everyday lives. This is highlighted by international organisations such as the United Nations (UN) who position citizen participation as both legitimate and necessary, reflecting a perceived participatory ‘turn’ or ‘revolution’ in public management (Lee et al., 2015). Such a ‘turn’ arguably offers the opportunity to refocus on the fundamental purpose of public management: to serve the public interest. It also offers an analytical viewpoint to understand the shifting role for citizens within different modes of governance – for example, from recipient, to customer, to participant – and to recognise the contested and multiple nature of publics. Citizen participation has also been understood as a potential means to address the limits of representative democracy or ‘democratic deficit’ (Gaventa, 2005), by advancing democratic values, such as justice, legitimacy and effectiveness (Fung, 2006) through greater voice, choice and influence. However, we can also recognise critical questions about the limits of such a participatory turn, specifically who is a citizen and, on whose terms and where does citizen participation within public management then take place? In Scott’s (1998) influential book, Seeing like a State, he looks at the ways in which states attempt to make societies legible, and argues that such efforts result in the standardising and therefore abstraction of a citizen: What is striking, of course, is that such subjects [have] no gender, no tastes, no history, no values, no opinions or original ideas, no traditions and no distinctive personalities to contribute to the enterprise. They have none of the particular, situated and contextual attributes that one would expect of any population and that we, as a matter of course, always attribute to elites. (Scott, 1998, p. 346)

If the question of who is a citizen is standardised and regularised, this has implications for how we understand citizenship itself, and citizen participation within public management. Indeed, within public management, citizen participation has tended to assume a certain kind of subjects: citizens who are registered, enrolled, legal, and visible, and who perform according to certain kinds of societal norms, are those that public administrators generally want to collaborate with (Pratchett, 1999; Clarke, 2005). In our own research on spatial planning in Greater Manchester, England, for example, we saw dismissal and de-legitimation of those perceived as ‘shouty’ activists and preferencing of others that would be ‘friendlier’ towards public authorities (Perry et al., 2019). We can also see these limits to citizenship in racialised (Beebeejaun, 2017) and gendered terms, again with implications for participation in public management. Harman’s (2018) work

Citizen participation in public management  101 on ‘conspicuously invisible women’ within global health, for example, highlights a reliance within public management upon the ‘conspicuous’ free labour of women, for example in providing care, but also that women have been rendered invisible in policy and practice, and disconnected from the outcomes and consequences of policy decisions. Hawthorne’s (2022) work on youth politics in the Black Mediterranean notes the production of new differentiations between so-called ‘productive’ Black citizens and ‘unproductive’ Black refugees, where the former are seen as ‘citizens-in-waiting’ as opposed to a racialised undeserving poor. Critical literatures, for example on community development, perceive citizen participation in public management to be primarily concerned with enrolling citizens in the business of the state on the state’s own terms (Cornwall, 2004). The concern here is that citizen participation in public management demands ‘citizen input without control’ (Bherer et al., 2016, p. 227; see also Arnstein, 1969), raising questions relating to the co-optation of citizens, and the value and influence of citizen participation to citizens themselves. This ‘hollowed out’ critique of citizen participation stands in contrast to a ‘participatory citizenship’ (Bookchin, 1992, p. xi), which is a more radical and emancipatory project (Bherer et al., 2016) centring citizens’ relations with each other and the public space they occupy. Participatory citizenship is grounded less in decision-making and instead in urban space and everyday life (Purcell, 2002), as articulated in an urban context in Lefebvre’s (1996) ‘right to the city’. The above summary highlights that citizenship is a constructed category (Isin and Turner, 2007), which may be differently accorded rather than inherent. We will use this notion of constructed citizens to critically engage with the question of the impact and implications of the pandemic for citizen participation in public management. Seeing citizens as constructed within public policy and management informed Clarke’s (2005) distinction between activated, empowered, responsibilised and abandoned citizens. His influential work was originally applied to treatments of citizenship by the UK’s New Labour government in the 1990s and 2000s, but has continued resonance for understanding how citizens are constituted in policy and public management. ‘Activated’ citizens reflects the emphasis in government policy on shifting citizens from passive and dependent recipients of state assistance into ‘active self-sustaining individuals’ (Clarke, 2005, p. 448). ‘Empowered’ citizens are those that require ‘rescue’ from a paternalistic, intrusive and dominating state, in order to exercise voice and choice in a plurality of ways (Clarke, 2005, p. 449). Activation and empowerment are countered with constructions of citizens as bearers of responsibilities as well as rights. Clarke differentiates between policy that seeks to ‘responsibilise’ citizens, and that which ‘abandons’ them. ‘Responsiblised’ citizens are charged with producing the conditions of their own independence. These idealised citizens are choice-making and self-directing, as well as hard-working and, importantly, moralised. The most sharply manifested characteristic of the ‘abandonment’ of the citizen is the dismantling of the protections for citizens constructed in post-war welfare capitalism (Clarke, 2005). We now use this analytical distinction to enable critical reflection on citizen participation in public management in the pandemic and beyond. The ‘Activated Citizen’ Drawing on both the communitarian emphasis on community self-help, and neoliberal aspirations to liberate the citizen from the state, the idea of the ‘activated’ citizen is illustrated by the recourse by public managers to mutual aid, community self-help, informal care and volunteering. This included foodbanks, prescription collection, checking on wellbeing, meal

102  Research handbook on public management and COVID-19 delivery, grocery shopping, informal childcare and so on, which served to reduce demands upon the state. Many of these activities were based on existing civic, community and voluntary organisations, and were extensions or continuations of longstanding activities. However, some citizen efforts were new as a direct result of the pandemic, such as ad hoc offers of informal help for neighbours in isolation, support for residents in specific places deemed as ‘vulnerable’, and spontaneous new social groups aimed at maintaining connections, protecting mental wellbeing, and practical help. The Lancet reported that, in the UK, ‘about 1 million people volunteered to help the pandemic response and highly localised mutual aid groups have sprung up all over the world’ (Marston et al., 2020, p. 1676). In the UK, 750,000 people signed up to the NHS Volunteering scheme alone, and people offered food to health workers and sewed scrubs for hospital workers (Benton and Power, 2021). Further reports from the UK also suggested that as many as 4000 informal community-based initiatives involving ‘tens of thousands of people’ (Rendall et al., 2022) emerged organically. While probably the result of a complex number of factors, it is notable that some informal volunteering schemes in the UK had many more volunteers than people to be helped (Benton and Power, 2021). The resonance of ‘activation’ in a pandemic context reflects existing evidence that ‘cooperative and solidaristic behaviours … are common amongst those affected in the immediate aftermath of disasters and extreme events’ (Fernandes-Jesus et al., 2021), and perhaps more contentiously ‘that citizens are mostly helped not by public authorities, but by other citizens’ (Steen and Brandsen, 2020, p. 852). Data on the extent and distribution of this activity remain limited, and concern has been articulated about the sustainability of such activation, given that these so-called ‘disaster communities’ often wane as those involved run out of resources and energy (Fernandes-Jesus et al., 2021; see also Steen et al., this volume). Citizens who were involved in community action themselves described their activation as wanting to avoid being ‘just a passenger’ in the crisis and to ‘give something back’ to public services (Benton and Power, 2021, p. 3). Studies of mutual aid groups formed during COVID-19 found that groups valued reciprocal lasting relationships and ‘bottom-up structures of co-operation’ over more ‘transactional and paternalistic cultures of working’ (Thiery et al., 2022, p. 3). The organic and spontaneous nature of civic action was inspired by the limits of the state, and thus challenges the state-centred assumption implied by the label of ‘activated’, instead allying with a more rights-based, radical and emancipatory notion of citizen participation, as referenced earlier. At the same time, for many, the celebration of mutual aid networks was a double-edged sword, given that they can involve an increase in the burden of care unless accompanied by resources, commitment to reducing poverty or redistribution of power (Toomer-McAlpine, 2020; McCormack, 2020). The ‘Empowered Citizen’ Forms of ‘empowered citizenship’ in the pandemic include efforts to enhance or target voice, with voice and choice being centred in public decisions and services, and strong levels of trust in institutions. For example, some advocated that more citizen participation could: in the short-term build legitimacy and support for hard decisions that need to be made in response to the pandemic and prevent further erosion of trust. In the longer term, it can contribute towards virtuous cycles of trust-building and more effective policies. (Norheim et al., 2021, p. 13)

Citizen participation in public management  103 The pandemic evidenced a range of practical examples of countries with established systems of participatory health governance, such as New Zealand, Taiwan and South Korea, where the base of public trust that such systems help to establish, were a vital component of their successful responses to COVID-19, along with effective communication strategies and unified health systems (Norheim et al., 2021, p. 12). Inclusive deliberative bodies, such as ad hoc citizens’ assemblies, permanent citizens’ panels and advisory councils, were evident: for example, the COVID-19 Culturally and Linguistically Diverse Community Forums in South Australia, the Citizens’ Panel Planning the West Midlands’ Recovery in England, and the Oregon Citizens’ Assembly on COVID-19 Recovery in the US. Other examples of efforts to develop open and inclusive decision-making included public hearings, such as those in Norway and the US, and France’s ‘Commission d’enquête pour l’évaluation des politiques publiques face aux grandes pandémies à la lumière de la crise sanitaire de la COVID-19 et de sa gestion24’ (Norheim et al., 2021). Open self-selective public participation mechanisms, such as town halls or village meetings (face to face or online), radio and television call-in programmes, petitions and crowdsourcing, initiated by either government or civil society, were also widely recorded in countries from Senegal to Brazil, the UK and Lebanon (Norheim et al., 2021, p. 12). Nonetheless a review of the participatory practices of 58 European cities revealed that such practices were predominately about the provision of support to citizens, public information campaigns or media platforms, with ‘little investment to steer online public consultations’ (Falanga, 2020, p. 7). At the same time, despite the examples above, concerns have also been expressed that citizen experiences of the pandemic undermined rather than built trust, as public health measures restricting movement unintentionally silenced citizen voices. The COVID-19 pandemic coincided with a global wave of protests by social movements, such as Black Lives Matter, School Strikes for Climate and action on indigenous land rights. COVID-19 severely disrupted these protests, for example with basic restrictions on people’s movement, ability to be in public spaces, as well as protesters’ own wariness about close contact with other citizens. The pandemic was perhaps a fortuitous opportunity, and was mobilised or used by some governments to try to quell protest, for example, through calls for national unity. There were high levels of acceptance and compliance with ‘exceptional measures of social control’ (Pleyers, 2020, p. 295), and an increasing number of citizens even consider[ed] authoritarian governments as the most efficient ones to deal with the crisis. Some governments took advantage of the media focus on the virus spread to silence activists (Lahbib, 2020), censor criticisms (Zhang, 2020) or take control of the press. (Pleyers, 2020, pp. 295–296)

Other forms of empowerment that sprang up globally were fundraising schemes for groups considered to be marginalised, or who have typically been marginalised in policy, and where the pandemic affected their ability to continue their livelihoods. For example, there were solidarity funds set up to support sex workers across several continents, involving sex worker advocacy groups, such as the African Sex Workers Alliance, the Indian Alliance of Sex Workers and similar networks in central and south America and elsewhere.1 In addition, citizen lobbying groups were actively campaigning for citizen rights to subsistence costs, housing rights and safety measures.2 Despite a context where social movements have been hampered in using their traditional methods such as street protests, there are social movements that have been ‘particularly active’ during the pandemic in ongoing ‘protests (that re-emerged

104  Research handbook on public management and COVID-19 in some countries despite sanitary risks); defending workers’ rights; mutual aid and solidarity; monitoring policymakers and popular education’ (Pleyers, 2020, p. 296). The ‘Responsibilised Citizen’ Government exhortations to stay safe by mask wearing and hand washing were positioned by policymakers as a form of empowerment, although seen by critics as responsibilisation. A ‘responsibilised citizen’ is one expected to ‘produce the conditions of one’s own independence’ (Clarke, 2005, p. 451). This notion is pertinent in the way that citizens have been expected to behave responsibly, and as the pandemic has waxed and waned, to use their ‘common sense’ to navigate risk. Increasingly such responsibilisation – the idea of which may be grounded in governmentality – has a moral flavour: self-directing subjects should be able to make ‘reasonable’ choices, directed by governmental rules or guidelines, and an inability to do so evidences an individual moral failing rather than one by the state (see also Williams, this volume). In the first responses to the pandemic in March 2020, there was a distinct contrast between two types of response to the pandemic. For the majority of states, Government regulations, often requiring changes in law, brought about hard lockdowns, stay-at-home orders and the closing down of services. Decision-makers’ ability to understand and predict how citizens would behave became central. Governments used advanced modelling to get a sense of the receptiveness of citizens to strong public order measures, particularly in places where the majority of the population has not experienced these. Consultation with experts at the very start of the global emergency suggested that it was not clear what the results of an imposition of lockdown might be – some predicting mass rebellion and civil disobedience, or even civil disorder. Early debates about panic buying, for example, were constructed into a picture of a thin veneer of civilised behaviour that could be stripped away terrifyingly quickly. This will be less of a surprise to those acquainted with the evidence on disasters, which recognises that even in extreme situations citizens are generally quite rational and yet that public authorities often expect citizens to panic and that stringent top-down interventions may be required (Heide, 2004). A second response can be seen in those ‘outlier’ nations, such as Sweden, which focused on awareness-raising. The choice of the Swedish government to appeal to the self-responsibility of its citizens, in firm contrast with the more paternalistic approach taken by other countries, has been argued to be a form of empowerment, based on high levels of public trust. This was also necessitated by a constitution that circumscribes peacetime limits on citizens’ rights and freedoms, making lockdowns effectively unlawful (Petterson et al., 2021). However, as the pandemic extended, other countries with different traditions and histories began to adopt the ‘Swedish model’. In the process, empowerment gave way to more widespread responsibilisation, with a shift from formal rules requiring hard compliance enforced by the state, to guidelines requiring soft compliance implemented by responsible citizens. Both hard and soft compliance are forms of responsibilisation that rely not only on the common sense of citizens, but producing and anticipating citizen intelligence: that is, understanding and predicting citizens’ attitudes and behaviours, particularly the likelihood of compliance with the most restrictive set of public health measures seen in some countries for several decades, including those with histories of authoritarian regimes and some without. The pandemic saw an emphasis being placed by governments on citizenship as compliance with

Citizen participation in public management  105 public health measures, and citizenship as basic types of behaviour that took regard of other human beings. ‘Compliance citizenship’ contributed to efforts to predict how citizens might react to instructions to ‘stay at home’, to wear masks, be tested, and later to take up vaccination programmes. Vaccine take-up was often framed by public health and government bodies as ‘vaccine hesitancy’. Such a framing puts the focus on the individual, rather than institutions. Low take-up might equally be about the often uneasy relationships that individuals, in particular ethnic communities, have with institutions, science, and medicine, often grounded in a number of previous experiences (see Hannah et al., this volume). In Australia, there were lower rates of vaccination in National Disability Insurance Scheme participants – the 12 per cent of Australians with permanent and significant disability. Some of this has been put down to vaccine hesitancy but it is also about not having appropriate vaccination experiences and distrust of the health system due to previous medical trauma (Dickinson et al., 2023). There was also a recognition in Australian health policy that a top-down approach to contact tracing would not work in some areas with predominantly Indigenous populations so this was devolved to community-controlled organisations (see Althaus et al., this volume). Underpinning questions of responsibilisation is a contestation over the balance between technocratic responses, based on compliance with hard rules which ‘follow the science’, and individual responses, based on compliance with soft guidance which are based on common-sense. To this extent, COVID-19 has been seen as a crisis in the politics of expertise (Boschele, 2021), heralding new forms of knowledge politics (May, 2021). Responsibilisation relies primarily on whether groups have, or are seen to have, sufficient expertise to produce their own independence – and if not, they risk being abandoned. The ‘Abandoned Citizen’ The ‘abandoned citizen’ is evident in how the pandemic has been utilised as an opportunity to roll back and dismantle the welfare state within developed democracies. We have seen this both in the sense of undermining the protections of the welfare state, but also in the limiting or narrowing sense of who is understood to be a citizen. There were examples of radical extensions to welfare protections, for example in the UK, the unprecedented ‘Everyone In’ initiative provided housing in the early stages of the pandemic for everyone experiencing street homelessness, alongside extensive income support and ‘furlough’ arrangements. However, such welfare protections were time-limited, and were far from comprehensive – for example, in Australia, where pandemic payments lifted some groups above the poverty line, which led to significant distress when they were retracted (Naidoo et al., 2022). The sense of ‘abandonment’ was viscerally demonstrated by the pandemic experiences of those without formal citizenship. For example, in India this informality excluded households and individuals from the protections of social safety nets (Sharma and Vora, 2021; United Nations Special Rapporteur, 2020). In the UK, there was also a spatial dimension to welfare protections, as centralised government decisions on public health restrictions, and economic support to counter their impact, were repeatedly driven by pandemic trends in London and the South East which differed radically from elsewhere in the country, leading to lobbying from city-regional mayors against command-and-control (Perry, 2021; Charara, 2020; Hill, 2020). In an international parallel, the COVID-19 pandemic impacted heavily on communities in low and middle-income

106  Research handbook on public management and COVID-19 countries dependent on international and national tourism. The communities around cultural heritage sites in the peri-urban area of Kisumu, Kenya, for example experienced abandonment not only by local political elites but also international donors, NGOs and organisations that had previously supported them. This in turn, however, enforced the development of limited mutual aid through community-based organisations until local resources ran dry (Perry et al., 2021). Abandonment also differed in demographic terms, with different groups experiencing variable public management engagement and support during the pandemic. For example, initially, public information campaigns in Sweden were carried out in the Swedish language, leaving the Somali community poorly informed and with subsequent higher levels of infection (Petterson et al., 2021). Fisher et al. (2020, p. 248) have noted how the UK Government’s response to COVID-19 effectively broke ‘the social contract between disabled people and successive governments’ as emergency legislation eroded disabled people’s rights to social care and made it easier for people to be detained under the 1983 Mental Health Act, whilst national clinical guidance questioned disabled people’s entitlement to critical care resources. Sex workers in informal settlements in Kenya were amongst the hardest hit in that context, as a result of hierarchies of ‘acceptable bodies’ embedded in state discourses based on prior framings of deserving and undeserving citizens (Hassan et al., 2021). Citizens are abandoned also when strategies of responsibilisation, for instance, lockdowns and social distancing, are not possible in conditions of density and informality, which have been described as counter-productive in suburban settlements in Nigeria (Chidubem Iwuoha and Toochi Aniche, 2020). This all points to the ways in which pre-existing structural inequalities have shaped the impacts on the pandemic on different groups and their construction (or dismissal) as citizens. The example of vaccine take-up is again a good example. There were low levels of take up of COVID-19 vaccines by specific communities such as south Asian and Black British communities, which paralleled higher levels of hospitalisations, a pattern similar to African Americans in the US. This points to intersecting disadvantages such as health inequalities and digital exclusion, when many COVID-19 processes for treatments and reporting were online, which also affected ethic minority communities disproportionately. However, it also reflects deeper issues of different historical experiences with the healthcare system (Warren et al., 2020), including past abuses of racial minorities (Hamel et al., 2016). For example, in the race to develop the vaccine there was an intensive process of clinical development, which was in the public eye to a greater extent and in ways that are unusual for medical trials. Public scrutiny of processes for approving medical treatments was heightened. Clinical trials should include a diverse mix of racial identities and sub-analyses should be included in trial data for vaccine efficacy data to be applicable for these individuals (Jethwa et al., 2021). Underrepresentation of racial diversity in coronavirus vaccine trials threatens both the validity and the generalisability of trial results. Differences in lifetime environmental exposure can result in different immunologic responses that could affect both safety and efficacy (Warren et al., 2020). However, the protocol for the Oxford vaccine phase 2/3 UK study had no mention of racial identity and out of a total of 560 participants in phase 2 trials, only 28 (5 per cent) individuals were from racial minority backgrounds. This reflects a significant underrepresentation of such groups, which constitute 13.8 per cent of the UK population (Jethwa et al., 2021). Similarly, phase 3 protocols for the three approved UK vaccines did not analyse the immune response of individuals from different racial identities separately in subgroups (Jethwa et al., 2021). What this example highlights are the multiple systemic

Citizen participation in public management  107 issues and antecedent inequalities which contribute to groups being effectively – by intent or not – abandoned.

DISCUSSION There is acknowledgement of greater demand for and perceived legitimacy and indeed necessity of citizen participation in public management (Torfing et al., 2012). Whilst a near bewildering array of experimentation and innovation with citizen participation in public management has been witnessed (Fung and Wright, 2001; Elstub and Escobar, 2019), fundamental critiques remain. Arnstein’s (1969) highly influential critique of citizen participation as an ‘empty ritual’, where participation is performed, but existing dynamics of power between the state and the citizen remain intact, is still resonant. Similarly, citizen participation has remained at the margins of public management, serving to inspire and offer a rhetoric of a participative turn, but without meaningfully enabling citizens to have the power to shape public management. Attention given to citizen participation can obscure a more fundamental question of whose interests public management serves, and whether a particular kind of citizen or group of citizens are privileged by public management, with others disregarded, ignored, or excluded. This tension between the potential and limits of citizen participation in public management has led to categorisation of relationships between citizens and public management as variously (or even simultaneously) collaborative, co-existent and/or antagonistic (Burchell et al., 2020; Thiery et al., 2022, p. 19). Clarke’s distinctions bring greater analytical nuance to debates on the construction of citizens within public management and the different ways in which they may participate, reflecting the complex and fluid relationship between citizens and multiple parts of the local and central state (Young, 2000). The typology of the activated, empowered, responsibilised and abandoned citizen is a useful heuristic to identify and discuss these forms of citizen participation in public management. Several states of course adopted many different strategies at once, with differential impacts, for instance, in China, Zhao and Wu (2020) identify three mechanisms through which Chinese citizens participated with the Government in addressing COVID-19, including strong state mobilisation, citizen compliance and community enforcement, along with formal non-profit organisations bridging between the state and citizens and informal self-help networks. However, Clarke’s (2005) original analysis debates these framings of citizenship not only as a set of different perspectives, but also suggests activation, empowerment and responsibilisation as a set of strategies for the broader abandonment of citizens by the state, and within public management. Indeed, our analysis in this chapter has shown the inter-relationality and unintended consequences of particular forms of engagement between the state and citizens. One example is provided by Andersen et al. (2021) for whom activation becomes responsibilisation when volunteering is effectively ‘imposed’ with implications for gender and caring roles. A second example relates to a critique of empowerment – that it effectively infantilises the citizen via a paternalistic approach. In Cape Town the local state provided food, shelter and healthcare to homeless people, but the latter group were also subjected to enforced relocation into areas with poor living conditions (Smit, 2021), leading to a sense of abandonment. Here, whilst the state sets the terms in ‘looking after’ its citizens, the process and associated actions (such as relocation) minimise agency. In these examples, abandonment is paradoxically pro-

108  Research handbook on public management and COVID-19 duced through particular forms of empowerment and/or responsibilisation. This perspective runs counter to much of the rhetoric around citizen participation in public management and supports the sense of a ‘hollowing out’ of its meaning and value. Conversely, some of these strategies, such as responsibilisation, can inadvertently bolster a more activist or empowered form of citizenship, even where this is not the specific aim. Steen and Brandsen (2020, pp. 851–852) have argued that in the case of the pandemic, not only is top-down, state control a ‘dangerous illusion’ but it also serves to ‘mask’ the realities of government reliance on collaboration. As such rather than stymieing citizen participation in public management, the pandemic has ‘boosted’ it, as governments ‘cannot but rely on citizens’ (Steen and Brandsen, 2020, p. 851) to both limit the spread and to lessen its effects. This reliance is in terms of compliance with ‘top down’ public health measures, but also reflects the ‘bottom up’ spontaneous response from communities to plug gaps in state provision or to reach where the state cannot, for example in informal care, social distancing, and vaccine uptake (see also Steen et al., this volume). Here there is a fine line between enforced responsibilisation and self-responsibilisation, with the latter being adopted by activated citizens. Whilst responsibilisation is a withdrawal of state support pushing the need to comply to citizens, the pandemic has also affirmed that in high stakes, urgent and complex situations, the value of top down and general solutions is limited (Steen and Brandsen, 2020; Head and Alford, 2015), and instead more localised, citizen-orientated, and reflexive approaches to problem-solving are required (Durose and Richardson, 2016).

CONCLUSION Public management faces a plethora of complex challenges exacerbated by the uncertain and precarious nature of the times. Such a context has heightened a demand for citizen participation, but also the recognition that it is insufficient in whatever guise it appears. In this chapter, we have positioned the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on citizen participation in public management within longer-standing public management debates about the nature of citizenship, and the role of the citizen. What these critical questions illuminate is that despite the claims to a ‘participatory turn’ in public management, we should be careful not to position the pre-pandemic period as a ‘golden age’ for citizen participation. Despite growing interest in citizen participation, different ‘logics of participation’ (Poletta, 2016) remain in tension in both theory and practice. Whilst reflection has begun of the wider implications of the pandemic for public administration and leadership, in terms of ‘robust’ governance for instance (Ansell et al., 2020), questions of citizen participation must not be sidelined. Our intention in this chapter has not been to offer exhaustive or comprehensive details of pandemic response, which has obviously varied significantly in different contexts. Instead, we hope to have illuminated the dynamic and contested nature of citizen participation in the context of the pandemic, the simultaneous retreat or default to traditional expertise in the context of crisis and the shifting forms that citizen voice and influence can take. We also want to provoke and consider the possibilities for more radical or emancipatory forms of citizen participation where the terms are not set or led by the state, alongside revealing strategies for the abandonment of citizens by the state. Two critical points of reflection emerge from this discussion which demand further attention. First, it is important to recognise the limitations of the assumed universalism of much of the

Citizen participation in public management  109 public management literature, that is often blind to what is happening outside Western liberal democracies (Hilmer, 2010), and analyse the potentially more exciting and radical innovations in participatory practice happening elsewhere. Second, the inevitably state-centred nature of public management as a discipline can fail to capture or recognise more ‘popular’ forms of participation (Cornwall 2004), where citizen participation in a more meaningful sense may be witnessed.

NOTES 1. 2.

https://​www​.redumbrellafund​.org/​covid​-initiatives/​ Campaigns – Covid-19 Mutual Aid (covidmutualaid.org)

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9. Public Service Logic: a service lens on the COVID-19 vaccination programmes Stephen Osborne, Maria Cucciniello and Tie Cui

This chapter explores the utility of the Public Service Logic (PSL) framework for understanding and enhancing the effectiveness of mass vaccination programmes, such as the current programme for COVID-19. Our argument is that such programmes have only been evaluated with a logistical and operational focus, in relation to public health objectives. By viewing such vaccination programmes through a service lens, however, the focus shifts from logistical programmes to those of value creation at the individual and societal level. Such an approach, we argue, is one that has significant benefits for the strategic achievement of public health objectives. Consequently the chapter is in three parts. The first part lays out the core elements of PSL. The second part then describes the current COVID-19 vaccination programme and the key challenges that it faces. The final section applies a PSL approach to the vaccination programmes and evaluates the strengths and challenges of such an approach.

PUBLIC SERVICE LOGIC PSL is a theory of public administration and management (PAM) that seeks to integrate insights from service management and marketing theory together with those of PAM. It was first posited in the work of Osborne and his colleagues (Osborne et al. 2013) but has since become the field of a substantive community of PAM scholars (inter alia, Hodgkinson et al. 2017; Grönroos 2019; Hardyman at al. 2019; Eriksson 2019; Trischler et al. 2019; Engen et al. 2020; Scarli 2021; Vestues et al. 2021). PSL understands public services ‘as services’ and argues for the application of a servicedominant approach (Vargo and Lusch 2008) to their management – in contrast to the product-dominant approach of the New Public Management (NPM). A ‘product-dominant approach’ is one that treats services as if they were goods produced through manufacturing and which emphasises technical specification, rather than service process enactment. A ‘service-dominant approach’ is one that understands services as process-based and as contingent on the creation of value in the lives of their users. The NPM argued for the hegemony of a linear approach to public services that concentrated upon the transformation of resource inputs into outputs and the importance of external competition and internal value chains for the efficient management of public services (Lapuente and Van der Walle 2020). In contrast, PSL argues for a focus both upon the creation of external value for the users of public services, and other key stakeholders (such as family and friends, public service staff and other citizens), and upon how such value is created within public service environments. This then forms a sustainable societal and economic basis for these public services. In doing this, it builds upon a substantial thread of PAM research and theory, including that of Public Value (Moore 1995). However, whilst Public Value focuses on value creation at the societal level 112

Public Service Logic: a service lens on the COVID-19 vaccination programmes  113 alone, PSL explores the interaction and tensions between value creation at the societal and individual levels. Importantly, PSL does not seek to simply import/impose lessons from commercial services onto public services (whether provided by the public, private or third sectors) – this was a significant flaw of the NPM. There are significant differences between public and commercial services. These include the distinctive ownership patterns of the public and third sectors, the place of public policy as a significant and often hegemonic element of the environment of public services, and the distinctive nature of the users of public services (that, unlike in commercial services, they may be mandated (school children), coerced (prison inmates) and/ or unconscious (adults with dementia) users of public services) (Alford 2016). PSL thus integrates insights from both commercial and public service experience to identify four core elements of PSL (Osborne 2021). These are the public service ecosystem, the distinctive role of public policy in PSL, the purpose of public services, and the nature of value and value creation for public services and their users. The Public Service Ecosystem (PSE) The metaphor of the ‘ecosystem’ has become a prevalent one in contemporary management theory (e.g. in innovation studies, Granstrand and Holgersson 2020). It draws upon the metaphor of dynamic, interactive and self-sustaining ecosystems, developed by Tansley (1935), to understand complex organisational environments. In service management and marketing theory, Vargo and Lusch (2016) argue that value creation is not solely the purview of individual businesses, but occurs within complex and interactive service ecosystems, comprising the key actors and processes of value creation as well as societal/institutional values and rules. It has subsequently become the front-line of such theory (Mustak and Plé 2020). PSL adopts and adapts this approach to a public service context. Context has long been a pre-occupation of PAM (Pollitt 2013), of course, and systemic approaches have an extensive history also (e.g. Knapp 1984). The PSL approach goes further, to explore both context and system (Hodgkinson et al. 2017). Petrescu (2019) has described it as a unifying framework through which to understand the complexities of public service delivery and value creation at the societal, service and individual levels, whilst Trischler and Charles (2019) explored its import for public service design. Strokosch and Osborne (2020) offered an empirical exploration of PSEs. They concluded that they moved our understanding of public service delivery from the transactional and linear approach of the NPM and towards a relational model where public service value creation is shaped by the interplay between multiple dimensions – and not least by the wider societal context and the values that underpin it (see also Kinder et al. 2020; Rossi and Tuurnas 2021; Hardyman et al. 2021; and Trischler and Westman Trischler 2022). Osborne et al. (2022) have presented the most evolved version of the PSE approach, which explores the interplay between four levels in the ecosystem. These are the macro-level of societal beliefs, norms and values, the meso-level of organisational actors, networks, processes, and norms, the micro-level of the individual actors (public service users, staff, and other stakeholders), and the sub-micro-level of the values and beliefs of these individual actors. None of these is hegemonic within PSL. Rather their interaction forms the petri-dish of public service delivery and value creation (Figure 9.1).

114  Research handbook on public management and COVID-19

Source:

Osborne et al. (2022).

Figure 9.1

The public service ecosystem

The Nature and Role of Public Policy In contrast to many policy implementation theories, PSL does not understand public policy creation and implementation as linear processes. Rather it understands public policy as a core element of the PSE. Public policy, as the outcome of political debate, offers a codification of

Public Service Logic: a service lens on the COVID-19 vaccination programmes  115 the societal values and beliefs embedded within public services (e.g. beliefs about the relationship between the ‘deserving’ and ‘undeserving’ poor engrained within national welfare systems). Public policy has no value in its own right. Rather it is a series of aspirations that may, or may not, be achieved by implementation/enactment through public services (e.g. societal aspirations about literacy in education policy). As such, it is a ‘service promise’ rather than the achievement of that promise. However, it is an essential element of the PSE. Public Services and Public Service Organisations (PSOs) In traditional models of PAM, the creation of public services and their organisational entities (PSOs) is seen as the fulfilment of public policy. Such services and organisations are there to meet the needs of citizens. PSL understands services and organisations differently. Rather they are resources that public service users can interact with in order to address their needs and create value in their own lives (Eriksson and Hellström 2021). However, the existence of a public service or a PSO does not create value in its own right. It is how the citizen interacts with a service/organisation that does so. The existence of a school and the place of teachers within it does not create value through learning, for example. Rather it provides a set of resources. What is key then is how the individual schoolchild interacts with these resources to create (or destroy) value in their lives – and this interaction will be mediated by their needs, personal/family experiences, and expectations (conditioned by prior service experiences). They can share this process with public officials, through co-creation. A PSL approach thus shifts the focus of performance and performance evaluation away from the internal efficiency and effectiveness of PSOs alone. Instead, the focus becomes how effective they are both in creating resources for public service users to integrate with their needs and in facilitating such value creation. Three key concepts are deployed within PSL. Co-design is the collaborative engagement of the key stakeholders (such as public service users, their carers and family, and public service staff) in the design and/or re-design of a public service. Co-production is the collaborative involvement of these stakeholders in the management and/or delivery of a public service. Co-creation is the collaborative process of value creation by these key stakeholders to a public service. Value and Value Creation through Public Service Delivery The crux of PSL is that public services should be judged upon their ability to facilitate value creation in the lives of public service users and their other stakeholders (Osborne et al. 2021). This value creation takes place within four domains and consists of five elements. These domains and elements comprise the value creation matrix for public services (Table 9.1). The domains are those of experience (value-in-use), of engagement in the design/delivery of public services (value-in-production), of fulfilling the needs of users and other stakeholders (value-in-context), and of their broader achievement of societal aspirations such as an inclusive society (value-in-society). Within these domains, five types of value can be created. These are ● the short-term satisfaction and well-being of public service users, ● the medium-term effects and long-term impacts (outcomes) of public services in relation to needs,

116  Research handbook on public management and COVID-19 ● the effect of public service upon the whole life experience of public service users, ● the ability of public services to create personal capacity for the future, and ● the creation of value for society through public service delivery. Table 9.1

The value creation matrix

Domains of value

Elements of value Short-term

Outcomes

Whole-life

satisfaction and

(medium-term

experience

quality of life

Capacity creation

Societal value

effects and long-term impacts)

Value-in-production

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

  Value-in-use   Value-in-context   Value-in-society  

A concrete example of these elements of value can be offered by a mental health service. Satisfaction concerns how the short-term effect of a public service user is created by service interactions. This will not only condition their personal well-being but also their willingness to engage further with the service in relation to their mental health needs. Outcomes concern the effect of the service upon their mental health needs directly – both in terms of medium-term effects and longer-term impacts. Whole-life experience concerns how being engaged with a mental health service constructs their view of their own life and their capacities within society more broadly. Capacity creation concerns the extent to which public service users develop strategies and techniques to manage their own mental health in the future rather than being dependent solely on the mental health service. Societal value concerns the extent to which the mental health service contributes to the mental health of society as a whole and to its beliefs about the nature and impact of mental health conditions and also the extent to which it reduces pressure on other healthcare services through improved mental health. It is important to distinguish between value-in-society and societal value. The former is a domain where value may be created, for the individual or society. The latter is actual value created for society as a result of public service delivery. Finally, none of the above assumes that public services will always create value or have positive outcomes. It is equally possible that the poor design or delivery of public services can make the lives of service users, service staff, and/or other citizens worse. This is known as value destruction (Plé and Caceres 2010; Engen et al. 2020). In summary, we would emphasise five points. First, PSL requires a new understanding of public policy as creating values-based aspirations for public services rather than offering the technical specification of these services. Second, PAM needs to replace its preoccupation with PSOs and their management with a focus on the PSE and value creation/mediation for all stakeholders within these ecosystems. Third, PSL will require both cultural change within PSOs and a new orientation by citizens to the purposes of PSOs. Such cultural/orientation change is challenging but not impossible (Grönroos 2019). Fourth, digital technology and

Public Service Logic: a service lens on the COVID-19 vaccination programmes  117 artificial intelligence is transforming public services, as with other elements of society. Increasingly the PSE may exist at least partially within a virtual province. Finally, PSL does not replace the key features of public service management but rather presents them with new challenges (e.g. the creation of performance management systems for PSOs that capture value creation and co-creation).

COVID-19 AND THE COVID-19 GLOBAL VACCINATION PROGRAMME On 11 March 2020, the COVID-19 outbreak (‘COVID-19’) was characterised as a pandemic by the World Health Organization (WHO). Two years later, the number of confirmed cases had exceeded 71,503,614. Since the pandemic began to spread, national governments had little time to prepare for its impact on healthcare systems, economies and businesses. The provision of public services has been especially challenged by the pandemic as many PSOs have perforce taken on new responsibilities. Examples of these challenges are the adaptation of personal protective equipment (PPE) and of hospital intensive care units to respond to COVID-19, and the establishment of nationwide ‘track and trace’ systems (Bokemper et al., 2021). However, in response to COVID-19, many governments also identified the rapid deployment of an effective vaccination programme as the ‘best way’ to fight the virus (e.g. UK Government 2021a). By mid-February 2022, at least seven vaccines had been rolled out around the world. The pandemic is now entering a new phase (as of March 2022), driven by the mutation of the highly transmissible Omicron variant of COVID-19. The transmissibility of this variant made such precautions as quarantining much less effective at containing the pandemic – and simultaneously raised further the significance of an effective vaccination programme as a response to COVID-19 (WHO 2021a). Implementing Vaccination In principle, vaccines represent one of the safest and most cost-effective public health intervention strategies to mitigate global pandemics (Ehreth 2003). Studies consistently indicate that vaccination provides a high level of protection against symptomatic and severe disease, as well as death, from COVID-19 (Scott et al. 2021). In addition to providing a direct benefit to individuals by reducing their risk of infection, vaccines also have a substantial indirect benefit by reducing transmission and generating herd immunity and by minimising the likelihood of new variants emerging through transmission (Betsch et al. 2013). Nevertheless, vaccine hesitancy and opposition prevails, and many existing public health campaigns have been ineffective in persuading significant elements of the public, globally, to vaccinate. This has delayed the evolution of the much-vaunted (and also contested) ‘herd immunity’ (Cucciniello et al. 2022). The COVID-19 vaccination programme was one of the largest such vaccination programmes in history (UK Government 2021a) and required rapid roll-out, in highly uncertain and stressful circumstances. In this context, the deployment of COVID-19 vaccines largely rested on government-centred national plans, actors and actions (Subbaraman 2020). Scientists succeeded in the initial task of developing vaccines in less than a year. The world has now begun grappling with the equally important questions both of how to deliver a mass

118  Research handbook on public management and COVID-19 vaccination programme most effectively, and of how to convince an often hesitant or resistant public to vaccinate and to continue engaging in healthy behaviour. These are no easy tasks, and research on vaccination programmes has continued to be scattered and spasmodic (Jean-Jacques and Bauchner 2021). It has focused on three, primarily operational, challenges. The first was establishing how to develop fully functional vaccination programmes that maximise vaccine procurement, storage and delivery, combined with effective information sharing and communication (Enayati and Özaltın 2020). The second concerned ensuring that vaccines were distributed speedily and equitably, especially in rural areas and in deprived and vulnerable communities and also between the global north and south. (Jean-Jacques and Bauchner 2021). The final challenge concerned how to address vaccine hesitancy and resistance. For some this was a case of concern about the side-effects of the COVID-19 vaccines, but it also encompassed distrust in scientific expertise and/or political leadership and the prevalence of vaccine conspiracy theories and misinformation (Agley and Xiao 2021). Whilst this research is important it has two failings. First, it is primarily operational rather than strategic. It deals with ‘how to’ questions without any strategic orientation (Osborne and Strokosch 2021) towards the personal and societal values underpinning the programme. Second, it provides no real guidance as to how to address vaccination resistance and hesitancy. A PSL approach, we argue, would address both these failings by adopting a value creation approach as its strategic orientation and by viewing vaccination resistance/hesitancy through this lens also. Vaccine Hesitancy and Resistance Whilst current attention is focused upon the COVID-19 pandemic, we know that despite the progress in infectious disease control and prevention during the past century, infectious pathogens continue to pose a threat to humanity. This point is clearly exemplified not only by the current pandemic but also by past experiences such as Spanish Flu and Ebola. Vaccines, when available, represent one of the most significant, cost-effective and safe public health interventions capable of mitigating such outbreaks. However, vaccine refusal has steadily increased globally and routine immunisation coverage for infectious diseases, such as measles, has decreased over time (WHO 2021b). The prevalence of vaccine hesitancy/refusal, and the consequent re-emergence of vaccine-preventable diseases, is a complex behavioural issue, which is context-specific and varies across time, place and vaccine type. For the mass COVID-19 vaccination programme, this has been especially challenging (see also Hannah et al., Chapter 16 this volume). Understanding Vaccination Programmes from a PSL Perspective Our argument is that a PSL perspective is essential for furthering the effectiveness of the COVID-19 vaccination programme. It situates these programmes within their broader societal ecosystems and is predicated upon a strategic orientation of value creation for the individual and society. The final section of this paper applies this perspective to the COVID-19 vaccination programme and examines its lessons and implications both for theory and practice.

Public Service Logic: a service lens on the COVID-19 vaccination programmes  119

A PSL PERSPECTIVE ON THE COVID-19 VACCINATION PROGRAMME Adopting the PSL perspective, we conceptualise the nature of a mass vaccination programme as a ‘service’. This service comprises numerous, micro-level, interactive processes between the vaccine team and recipients, situated within an overarching public service ecosystem. This conceptualisation is in counter-position to the prevailing ‘product-dominant’ approach that views vaccination programmes as a linear transformation from vaccine production/procurement to distribution/injection. Even though reliable logistics are essential to a vaccination programme, there is no reason to assume that reliable logistics alone will necessarily lead to a successful vaccination programme. Rather, an often-ignored fact is that the effective implementation of a vaccination programme, as a cluster of services, is ultimately determined by the trust, acceptance and cooperation of citizens and service users (Cairney and Wellstead 2021). Through this service lens, we suggest a shift of research attention along two dimensions, in order to develop effective health policy for the pandemic. First, the current focus on logistical supply of vaccines should be supplemented by research on their use and uptake. Second, the fixation with the operational speed and efficiency of vaccine logistical deployment should be supplemented by a focus upon the external value-creation impacts. On both dimensions, the role of individual citizens is essential: they uptake vaccines as users, and act as the final arbiter of value-creation results. Therefore, their hesitancy and refusal needs to be taken seriously, rather than dismissed as foolishness, and as the most significant challenge in the COVID-19 vaccination programmes. Taking a PSL perspective, such resistance cannot be resolved in isolation. Rather, it depends on the strategic re-design and of public services, based upon a deeper comprehension of the complexity of PSEs and the embedded diverse value promises and value-creation processes. We now explore how PSL theory can shed light on effective vaccination programmes from the four distinctive spheres above: the PSE, public policy, the role of health agencies as PSOs, and the nature of value/value-creation. The Public Service Ecosystem A PSE approach understands the environment of mass public programmes as an interactive and dynamic ecosystem. This approach to the COVID-19 vaccination context allows the clarification of its three issues. First, COVID-19 vaccination is not implemented by individual PSOs, or by the dyadic relationship between nursing staff and vaccine recipients, but occurs at the nexus of multiple actors and processes. In the UK for example, by March 2021, there had been over 2,700 different locations nationwide offering vaccinations, ranging from GP surgeries and high street pharmacies, to larger urban vaccination sites and small ‘vaccine teams’ in local care homes (UK Government 2021a). The questions about how to incentivise relevant actors, generate accountability mechanisms, and mitigate the transaction-cost risks are critical to the governance of this large-scale relational network. Second, the PSE approach maintains that inter-organisational networks are essential, but not the whole picture. As illustrated in Figure 9.1, the societal/institutional values and rules at the macro-level are highly significant (Osborne et al. 2022), such as regarding vaccination safety or trust in scientists and the government (e.g., Trent et al. 2021). The meso-level governance systems are also significant. The centralised COVID-19 response model in the UK, for example, has been criticised for its arrogance towards the knowledge and experiences of local

120  Research handbook on public management and COVID-19 governments and communities (Harris 2020). An ecosystem approach reveals these tensions for resolution. Third, the PSE framework highlights the potential impacts of individual values and beliefs in COVID-19 vaccination programme. These diverging beliefs at the sub-micro level not only determine individual and professional behaviours, but also can influence how perceived value achievement is appreciated. Citizens with vaccine-resistant belief will interpret an increase in vaccination levels differently from a vaccine supporter (perhaps as evidence of state control rather than effective healthcare). Moreover, the impact of such individual beliefs can be magnified through social media exposure, which can in turn influence public policy and service delivery (at the meso-level) and re-frame both individual and societal values (at the sub-micro and macro-levels respectively). Notably, an expanding group of studies has revealed that individual values and beliefs can be challenged and modified by an active response to them within the PSE. For instance, the social experimental research of Cucciniello et al. (2022) has found that appealing to other-regarding preferences is one way of combatting vaccine hesitancy and improving the pro-vaccination commitment. A PSE approach thus shifts the discourse on vaccination away from a transactional approach, and towards a relational model that takes both the human and institutional/belief factors into account. It also emphasises the dynamic interaction across the institutional, network, organisational and individual levels. In doing so, it raises a series of new challenges for public managers in vaccination programmes. The governance of PSEs is not an easy task. Moreover, how to account for and govern the diverse societal and individual values towards vaccination, and deal with the possible subsequent values conflicts, is a substantial challenge for public managers. The Nature of Public Policies Public health policy is an essential tool to implement the COVID-19 vaccination programme. Within the UK government, for example, there have been over 100 vaccination policies published since 2020, ranging from general guidance on vaccine delivery to specific advice, such as on the vaccination of children. The successful implementation of these policies relies both on effective public officials and on the compliance of citizens. However, increasing studies have shown that there has been a significant increase in non-compliance towards vaccination policies, especially in developed countries (e.g., Blume 2005). Existing research on such non-compliance has largely concentrated on the operational implementation of vaccination policies. They suggest a series of operational/logistical tactics to overcome vaccine hesitancy and refusal (e.g., Gofen and Needham 2015), while overlooking the importance of health policy design. From a PSL perspective, we argue that vaccination policy has no value in its own right. Instead, it offers a codification of societal values and beliefs related to vaccination and proposes a series of value ‘aspirations’ or promises. Further, such policy is not only data-driven but value-laden (Hwang et al. 2021). Therefore, evidence-based policymaking is necessary but not sufficient for effective policy: communication and negotiation with/across stakeholders with different beliefs is also essential. Health policy will also require iterative policy re-design as a pandemic evolves, and a balancing between the national and local elements of the PSE. ‘One-size-fits-all’ vaccination policies, usually with mandatory elements, invariably trigger citizen resentment and provoke protests/boycotts that impede the progress of the vaccination programme as a whole (Mahdawi 2022). Rather, an approach is

Public Service Logic: a service lens on the COVID-19 vaccination programmes  121 required that acknowledges the legitimate holding of such value positions, whilst also challenging them and seeking to ameliorate their impact on the effectiveness of the vaccination programme. This is not a ‘quick-fix’ approach, but we would argue that in the medium term it offers a more effective and sustainable response to vaccine hesitancy and refusal. Public Services, Citizens and PSOs PSL theory views public services as resources that users can utilise to address their needs and create value. This can be applied to the COVID-19 vaccination context. Vaccines, medical equipment, and staff do not create value by themselves. Rather, they provide resources. Citizens who choose to engage with them can create value in their lives and across the PSE, by increasing individual and societal-level immunity. However, it is the citizen who creates this value by their engagement, not the vaccination programme by its existence. Thus, the role of PSOs and their staff is to support the co-creation of such value, rather than simply asserting vaccination as ‘a good thing’. From this perspective an effective vaccination programme validates and celebrates the active role of citizens within the programme, rather than simply focusing on PSOs as vaccine delivery agents. It is also important to recognise and celebrate the role of citizens as carers within the vaccination ecosystem. This will, in turn, influence the value creation of other key actors, such as volunteers and care staff. PSL also emphasises the experiential/phenomenological aspects of public service delivery and reinforces the need for healthcare managers to focus on improving the individual service experiences of vaccine recipients (e.g. dealing with fear of needles) as a conduit to enhanced vaccine uptake. Four specific changes are suggested here. The first is to resolve such phobic fears effectively rather than dismissing them as irrational (Gofen and Needham 2015). The second is to break down barriers to accessing the COVID-19 vaccine, such as through the UK’s ‘Mobile Vaccine Bus’, bringing vaccination to hard-to-reach parts of the community with a poor experience of pre-existing health services (UK Government 2021b). Third, accessibility is also mediated by information dissemination. Linos et al. (2022) have demonstrated that social media-based communication strategies can backfire, by imposing sizeable psychological burdens on disadvantaged groups (e.g. older or less educated individuals) and preventing them from accessing service information. In contrast, an active approach to supporting social media usage by older people, for example, can enhance their usage and impact (Leist 2013). Fourth, and underpinning this, is the need for effective communication strategies across the PSE, about the COVID-19 vaccination programme. A vaccination strategy has to embrace not only existing communication standards, such as timeliness and transparency, but also needs to consider and respond to the specific demographic and social-economical features of a country, such as the ‘Spread Calm, Not Fear’ movement in Ghana (Antwi-Boasiako and Nyarkoh 2021). Value and Value Creation PSL requires policymakers and public service managers to proactively define, respond to and facilitate the creation of societal and individual value. However, few indicators of such value currently exist. Existing research on vaccination programmes has predominantly focused on technical/logistical indicators, whilst ignoring phenomenological and value-based ones. In the first section, we elaborated the four domains of value creation and five types of value within

122  Research handbook on public management and COVID-19 Table 9.2 Dimension of

An illustrative evaluative framework for the COVID-19 vaccination programme, from a PSL perspective Value-in-use

Value-in-production (systemic) Value-in-context

value/time-frame (experience) Short-term

Long-term

Value-in-society

(needs)

(societal)

Citizen/staff

Vaccine staff/volunteers learn

The vaccination

The vaccination programme

satisfaction with the

new skills and citizens are

programme provides

prevents the collapse of

vaccination process

actively involved in decisions

short-term immunity to the healthcare system from

about their vaccinations The short-term positive The new skills acquired above

overload the virus Vaccine recipients have The vaccination programme leads to ‘herd immunity’

experience builds

enhance social and work

more confidence to

a positive attitude for

achievements of citizens/staff/

return to social life with and the prevention of

citizens/staff about

volunteers

protective immunity

vaccination more

new variants by reducing transmission

generally

PSL. In Table 9.2 we offer an illustrative approach to the evaluation of value creation by public services, located within this framework. As Table 9.2 illustrates, value can be achieved in both the short-term and long-term and be accumulated by both vaccine recipients and volunteers/vaccine staff. Such value creation also occurs both societally and individually. Table 9.2 is only an illustrative example of the application of the PSL framework. Specific value propositions will need to be defined within each local and national PSEs. Moreover the potential for ‘value destruction’ (Engen et al. 2020; Cui and Osborne 2022) has to be continually acknowledged and responded to – no mass vaccination programme is assured of success. A PSL approach to its implementation, though, will enhance the prospects of such success.

CONCLUSIONS Our argument is not that the effective logistical and operational implementation of a mass vaccination programme is unimportant. Far from it. Our argument is rather that such effective implementation is essential. Achieving such effective implementation though requires an over-arching PSL perspective that: ● situates such implementation within the over-arching PSE that recognises the interaction between its institutional/societal, organisational, individual and values/belief levels. This will allow greater clarity over the processes and mechanisms of value creation for citizens. Without this recognition, a mass vaccination programme will be much less effective in achieving its goals; ● acknowledges that the relevant healthcare policies have to be based upon an understanding of how vaccination adds value to citizens and society rather than simply portraying it as a logistical objective to be achieved. It thus needs to have clear value propositions articulated. It must also acknowledge and challenge alternative value propositions, such as vaccination hesitancy/resistance; ● recognises that public services and PSOs can only offer resources to citizens (e.g. a vaccination programme). Its effectiveness is reliant both upon public policy and PSOs providing

Public Service Logic: a service lens on the COVID-19 vaccination programmes  123 a convincing narrative about how that programme will enhance their lives and upon citizens actively engaging with this value creation narrative; and ● validates value creation as the key lens through which to evaluate the success of a mass vaccination programme. This will thence allow the development of appropriate measure through which to evaluate such value creation, rather than focusing solely upon logistical deployment.

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Public Service Logic: a service lens on the COVID-19 vaccination programmes  125 Tansley, A. G. (1935). The use and abuse of vegetational concepts and terms. Ecology, 16(3), 284–307. Trent, M., Seale, H., Chughtai, A. A., Salmon, D., and MacIntyre, C. R. (2021). Trust in government, intention to vaccinate, and COVID-19 vaccine hesitancy: A comparative survey of five large cities in the United States, United Kingdom, and Australia. Vaccine, 40(17), 2498–2505. https://​doi​.org/​10​ .1016/​j​.vaccine​.2021​.06​.048 Trischler, J., and Charles, M. (2019). The application of a service ecosystems lens to public policy analysis and design: Exploring the frontiers. Journal of Public Policy & Marketing, 38(1), 19–35. Trischler, J., Dietrich, T., and Rundle-Thiele, S. (2019). Co-design: From expert- to user-driven ideas in public service design. Public Management Review, 21(11), 1595–1619. Trischler, J., and Westman Trischler, J. (2022). Design for experience – a public service design approach in the age of digitalization. Public Management Review, 24(8), 1251–1270. https://​doi​.org/​10​.1080/​ 14719037​.2021​.1899272 UK Government. (2021a). UK COVID-19 vaccines delivery plan. Retrieved from https://​www​.gov​.uk/​ government/​publications/​uk​-Covid​-19​-vaccines​-delivery​-plan UK Government. (2021b). UK COVID-19 vaccine uptake plan. Retrieved from https://​www​.gov​.uk/​ government/​publications/​Covid​-19​-vaccination​-uptake​-plan/​uk​-Covid​-19​-vaccine​-uptake​-plan Vargo, S., and Lusch, R. (2008). Service-dominant logic. Continuing the evolution. Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science, 36(1), 1–10. Vargo, S., and Lusch, R. (2016). Institutions and axioms: An extension and update of service-dominant logic. Journal of the Academy of Marketing Science, 44, 5–23. Vestues, K., Mikalsen, M., and Monteiro, E. (2021). Using digital platforms to promote a service-oriented logic in public sector organizations: A case study. Proceedings of the 54th Hawaii International Conference on System Sciences, 2193–2202. Retrieved from https://​hdl​.handle​.net/​10125/​70882 WHO. (2021a). Vaccines and immunization: What is vaccination? Retrieved from https://​www​.who​.int/​ news​-room/​q​-a​-detail/​vaccines​-and​-immunization​-what​-is​-vaccination WHO. (2021b). Immunization coverage. Retrieved from https://​www​.who​.int/​news​-room/​fact​-sheets/​ detail/​immunization​-coverage

10. Can co-production that emerged during the COVID-19 pandemic be sustained? Trui Steen, Taco Brandsen and Menno Hoppen

INTRODUCTION Citizen involvement in public service delivery was strongly boosted by the pandemic. The demand for public services increased so dramatically and suddenly that governments could not but rely on citizens to co-produce, from adhering to social distancing policies and providing informal care to producing medical and other goods that help prevent the spread of the pandemic and lessen its social and economic effects. Co-production was perhaps more evident than ever: public health policies functioned only because citizens massively, and voluntarily, chose to cooperate. Initially, the public debate tended to emphasise the strengthened role of the state, central leadership and scientific expertise – but this is one-sided. It is true that state power has grown, at the expense of individual freedom. Pessimists predicted that recently imposed measures may stay in force well beyond the pandemic. The Economist spoke of “a pandemic of power grabs” in places where democracy was already weak (The Economist, 2020). Yet, at the same time, central governments had never been exposed as more powerless and more dependent on their citizens. Governments have proved utterly dependent on citizens, not only for compliance with top-down directives, but also because of the many spontaneous, bottom-up initiatives that sprung up in parallel, which have kept society functional, or at least bearable. Even in China, an extreme case in terms of centralisation and restrictiveness, the pandemic response was at least partly built upon community initiative and co-production (Cheng et al., 2020, p. 866). This chapter is based on a previously published article that was written during the first peak of the COVID-19 crisis (Steen and Brandsen, 2020). At the time, it seemed plausible that the pandemic would last for years to come, until a vaccine would be developed to end it. Therefore, we addressed the question of whether we could expect the emerging co-production initiatives to last during and beyond the immediate crisis. However, the rapid development, production, and distribution of vaccines have changed the nature of the crisis. This gives us the opportunity to take stock of the co-production projects that have emerged during the pandemic. The question is: can the co-production initiatives that emerged in the crisis be sustained or will they fade as the perceived urgency of responses to the pandemic decreases? In this chapter, we seek to understand the relevance of co-production under COVID-19 and how it relates to themes that were already present in the literature. Subsequently, we will focus on one of these issues, namely the sustainability of these co-production efforts. We outline the conditions for sustainable co-production to find out how government can support continuation of citizen co-production projects it has initiated, can facilitate bottom-up citizen initiatives, and may even aim for a multiplier effect.

126

Can co-production that emerged during the COVID-19 pandemic be sustained?  127

CO-PRODUCTION: BLOOMING UNDER COVID-19 The term ‘co-production’ finds its scholarly origins in the public sector, in the work of Nobel Prize winner Elinor Ostrom and other economists from the 1970s (Ostrom et al., 1978) who studied collaboration between governmental departments and citizens, showing that effective service delivery was encouraged by collaboration between professional providers and service users, rather than central planning. In the past decades, governments have (re-)discovered the citizen as an important actor in the design, implementation and monitoring of public policies and services (cf. Brandsen et al., 2018a). Yet during the pandemic, co-production received attention as it rarely has before. In practice, co-production varies from projects started by professionals in public service delivery and introduced top-down to spontaneous bottom-up ideas by citizens. Governments worldwide have used a broad array of communication channels to call upon citizens to contribute to limiting the spread of the virus and protect and support people at risk. In response, or spontaneously, citizens organized in networks to help neighbours who were obliged to stay indoors; while local governments, in turn, used their websites to provide free insurance to those volunteers and to link up volunteers to people in need. Parents worked with teachers and their children to provide home schooling. Governments relied on efforts of both professionals and citizen co-producers to organize and implement wide-scale vaccination campaigns. Indeed, if we interpret the term co-production in Ostrom’s (1996, p. 1073) sense, as a “process through which inputs used to produce a good or service are contributed by individuals who are not ‘in’ the same organization”, the entire public health policy of social distancing and other voluntary restraints could be regarded as a gigantic co-production project. Not only have citizens contributed to policies within their local community, as demonstrated in the examples mentioned: the response to COVID-19 has required individual citizens to adapt to new rules that changed their lifestyle patterns at a very basic level. None of the measures could have succeeded without collaboration on the part of citizens, in the face of limited opportunities for enforcement or encouragement. Co-production: What has COVID-19 Taught Us? The pandemic exposed ongoing debates about co-production, rather than fundamentally starting them. Some of the recurring topics in the co-production literature that are particularly relevant in relation to the pandemic involve (unequal) participation in co-production, the role of sanctions and rewards, voluntariness and compulsion, and the sustainability of co-production efforts. Below, we explore these themes and discuss how the pandemic may provide new insights. Subsequently, we focus on the sustainability of co-production initiatives. The characteristics of people who co-produce, equity, co-producers’ motivations, and the voluntariness of co-production can be illustrated with the simple example of vaccinations. Although narrower definitions of co-production (e.g., Brandsen and Honingh, 2016) would rule out vaccinations as a form of co-production, other studies (e.g., Ostrom et al., 1978) may categorise getting vaccinated as a form of co-producing public health. Vaccination campaigns can only work if people make an appointment and show up to get vaccinated. Thus, it requires an active involvement from citizens. Especially for young, healthy persons, getting vaccinated may be not so much about their personal health, but rather about protecting family, friends, and fulfilling their civic responsibility. Vaccinations will stay relevant in the years to come given

128  Research handbook on public management and COVID-19 that even newborns will need vaccination at a certain age, and given the widespread expectation that booster vaccinations remain essential to combat COVID-19. If so, motivating people to do so will be a recurring task for governments. The vocal minority of people with fundamental ideological (or conspiratorial) objections against vaccinations may be hard to convince. Still, a substantial percentage of the unvaccinated is hesitant rather than full-blown anti-vax (e.g., Razai et al., 2021). Although the reasons for distrust against vaccines are complex, vaccine hesitancy is found to positively correlate with lower education, lower income, lower levels of trust in government, lower self-perceived risks of getting infected and severely ill, lower sense of collective responsibility, and lower self-efficacy (Razai et al., 2021; Aw et al., 2021). Many of these factors have been proven to be negatively correlated with co-production, suggesting that, for instance, people with higher levels of trust and more social capital are more easily stimulated to co-produce than others (Van Eijk and Steen, 2016; Fledderus, 2016). Unequal participation in co-production is problematic in normal situations, but more so during a pandemic. Around the world, socioeconomically disadvantaged communities have been hit the hardest by COVID-19, both as a disease and the resulting economic fallout. At the same time, vaccination uptake often was (and remains) lagging in many of such communities. Co-production and community engagement are potentially vital in encouraging it, given that many people tend to distrust (or have limited access to) official government communication: “A top-down, one-size-fits-all approach has derailed countless well-meaning global health solutions, and in the context of vaccine implementation risks leaving many groups behind, again” (Burgess et al., 2021, p. 9). There are some inspiring examples of co-produced community engagement that were aimed to combat the looming vaccination divide. In Rotterdam, medical students and community volunteers assisted general practitioners to provide community outreach in hard-to-reach neighbourhoods (Van de Griend and Von Piekartz, 2021). In England, people cumulatively contributed about two million hours of voluntary work to support the vaccination campaign, for instance by translating vaccine information into minority languages (NHS England, 2022). Such co-produced initiatives have helped to create sources of accessible and reliable information and substantially lower the bar to get vaccinated. Given the high workload of healthcare professionals and expectation of recurring booster vaccinations, co-production may remain vital here to keep convincing people to vaccinate. In addition, some governments have offered rewards to get vaccinated. The role of monetary incentives as motivators has been discussed in the co-production literature before (e.g., Letki and Steen, 2021; Voorberg et al., 2018). However, the pandemic has created conditions that allow for a large-scale analysis of the impact of such incentives in real-world settings. Vaccine lotteries, for instance, seem to have had positive effects on vaccination uptake (Robertson et al., 2021). Furthermore, a Swedish experiment in which people were offered a small monetary reward showed an increased vaccination uptake of about four percentage points in comparison with the control group which received no reward (Campos-Mercade et al., 2021). The effects of such incentives on co-production may put previous findings that financial rewards do not increase co-production willingness in a new light (Voorberg et al., 2018; Letki and Steen, 2021). A possible explanation for this difference may be that the task to get vaccinated is incidental and low-effort. Therefore, it could be more easily influenced by incentives than intensive or enduring services. Over time, various countries have proposed compulsory vaccination requirements – either for the entire adult population (e.g., Austria) or certain professions (e.g., Australia). Can such requirements be understood from a co-production perspective? Although co-production

Can co-production that emerged during the COVID-19 pandemic be sustained?  129 is predominantly studied as a voluntary activity, it is not necessarily so, for example, if co-production is seen as embedded in service production processes (Osborne et al., 2016). Still, the question is whether a co-production perspective has added value in cases such as compulsory vaccination. Tentatively, one could argue that a co-production perspective remains beneficial where involuntary or semi-voluntary contributions to public services are sustainable, but less so for incidental non-voluntary activities, such as in the case of employee vaccination mandates. This is because sustainable co-production also requires sustained support, a point we will return to below. The need for co-production to persist Even with vaccination rates well above 70 per cent of the total population, many countries still impose(d) (semi-)lockdown measures to contain virus outbreaks as well as other measures such as masks, ventilation, and QR code check-ins. This implies that behavioural changes and co-production initiatives will at least partly need to persist to deal with the recurring peaks of the virus. Moreover, new initiatives will be needed post-pandemic, when attention will be shifting from short-term crisis management and relief to managing an endemic and countering the long-term impact of this crisis on the well-being of different communities. Governments’ ability to continue and even extend collaboration with other actors in society, including co-production with (organized) citizens, is even more important, not least given the severe cuts that public services in many countries have faced and – given the impact of the COVID-19 crisis on public debts – will probably face in the coming years. But how likely is it that the present burst of co-production will persist, rather than fizzle out?

WHAT CAN RESEARCH TELL US ABOUT THE SUSTAINABILITY OF CO-PRODUCTION? Defining Sustainable Co-production Jaspers and Steen (2020) address the question of whether temporary co-production initiatives can lead to sustainable outcomes, even after the temporary activity itself has come to an end. This paradox of temporary initiatives that create lasting outcomes provides valuable insights for the question of what sustainable co-production means and how the co-production that emerged during the COVID-19 crisis can be sustained post-crisis; in other words, how not to lose this newly found capacity to address longer-term health, social, economic and other needs. The authors point out two distinct, yet interrelated aspects of sustainability: the sustainability of effects and the sustainability of problem-solving capacity. First, sustainability denotes the persistent effects of the co-production, that is, reaching the co-production initiative’s goals and having these effects endure over time. For example, a co-produced programme could foster social capital in a community, which outlasts the project itself. Second, the sustainability of co-production entails the use of co-production as a means to design, deliver and assess public services being endured over time. The problem solving-capacity, induced by the co-production programme, may be used again to face future challenges. The capacity to co-produce may be sustained at the systemic level (e.g. developed networks between societal actors), organisational level (e.g. institutionalised procedures, budget allocation, and supportive legal frameworks), and at the level of the individual

130  Research handbook on public management and COVID-19 co-producing citizens and professionals (e.g. sustained capability, willingness, and opportunity) (Jaspers and Steen, 2020, p. 73). This means the sustainability of co-production refers to three aspects: (1) the sustainability of the co-production initiatives, (2) the sustainability of the co-produced effects, and (3) the sustainability of the problem-solving and collaborative capacity induced by the co-production. The sustainability of co-production is crucial – in a pandemic, it may even be a matter of life and death. However, reviews of the co-production literature identify but very few studies that examine co-production from a long-term perspective (Sicilia et al., 2019; Cepiku et al., 2020). It is probably still too soon to say whether the effects of co-production initiatives are sustainable and how co-production initiatives have impacted societies’ problem-solving capacity. As for the sustainability of co-production initiatives, we turn to the founder of the field, Elinor Ostrom, to provide us with insight into the conditions under which effective co-production is likely to emerge. Conditions for Sustainable Co-production A first condition that Ostrom (1996) deduced from empirical evidence is the importance of legislative frameworks that must allow co-production initiatives to take place and to be continued. In several cases, the COVID-19 crisis provided a window of opportunity to break through procedural restrictions, opening options for co-production. For example, the urgency of the crisis made it possible for schools to loosen restrictions and adapt their teaching programme to fit online teaching and provide access to platforms that support home schooling. Yet a crisis context may increase the need for legislation, for instance, to determine the liability of citizens who provide support, but in doing so endanger themselves with infection. Szescilo (2018) has cast doubt on the potential of legislation to be a trigger for co-production, especially for bottom-up initiatives, since “‘what is not prohibited is permitted’ remains the key principle governing citizens’ roles within the legal system” (Szescilo, 2018, p. 138). However, he acknowledges that legislation may serve as a useful instrument for the promotion and dissemination of co-production. Jaspers and Steen (2020) argue that capacity building for sustained co-production includes institutionalising processes. According to their view, this extends beyond the provision of regulative frameworks supportive of co-production and includes the structural allocation of required (staffing and financial) resources, for instance, structural funding for an agency supportive of co-production in a specific area, say housing or public health care. This is backed up by Cinar et al. (2019), who argue that lack of financial resources, and uncertainty brought about by lack of long-term funding specifically, hinders the ability of innovations to turn into routine. Unless governments make an effort to sustain funding and to institutionalise the legal flexibility, this condition is unlikely to be met. Second, the contribution of professionals and citizen co-producers should be complementary rather than merely substitutive. If “each has something the other needs” (Ostrom, 1996, p. 1082), each providing their skills, time and perspective, there is the opportunity for synergy. The example of co-produced community engagement to stimulate vaccination uptake in disadvantaged neighbourhoods has obvious complementarity: volunteering community members offer a persuasiveness and public confidence that government communications cannot achieve on their own. Parents and teachers collaborating is another example, in which each offers a different approach to supporting and motivating children (Honingh et al., 2020). As schools were closed during the pandemic, parents came to offer something vital the teachers could not:

Can co-production that emerged during the COVID-19 pandemic be sustained?  131 physical presence. Yet this period also showed the limits of co-production, because despite the efforts of parents, school performance dropped: obviously home schooling was no substitute for professional teaching and the social school environment. The fact that many public services could not be provided at the height of the pandemic obviously changed the equation: while parents’ contributions normally enhance school performance, now they acted as a poor substitute, merely limiting the damage. This once again points to equity concerns, as households are not equally equipped to facilitate learning nor to substitute the social interaction children have with peers. In the Netherlands, the children of parents with low education levels suffered up to 60 per cent more learning loss than their peers (Engzell et al., 2021). While, at the height of pandemic, there may have been no better alternative, it is imperative to stay aware of the potential negative consequences of shifting the responsibility to deliver services to citizens. Parents’ satisfaction with home-schooling proved to be mediated by a school’s communication about online teaching (Cicatiello et al., 2023). This suggests that, by acknowledging and stimulating the active complementary co-producing role of parents, schools can increase experiential satisfaction. Where initiatives were complementary rather than substitutive, the value of co-production was obvious. At the outset of the crisis, bottom-up citizen initiatives proved vital for societies’ functioning by offering local knowledge and flexibility that governmental organisations lacked. Several studies display the resilience of communities and the complementarity of community initiatives to the functioning of government (Miao et al., 2021; Zou and Zhao, 2022). Over half of the Danish population gave corona-related aid in one way or another, from disseminating information to helping people in isolation (Andersen et al., 2020). Especially at the start of the pandemic, the local knowledge and flexibility of these efforts offered complementary benefits to what governments could provide. Whether that complementarity, and the acknowledgment thereof by professionals, will persist after a return to normal conditions must be reviewed on a case-by-case basis. For instance, there are examples of volunteers helping to disinfect hospitals when medical staff were overwhelmed or volunteers who step up to increase vaccination capacity. The desirability of this will obviously be regarded differently when hospitals return to more regular conditions or when (booster) vaccination campaigns become predictable periodically recurring events or become focused on vulnerable persons rather than on the (adult) population as a whole. Yet in public spaces that are less obviously the domain of professionals, the role of volunteers may turn out to be more permanent. Third, incentives directed towards both citizens and professionals help to encourage and sustain co-production. Closely related to this, Ostrom (1996) finds that mutual commitment is needed, so that co-producers can trust that if they continue or even increase their input, the other party will likewise do so. Although Ostrom (1996) wrote about mutual commitment at the organisational or community level (e.g. between a school and parents), this is of course also related to macro-level trust in institutions. There are signs that citizens’ trust in government and interpersonal trust relate positively to their compliance with social distancing and vaccination uptake – in other words, with co-producing public health (e.g., Bargain and Aminjonov, 2020; Bollyky et al., 2022). Similarly, data from before the COVID-19 crisis indicate that people with high trust in government are more likely to perceive vaccines as safe, while the COVID-19 crisis shows the importance of public trust in both the vaccines and the competence of the institutions that deliver them, as well as the crucial role of extensive and effective community engagement and open communication (Brezzi et al., 2021; OECD, 2021).

132  Research handbook on public management and COVID-19 These findings would fit the insights from previous research that people with more trust in (local) governments tend to have a higher motivation to co-produce and are more likely to do so (Fledderus, 2016). While at the start of the pandemic, people showed high trust in governmental organizations, it waned as the crisis went on. Pandemic fatigue – the sentiment that people are ‘done’ with COVID – is normal and to be expected (WHO, 2020). Yet, that does not mean that it is fully out of governments’ influence and that governments have no strategies to appeal to people’s civil responsibility. The issue why citizens commit to co-production is part of this broader discussion. With regard to incentives, Jaspers and Steen (2020) point at the need to sustain the ability, motivation and opportunity of co-producers, thus arguing that these conditions are crucial not only for making co-production occur, but also for sustaining it. Likewise, citizens are more likely to engage when they can see the advantage of doing so and it is therefore essential to consider the motivations and capabilities to co-produce (Brandsen et al. 2018b; Vanleene et al. 2018). In a study of partnerships for elderly people, Windle (2008, cited in Brown 2015, p. 147) similarly finds not only lack of financial resources, but also lack of evidence of effectiveness and lack of commitment to be major barriers for sustainability. Initially, fear of the pandemic and its consequences served as sufficient motivators, with urgent inspiration to rally together and combat the crisis. These motivations, however, decrease in importance as more people got vaccinated and the effects of infection became less severe. Without significant new reasons for citizens to continue contributing to co-production, this condition is unlikely to be met at a later point. At the very least, governments should continue raising awareness on this point, communicating the benefits of both top-down initiated co-production projects and supporting bottom-up ‘small wins’ initiatives in addressing the long-term effects of the crisis. The longer the pandemic lasts, the more complicated it will get to sustain citizens’ co-production. In addition to these basic conditions for co-production to succeed, there are other tricky issues. The roles, rights and responsibilities of governments, professionals and citizens change in the process of co-production. Again, the pandemic has offered various examples. In care homes, reliance upon long-distance telecare and assisting robots has increased, changing the relation between client and care provider by shifting responsibility toward clients. In public life interactive and tailored solutions designed among citizens emerged alongside solutions that require only passive input from citizens, such as sensor-based technologies that track the movement of infected persons. Especially in China, such technologies were used, with an example of drone surveillance where these measured people’s temperatures and ‘reminded’ them to adhere to face mask and stay-at-home requirements (Zou and Zhao, 2022, p. 1923). Related to this is the role new technologies have played (Clifton et al., 2020). Although often hailed as a driver of co-production, the reverse could be true (Lember et al., 2019). The COVID-19 crisis has shown wildly varying practices. At one end, we saw citizens using 3-D printing to create face masks and respirator valves, making them direct contributors to (as opposed to only consumers of) public healthcare. Digital tools have allowed them to reorganise work patterns without help from the state, or even from their own employers. Simultaneously, we have seen more centralised monitoring and control through data sharing and sensor readings, suddenly legitimate, as concern over public health trumps all other restrictions that normally apply. Technological innovations offer the chance of enhanced efficiency, but once moving beyond an immediate crisis response, citizens may resist them for fear of losing control over decisions or over their data, rejecting the architecture of decision-making as favouring centralisation and control (see also Dickinson and Smith, Chapter 22 this volume).

Can co-production that emerged during the COVID-19 pandemic be sustained?  133 The response to the pandemic and the discussion over ‘corona apps’ have highlighted the tension between voluntary and forced co-production, raising issues of surveillance and data protection, and sometimes demonstrating rather bluntly that governments remain the dominant partner in such discussions (cf. Whitaker, 1980). However, the crisis has shown that governments cannot just expect citizens to co-produce. In most countries, contact-tracing applications seem to have failed to generate much public enthusiasm and cooperation from substantial parts of the population, relating to citizens’ concerns about the applications’ performance as well as accountability issues (e.g., Polzer and Goncharenko, 2021). This discussion points to the need for policymakers “to find a good balance between top-down and bottom-up approaches to digital co-production” (Brandsen et al., 2018b, p. 300) and to ensure that citizens trust the service they are invited to co-produce. What Can Be Sustained? Many co-productions will probably end after the crisis. However, as Jaspers and Steen (2020) discuss, this is not necessarily the end of the outcomes of co-production. Both the effects and the problem solving-capacity created by the co-production initiative may endure after the initiative itself has ended. Even though it is still too early to speak of which effects can be sustained, we can already say something about the problem-solving capacity that may remain present from the co-production initiatives. Miao et al. (2021) signalled that many (over 75 per cent) of co-producing volunteers during the early stages of the pandemic in China were people already actively volunteering in some other capacity. Voluntary efforts were redeployed to the imminent crisis situation. This suggests that part of the 25 per cent that came aboard during the pandemic may be willing to continue to volunteer by deploying their efforts to other matters – or that they will become active again in a future crisis situation. Thus, a part of the problem solving-capacity may be sustained. This idea is supported by a review about volunteering in the UK in the context of COVID-19, which found that “communities and groups began to reorient themselves beyond the temporally bound demands of the pandemic context, and towards more fundamentals structural demands” (Mao et al., 2021, p. 12). Another example comes from Zhejiang, a Chinese province, where community organisations and local governments were quick to collaborate in combatting COVID-19 (Cheng et al., 2020). This collaboration was largely based on previous experiences in managing natural disasters. This illustrates that even when co-production ends, there may be fertile soil for future cooperation. A task for future research is to investigate which strategies are most effective in sustaining this problem-solving capacity.

CONCLUSION In the unprecedented COVID-19 crisis, public service professionals and citizens have engaged in many diverse co-production initiatives, be it introduced by government or initiated by citizens. The pandemic has drawn attention to a number of challenges related to co-production. First, it has exposed the dependence of government on citizen co-production to ensure core public services, including securing public health. Second, it has raised awareness that, although we tend to define co-production as the voluntary engagement of citizens in public service delivery processes, co-production can be made compulsory. Third, it has demonstrated

134  Research handbook on public management and COVID-19 the need for the expertise and involvement of citizen co-producers, complementing regular service providers. It has also pointed to the complex but vital role of trust in co-production. Trust encourages people to co-produce; distrust makes it essential for governments to collaborate with civil society and citizens. The pandemic forced everyone to acknowledge the non-participation of groups that might otherwise have remained unnoticed at societies’ margins. This should bring renewed attention to the quest to involve vulnerable groups in co-production. This chapter has applied insights from past evidence on co-production, focusing on the question of whether it can be sustained. Where the future is uncertain, history may provide us with clues. Major societal changes often come about after a crisis (e.g., voting rights after the First World War, welfare states after the Second World War). Yet there are also many examples to the contrary. Based on an eyewitness account of the plague in London in 1665, Daniel Defoe noted that during the worst of the infection, religious conflicts were forgotten and charity was plentiful. However, when the plague started abating, everything went back to normal very quickly, even when thousands were still dying (Defoe, 2003). Indeed, despite commonly heard assumptions that ‘everything will change’, research on past epidemics shows that this is not necessarily true. While it is clear that sharp population decreases and social upheaval due to pandemics can change the course of history, or accelerate existing developments (Snowden, 2019), most likely, in post-COVID-19 pandemic times people and institutions will easily slip back into ‘business as usual’. This is not only because deeply rooted social behavioural patterns are not necessarily changed by a few months’ lockdown, but also because the conditions that made co-production emerge are likely to change, as emergency regulations and funds are abandoned and the sense of urgency disappears. Many community initiatives are likely to evaporate quite swiftly. The areas where there could be a more lasting effect are those where the basic conditions are already in place and where only a push was necessary for co-production to take off. An example of this might be the involvement of parents in their children’s education, which has been proven to be beneficial to educational achievement, albeit not able to substitute for professional teaching. Of course, the same levels of ‘home schooling’ will not be sustained (nor would this be desirable), but the heightened interaction between parents and teachers, the greater involvement of parents with their children’s homework and the swift adoption of digital technologies would easily allow a greater level of co-production than existed prior to the pandemic. But it will require a deliberate effort on the part of policymakers and staff to sustain it after school returns to normal. An important lesson for practitioners, therefore, is that in aiming for sustainable co-production, choices will need to be made. A guideline for making such choices, then, is to focus on those fields where the right conditions can be sustained relatively easily in normal times. Providing legislative frameworks where basic commitment is present is going to be more effective than trying to break through procedural restrictions when interdependency and mutual commitment are lacking. Moreover, focusing on such ‘easy wins’ rather than simply trying to sustain all ongoing initiatives, may leave resources to government to also invest in specific initiatives where conditions might be more challenging but where citizens’ co-production is essential in combating societal challenges. Many, probably most, beautiful initiatives we read of are going to disappear as the pandemic dies down. Some may be salvaged.

Can co-production that emerged during the COVID-19 pandemic be sustained?  135

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136  Research handbook on public management and COVID-19 Letki, N., and Steen, T. (2021). Social‐psychological context moderates incentives to co‐produce: Evidence from a large‐scale survey experiment on park upkeep in an urban setting. Public Administration Review, 81(5), 935–950. Mao, G., Fernandes-Jesus, M., Ntontis, E., and Drury, J. (2021). What have we learned about COVID-19 volunteering in the UK? A rapid review of the literature. BMC Public Health, 21(1), 1–15. Miao, Q., Schwarz, S., and Schwarz, G. (2021). Responding to COVID-19: Community volunteerism and coproduction in China. World Development, 137, 105128. NHS England. (2022, January 3). NHS Chief thanks “selfless” volunteers for giving two million hours as NHS doubled down on boosting the nation, NHS. https://​www​.england​.nhs​.uk/​2022/​01/​nhs​-chief​ -thanks​-selfless​-volunteers/​ OECD. (2021). Enhancing public trust in COVID-19 vaccination: The role of governments, OECD. https://​doi​.org/​10​.1787/​eae0ec5a​-en Osborne, S. P., Radnor, Z., and Strokosch, K. (2016). Co-production and the co-creation of value in public services: a suitable case for treatment? Public Management Review, 18(5), 639–653. Ostrom, E. (1996). Crossing the great divide: Coproduction, synergy, and development. World Development, 24(6), 1073–1087. Ostrom, E., Parks, R. B., Whitaker, G. P., and Percy, S. L. (1978). The public service production process: a framework for analyzing police services. Policy Studies Journal, 7, 381–389. Polzer, T., and Goncharenko, G. (2021). The UK COVID‐19 app: The failed co‐production of a digital public service. Financial Accountability & Management, 38(2), 281–298. Razai, M. S., Chaudhry, U. A., Doerholt, K., Bauld, L., and Majeed, A. (2021). Covid-19 vaccination hesitancy. BMJ, 373. Robertson, C., Schaefer, K. A., and Scheitrum, D. (2021). Are vaccine lotteries worth the money? Economics Letters, 209, 110097. Sicilia, M., Sancino, A., Nabatchi, T., and Guarini, E. (2019). Facilitating co-production in public services: Management implications from a systematic literature review. Public Money & Management, 39(4), 233–240. Snowden, F. M. (2019). Epidemics and Society: From the Black Death to the Present. Yale University Press. Steen, T., and Brandsen, T. (2020). Coproduction during and after the COVID‐19 pandemic: Will it last? Public Administration Review, 80(5), 851–855. Szescilo, D. (2018). Legal dilemmas of co-production and co-creation. In T. Brandsen, T. Steen, and B. Verschuere (Eds), Co-Production and Co-Creation. Engaging Citizens in Public Services (pp. 137–144). Routledge. The Economist. (2020). A pandemic of power grabs: Autocrats see opportunity in disaster. The Economist, 25 April. https://​www​.economist​.com/​leaders/​2020/​04/​23/​autocrats​-see​-opportunity​-in​ -disaster Van de Griend, R., and Von Piekartz, H. (2021). In Nederland gaapt een grote vaccinatiekloof, migranten blijven achter. De Volkskrant. https://​www​.volkskrant​.nl/​nieuws​-achtergrond/​in​-nederland​-gaapt​-een​ -grote​-vaccinatiekloof​-migranten​-blijven​-achter​~b0515b77/​ Van Eijk, C., and Steen, T. (2016). Why engage in co-production of public services? Mixing theory and empirical evidence. International Review of Administrative Sciences, 82(1), 28–46. Vanleene, D., Voets, J., and Verschuere, B. (2018). The co-production of a community: Engaging citizens in derelict neighbourhoods. VOLUNTAS: International Journal of Voluntary and Nonprofit Organizations, 29(1), 201–221. Voorberg, W., Jilke, S., Tummers, L., and Bekkers, V. (2018). Financial rewards do not stimulate coproduction: Evidence from two experiments. Public Administration Review, 78(6), 864–873. Whitaker, G. (1980). Coproduction: Citizen participation in service delivery. Public Administration Review, 40(3), 240–246. World Health Organization. (2020). Pandemic Fatigue: Reinvigorating the Public to Prevent COVID-19: Policy Considerations for Member States in the WHO European Region (No. WHO/EURO: 2020-1160-40906-55390). World Health Organization. Regional Office for Europe. Zou, Y., and Zhao, W. (2022). Neighbourhood governance during the COVID-19 lockdown in Hangzhou: Coproduction based on digital technologies. Public Management Review, 24(12), 1914–1932.

11. Examining the impact of COVID-19 on managing public sector employees: overcoming or exacerbating incoherences? Sue Williamson and Linda Colley

INTRODUCTION Working from home expanded rapidly during 2020, as millions of employees – including public servants – were compelled to leave their workplaces to contain the COVID-19 contagion. The pandemic required rapid responses to new policy challenges as well as to how and where work was conducted. Governments played a key role during the initial stages of the pandemic, as public services continued to operate and deliver services under challenging circumstances. Such crises highlight the importance of public sector capacity and capability to be agile and responsive (Mazzucato and Kattel, 2020). These crises also highlight how this public service response has been influenced by New Public Management (NPM), which has shaped public service approaches in many Western democracies for more than 40 years (Hood, 1991), and resulted in extensive devolution of human resource management (HRM) functions from central agencies to line agencies, and further to managers (Williamson, Colley and Foley, 2020). While there has been extensive analysis of working from home during the pandemic, little research has examined how public sector managers oversaw their teams during this period (extant research includes Kirchner et al., 2021; Rose and Brown, 2021). In this chapter we ask: how did the pandemic change management practices in the Australian public service (APS), as employees and teams worked from home? What are the implications for NPM and its ostensible goals of letting managers manage? To answer these questions, we surveyed approximately 6,000 Australian public service employees in both 2020 and 2021, in partnership with Australia’s largest public sector union. The chapter begins with the conceptual framework on managing in the complex public sector human resources (HR) environment. It presents findings through the theoretical lens of incoherences within HR (Pichault, 2007), where we consider whether working from home has exacerbated or ameliorated existing inconsistencies. Our research provides evidence of a significant shift in managers’ approaches to working remotely, from pre-pandemic resistance, to being supportive of this type of working (Williamson et al., 2022), and supports reflection on what this means for the NPM goal of letting managers manage amidst ongoing reforms.

THE ROLE OF MANAGERS IN THE NPM ENVIRONMENT NPM “is a set of assumptions and value statements about how public sector organizations should be designed, organized, managed and how, in a quasi-business manner, they should 137

138  Research handbook on public management and COVID-19 function” (Diefenbach, 2009, p. 893). NPM aimed to make public sector organisations operate more like private sector organisations, with a focus on performance, cost reduction and efficiency (Podger, 2017; Pollitt and Bouckaert, 2004). It is a global phenomenon which started in Western countries and subsequently spread to developing countries (Diefenbach, 2009). A major tenet of NPM is that managers are envisioned as active agents in the management of work and people, hence the adage “let managers manage” (Kettl, 1997, p. 447). This concept became popular in various countries, including the case study country for this chapter, Australia (Podger, 2017). Early NPM-inspired reforms in Australia in the 1970s and 1980s led to decentralisation of HRM functions, from central government to line agencies; and further devolved from HRM professionals in line agencies to line managers (Bach, 1999; Podger, 2017; Truss, 2013). The resulting decentralisation and devolution of responsibility for staffing had far-reaching effects on HRM policy and practice (Diefenbach, 2009; Williamson, Colley and Foley, 2020). While this devolution was applied across all corporate service fields, it was particularly fraught in the HRM context with continued coordination and accountability disjunctions between central agencies and line agencies (Colley et al., 2012; Alford 1993). Within agencies, HRM resourcing was reduced, effectively outsourcing HRM activities to line managers. Managers were tasked with broader responsibility for managing staff performance, managing local HRM practices such as job design, and decisions about access to HRM policies (Truss, 2013; Bach and Kessler, 2009; McConville, 2006; Bach, 1999; Hood, 1991). Capacity challenges emerged in Australia and internationally. Managers struggled with the added workloads, role ambiguity, a lack of understanding of how HRM goals were related to their core business and internal constraints, such as public sector standards around HRM processes (Lapuente and Van de Walle, 2019; Wällstedt and Almqvist, 2015; McConville, 2006; Harris et al., 2002; Bach, 1999). Tensions also occurred in the balance between central HR policy and the level of autonomy available to line agencies and line managers (Meyer and Hammerschmid, 2010). This tension has potentially been exacerbated in the COVID-19 context of rapid HR policy changes and decisions, as will be discussed.

THE AUSTRALIAN PUBLIC SERVICE AND COVID-19 The APS employs over 150,000 employees, in 97 agencies across 14 broad areas (APSC, 2021). While state and territory governments in Australia are largely responsible for service delivery, including for education, policing, and healthcare, the APS provides some services, and also co-ordinates policies across governments. Services Australia (which provides welfare payments and services), the Department of Defence, the Australian Taxation Office and the Department of Home Affairs employ 56 per cent of the APS (APSC, 2021). The APS is female dominated, with women comprising 60.2 per cent of the workforce (APSC, 2021). Executive level staff – from where line managers are drawn – comprise just over a quarter of the APS workforce (APSC, 2021). In 2019 (before the COVID-19 pandemic), only 15 per cent of lower-level APS employees worked from home, although around one-third of senior employees worked from home (APSC, 2019). Access was not universal across classification levels (i.e. employees are grouped into various job classifications based on work value). It was mostly accessed by knowledge workers, and those with caring responsibilities (Cortis and Powell, 2018), and

Examining the impact of COVID-19 on managing public sector employees  139 usually only for a small proportion of their working hours and often on an ad hoc basis. Public sector organisations and managers had concerns that employees would be less productive when working at home than when in the workplace, while some employees had concerns about the effects upon work–life balance and negative impacts on their careers (de Vries et al., 2019; Callier, 2012; Maruyama and Tietze, 2012). Resistance to working from home was overthrown by the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic, as health directives compelled millions of employees to leave their workplaces in an effort to contain the contagion. In the public sector, three decades of relatively unfettered organisational and managerial discretion were overturned by central directions and large sections of the workforce were required to work from home. The APS reported 56 per cent of employees worked from home at the height of the pandemic (APSC, 2020a). While most of the research will be presented in the empirical findings section, we reflect briefly here on how this operated in the NPM environment of devolved HRM responsibility and accountability. At the peak periods of pandemic lockdowns, governments issued central advice to their agencies and, in accordance with the devolved context, this advice was then implemented at agency and manager level. For example, APS guidelines outlined the factors for agency heads to consider for employees working from home, such as the ability to meet operational requirements, security, information and communications technologies, and capacity to work remotely (APSC, 2020b). However, the diverse nature of public service work precluded definitive eligibility on who could or could not work from home, and therefore agencies had some discretion in the implementation of these central policies (APSC, 2020b). At the height of lockdowns, managers had relatively little discretion and extensive efforts were made to facilitate working from home. This experience changed perceptions about working from home and removed some of the previous concerns and resistance. Once lockdowns ended and central direction and controls were relaxed, we saw differences in how agencies negotiated their workforce transition back to the workplace. It was clear that the pandemic experience would shape the future choices of organisations, managers and employees, in some instances leaving a lasting legacy of lower resistance, and with widespread expectations from employees about new ways of working in the future. In this chapter we examine the changes wrought as a result of working from home, focusing on the role and operation of managers.

THEORETICAL FRAMEWORK The pandemic precipitated a new wave of reforms and new ways of working (APSC, 2021). These changes added to a model of HR which was not necessarily coherent, resulting from earlier rounds of reform. We draw on Pichault’s (2007) framework which theorises incoherence in the specific context of public sector reform and the specific policy and practice field of HRM, which supports examination of managers’ capability in implementation of HR policies. Identifying and understanding these incoherences and inconsistencies within public sector HRM practices is important to gauge the potential for successful implementation of HRM practices as well as NPM itself. Debates around the role of core elements of NPM are also of increasing importance as governments consider how public services should operate as the world moves towards some form of COVID-normal (Lapuente and Van de Walle, 2019).

140  Research handbook on public management and COVID-19 Pichault (2007) argues that incoherence arises in three ‘domains’ related to content, context and process. Content includes innovations, including public sector reforms and the HR matters likely to be shaped by such reforms, such as working arrangements. Context refers to the factors that can influence the content, namely, organisational factors including conditions under which work is undertaken and the nature of work. Process refers to the strategies developed by stakeholders and competing interests, with some advocating for change, and others trying to maintain the status quo. Incoherence arises between these various domains. The first is internal incoherence within the content of HRM reforms and their strategic goals and mechanisms for achieving those goals. For example, training managers to improve skills in one HR function, such as recruitment and selection, but not in other HR processes. The second is discursive incoherence, which occurs when HR practices become more formalised and professional, at odds with the flexibility inherent in the NPM ethos of “letting managers manage” (Kettl, 1997, p. 447). The third type of incoherence is contextual incoherence, which occurs when public sector reforms focus on HR practices, while organisational routines are unchanged. This type of incoherence also results from incoherence between the content and context in which the reforms are introduced, including the socio-political context and the organizational context, such as levels of autonomy. The final type of incoherence is processual incoherence, which refers to not adequately engaging stakeholders, hindering reforms. This type of incoherence also refers to power interplays amongst stakeholders with differing interests. Using Pichault’s (2007) framework, we contextualise how managers managed remote workers in a pandemic context. We conducted research within the APS at two junctures, in partnership with the Community and Public Sector Union (CPSU). Our first survey was conducted towards the end of the first lockdowns in June/July 2020 (the 2020 survey), with over 6,000 participants, where 25 per cent identified as managers/supervisors. Our second survey was conducted during extensive and prolonged lockdowns in some Australian States and Territories in September/October 2021 (the 2021 survey), with over 5,000 respondents, including 28.5 per cent identifying as managers/supervisors. Survey themes included who did and did not work from home, hours of work, productivity, preferences for future working arrangements, and organisational support for continued working from home. Survey data for both 2020 and 2021 included both multiple choice responses and extensive free text options.1

FINDINGS We examine three areas to identify how managers managed during a pandemic within an NPM environment. We use Pichault’s (2007) framework to categorise and analyse the main impacts of working from home, as experienced by managers and their teams. Table 11.1 summarises our findings. Content Factors In this section, we examine content factors – or those factors impacted by change processes. We focus on changes to working hours in a pandemic context, followed by changes to the organisation of teams once these teams started to return to their usual workplace.

Examining the impact of COVID-19 on managing public sector employees  141 Table 11.1

Findings of incoherence and coherence in managerial practice as employees worked from home

Domains of incoherence Content of reforms (working and HR

Managerial practices Working hours

Coherences/incoherences Internal coherence – changed HR

practices)

Longer working hours – employees

processes resulted in changed managerial

‘proved’ themselves. Managers persuaded practices

Context factors (policy)

by proof and focused on outcomes-based

Discursive incoherence – managerial

performance

flexibility hampered by agency policy

Organisation of work

Contextual incoherence – rigid conception

Able to be more productive at

of working hours and performance in

home; some employees less able to

a theoretically more flexible context

collaborate; managers maintained good

Processual incoherence – ongoing

communications and team cohesion Working from home policy decoupled

resistance from some managers indicates lack of engagement

from implementation; managers applied policy inconsistently (decreased inconsistency in 2021) Process factors (power)

Managers increasingly accepted working from home; increased employee bargaining power

Working hours We found a substantial minority of employees worked longer hours during the pandemic (28.6 per cent in 2020 and 33.2 per cent in 2021). There were multiple reasons for these additional hours, including increased workloads. However, some employees noted they worked longer hours to ‘prove’ to their managers they could work from home successfully. Some reported they worked longer hours as they felt guilty about not completing enough work, or that their manager would think they were not being productive. This guilt stems from employees believing they needed to justify working from home – even when required to do so in a pandemic. For some, the guilt arose from tasks taking longer when performed from home, with employees reading more on their computers in lieu of conversations, a lack of printed material making reading slower, and slower work processes, such as going through approval processes for projects and policy briefings. Employees often made up any lost time, as exemplified by this employee’s comment: “productivity per hour decreased, so [I] had to increase hours to compensate” (woman manager, Agency 7, 2020). Our 2020 survey identified a change in manager perceptions. Managers felt that employees had proven they could work from home successfully and be productive, with the theme of ‘proof’ featuring very strongly in managers’ written survey responses. Many managers experienced an ‘epiphany’ that working from home could be undertaken successfully and productivity maintained (see Williamson et al., 2022, for more detail). Further, a move towards outcomes-based performance was evident, with a minority of managers stating that rather than focusing on presenteeism, once employees were working from home they were required to focus on outcomes. Performance was judged on the work produced, rather than hours worked. Some also noted, however, that performance management systems lagged behind this shift.

142  Research handbook on public management and COVID-19 Organisation and operation of work Even as employees faced obstacles to maintaining productivity, both managers and employees believed productivity was maintained, if not increased, in the pandemic context. Many managers commented on their team’s increased ability to work productively with fewer distractions. Almost two-thirds of respondents in our 2020 survey told us that working from home enabled them to get more done, compared with being in the office – this increased slightly to almost 70 per cent in 2021. Many respondents across both surveys told us that working from home enabled them to get more work done owing to fewer distractions. Working from home affected employees’ interactions and ability to collaborate. In 2020 we asked whether respondents were more or less able to undertake a range of tasks and functions, including participating in meetings, maintaining networks, and keeping aware of developments in their workplace (Williamson and Colley, 2022). In both 2020 and 2021, around one-quarter said they were less able to contact or collaborate with colleagues, or mentor or coach others. In 2020, around one fifth of respondents noted that they were less able to maintain professional networks, increasing slightly to one quarter in 2021. Managers appear to have maintained strong communications with staff during the pandemic. In 2020, while around 12 per cent maintained their usual routine of meetings, the majority (around 60 per cent) supplemented this with additional virtual work meetings. Importantly, the majority of managers also kept a non-work connection with their staff, through social meetings (such as virtual coffee/drinks), chat room forums, overseeing weekly trivia quizzes with their teams, participating in virtual exercise sessions with their teams, mindfulness sessions, facilitating sharing of non-work related photos around the team (such as of team members’ pets), sharing recipes, and a step counting challenge. Managers provided numerous examples of frequent use of one-to-one communications using technologies such as WhatsApp, Messenger and Jabber. Managers oversaw a range of working practices and arrangements to ensure team cohesion, business continuity and individual wellbeing. Managers reported that their agencies had necessarily increased the flexibility available to staff, with staggered start and finishing times, increased bandwidth, staggered days in the office, rosters determining which days employees could work, including a system of week on/off in the usual workplace. The staggering of staff attendance also ensured that a restricted number of employees were accessing the building and lifts at any given time – to support social distancing rules – and also so enough desks were available, as some parts of the workplace had been closed. A minority of respondents also told us of staggered teams, where, for example, employees were divided up into ‘blue’ and ‘white’ teams which alternated working days, to ensure business continuity. Our findings show that the content domain of work is changing, as the pandemic triggered further public sector reforms, impacting on working hours, ways of working together, and perceptions of performance and productivity. Context Factors: Organisational Policy and Interpretation In this section we examine the main factor that impacted on working from home in a pandemic context – that of organisational policy and how managers interpreted policy. While policies were set by the Australian Public Service Commission (APSC) – the central agency which oversees employment relations in the APS – individual agencies had discretion to interpret

Examining the impact of COVID-19 on managing public sector employees  143 the policy, and this discretion flowed to line managers. We therefore also discuss policy implementation. Organisational policy Throughout 2020 and 2021, Australian workforces and communities cycled in and out of lockdowns. Government and agency policy changed accordingly (see Williamson, Colley and Hanna-Osborne, 2020). The APSC issued broad guidelines throughout 2020 and 2021 around working from home. However, ultimate control of who should work from home remained at the agency and line manager level. Over two-thirds of APS agencies have reportedly reviewed their flexible working/working from home policy since the onset of the pandemic (APSC, 2021). We asked respondents if their supervisor was following the new policy – a third did not know whether their supervisor did, and another third stated that their supervisor or manager was not following the policy. We see here not only a decoupling of policy from implementation (Bromley and Powell, 2012), but also a lack of managerial capability or resistance in not implementing the policy. One third of respondents stated that they were unable to work from home because their agency’s criteria precluded them from doing so. Participant responses indicated that a minority of agencies only allowed certain groups of employees to work from home, including those who were vulnerable to contracting COVID-19 or had vulnerable family members. This attitude was particularly prevalent in one large service delivery agency. A typical comment was: “I was not in the cohort of staff that were identified as at risk, therefore it was not deemed necessary for me to work from home” (woman supervisor, Agency 51, 2020). Policy implementation We also uncovered inconsistent decisions as managers determined who could, and could not, work from home. We examined managerial discretion on who could work from home, based on the findings of our initial survey. Respondents reported managers exercised discretion contrary to their agency’s policy that vulnerable employees should continue to work from home. In some agencies, managers determined whether employees were deemed to be part of a vulnerable group who could continue to work from home after the initial lockdown (see Williamson et al., 2022). Responses revealed differences of opinion between managers and employees about risk. Managerial discretion expanded to assessing whether employees were in a high-risk category and could therefore work from home. An example from a respondent highlights this assessment process: “letter provided by medical practitioner did not meet standard to permit working from home” (woman supervisor, Agency 34, 2020). Managers had potentially exceeded their management remit by determining the health needs of their employees. In 2021, we found far fewer comments about managers determining who could work from home based on an assessment of their employees’ medical evidence or health status. This may be due to a greater acceptance of working from home, particularly as the survey was conducted when three Australian states and territories were experiencing stringent lockdowns. In the 2021 pandemic peak, our findings show that 84.0 per cent of respondents worked from home, an increase from 80.0 per cent in our previous survey. Additionally, agency policy may have influenced managers. We asked respondents in our 2021 survey whether their agency had placed a cap on the proportion of the working week employees could spend working from home. Just under half said that their agency had implemented a cap, with the most common

144  Research handbook on public management and COVID-19 being 40 per cent – agencies were allowing full-time employees to work from home two days a week. This effectively mandated a maximum period of time for employees to work from home in 2021 and beyond. Process Factors Pichault’s (2007) process domain centres on strategies used by stakeholders to advance their own interests. It also examines the interplays of power between stakeholders, with some advocating for change, and others resisting any public sector reforms. In this section we focus on managers’ increased acceptance of employees working from home. We also focus on employees’ bargaining power – a key aspect of power differentials between employers and employees. Managerial resistance Prior to the pandemic, managerial resistance to working from home was common in the public sector (Williamson et al., 2022). While the pandemic led many managers to change their beliefs and support employees working from home, as detailed above, a level of resistance remained. In both our 2020 and 2021 surveys, some respondents detailed difficulties in having working from home arrangements approved beyond the initial lockdown, indicating the prevalence of organisational and managerial resistance. When asked why they could not work from home, respondents gave examples of resistance, largely in the form of working from home “not being offered” or their request not being approved. Some managers noted that the pandemic experience had not changed a historical resistance to working from home from their organisation or senior managers. This comment demonstrates this attitude: “the general feeling I get from the Department is that they don’t trust that you are working effectively when you’re at home” (woman supervisor, Agency 39). These beliefs suggest that some organisations may not be supportive of employees continuing to work from home. Line managers expressed relatively few concerns about performance, other than a potential reduction in social learning and innovation through a lack of face-to-face interactions. In both 2020 and 2021, more than 90 per cent of managers reported that their staff were just as productive working from home or were more productive. This led to increased support to enable employees to continue to work from home. We also asked about managers’ support for working from home in the future. In both 2020 and 2021, the overwhelming majority of managers (64 per cent in 2020; 69 per cent in 2021) stated that they would be “much more” or “somewhat more” likely to support employees working from home in the future. The increase in support between the two periods highlights not only increased acceptance for working from home and hybrid working, but also decreasing managerial resistance. Employees’ bargaining power In our 2021 survey, we asked respondents whether they would consider leaving their agency or the public sector if they were unable to work from home for at least part of the week. Almost half (45 per cent) stated that they would consider leaving. Further, almost 90 per cent of respondents believed that improved working from home provisions should be included when collective enterprise agreements were being renegotiated. A slightly lower proportion of respondents stated that working from home is now a standard working condition that employees expect.

Examining the impact of COVID-19 on managing public sector employees  145 Employees have a sustained desire to keep working from home in a hybrid working arrangement and clear preferences about the extent. In 2021, almost two in five respondents stated that they would like to work from home for either two or three days a week; over a third would prefer to work at home all the time, or for 80 per cent of their working time. This desire for hybrid work was also evident in 2020. The most popular choices of employees were for some hours every week from home (38.8 per cent) and most hours worked from home every week (30.9 per cent). Having examined the three domains of incoherence, we now consider the interaction between each domain and related managerial practices, and whether these exacerbated or ameliorated incoherences. The interactions between the various domains can result in incoherences between HR policies and practices. This can stymie ongoing reforms, particularly those associated with HR changes resulting from large-scale working from home. We now expand upon these forms of incoherence, and in one area, have identified a strengthened coherence.

DISCUSSION This research has examined the employment reforms in the wake of the pandemic, and the tensions in an NPM context. We have used Pichault’s (2007) framework to categorise and analyse the findings of our 2020 and 2021 surveys of APS employees using the domains of content, context and process. Internal incoherence occurs when some HR variables are modified, but strategies do not change, and hence organisational change does not occur. It also occurs when some HR variables are changed, but others are not, thereby limiting organisational change. Given the rapid transition to working from home, it might be expected that some incoherences would emerge, such as HR systems and ways of working not being adjusted to the new ways of working. Instead, we have identified a move towards coherence. When employees rapidly transitioned to working from home, managers developed new ways of working with their teams. Perceptions of performance and productivity also changed, as managers realised that employees could be productive while working from home. This has implications for the ongoing NPM reform project, with traditional perceptions of productivity and performance being redefined. A move towards outcomes-based performance may increase the flexibility and agility of public servants and organisations, and change the nature of managing employees to be less prescriptive. This also highlights inconsistencies within NPM, as it combines old and new practices and ideas. Second, we examine discursive incoherence. This form of incoherence refers to the disjunction when public sector reforms aim to increase flexibility, however, practices result in more rules and bureaucracy. This is evidenced by policies on working from home being determined centrally, but interpreted at agency level, and then at line manager level. Agency policies placed increased bureaucratic procedures on managers which limited their discretion. Paradoxically, however, managers then used what discretion they had to determine who could and could not work from home. The increased guidance from central agencies flowed through to the manager level, even as the central HR agency emphasised that agencies were to determine their own working arrangements. An NPM environment has potentially exacerbated this incoherence. From a mantra of “letting managers manage”, the pandemic required that governments, central public sector

146  Research handbook on public management and COVID-19 HR agencies and individual agencies all affected how managers could decide who could work from home, and how they could manage their teams. The pandemic has highlighted the limitations of a devolved public sector HR system, with inconsistencies in managerial decision-making affecting individual employees. While government directives were required to be made and communicated quickly owing to the evolving nature of the pandemic, in a COVID-normal environment, an adherence to the NPM ethos would once again see managers responsible for determining who can work from home. Organisations applying a cap on the amount of time employees can do so suggests that managerial prerogative will continue to be curtailed – further evidence of an incoherence between managerial practice and NPM, and even challenging the authenticity of its central tenet of letting managers manage. Third, we examine contextual incoherence. This type of incoherence occurs when some HR variables are modified, but routines do not change. It also occurs with a disjunction between the content of reforms (such as working from home) and the organisational context (such as autonomy). Our findings show some incoherence between working hours and location of work. Employees working longer hours indicates a mismatch between the new forms of flexibility inherent within flexibility of working location, with a rigid conception of hours and work needing to be undertaken. Further, it signals a disjunction – or incoherence – between new and old conceptions of work even as ways of working were being reconfigured, demonstrating a contextual incoherence. Our finding reiterates other research which has also examined how public sector managers conducted their work during the pandemic lockdowns, with one Danish study finding that public sector managers struggled with new work practices, even as they adapted to them (Kirchner et al., 2021). This has implications for managing in an NPM environment. Pre-pandemic literature showed that some public sector managers experienced difficulties being responsible for HR processes. In an environment of increased flexibility, managers may increasingly struggle with managing employees, even as performance and productivity are maintained. Fourth, our findings also reveal processual incoherence, which refers to a lack of involvement of public servants in reform processes and not adequately engaging stakeholders. No public information is available on whether managers were consulted about the changes arising from their teams working from home. However, a low level of ongoing resistance shows that some managers were not adequately engaged to support employees working from home. This was offset by the majority of managers expressing support for team members working from home, as employees had proved that they could do this successfully, with some managers even having an epiphany about productivity. Our finding echoes other research conducted during lockdowns, which also found increased managerial support for working from home in the public sector (Rose and Brown, 2021). Despite the levels of support, our finding suggests that the decentralisation of HR to line managers has not been entirely successful, with managers needing increased resources. Working from home is increasingly a subject of unions’ collective enterprise agreement negotiations. Australia’s main public sector union recommends that working from home provisions be included in collective agreements, rather than HR policy (CPSU, 2022). Employees’ clear desire to work hybridly and the high proportion of respondents who have stated that they will leave their organisation if they are unable to do so, are factors that serve the interests of employees and their unions. Currently, working conditions cannot be enhanced in agreements without trade-offs (APSC, 2020c), although a recent change of government may

Examining the impact of COVID-19 on managing public sector employees  147 revisit this policy. This demonstrates processual incoherence, based on differing power plays of the two main parties.

CONCLUSION To conclude, it is clear that the pandemic has changed ways of working, and ways of managing employees. Our research is ground-breaking as it not only adds to the scant literature on how public sector managers operated during pandemic lockdowns, but also considers the implications for ongoing public sector reforms. Our findings highlight a range of incoherences within HR content, processes and stakeholder relations, while also uncovering a level of internal coherence between HR variables and organisational change. The changes wrought by the pandemic are not limited to the increased adoption of working from home but may also extend to a reconsideration of how managers work in an NPM environment post-pandemic. Our research highlighted the tensions in letting managers manage during a crisis, with that being only one potential shortfall of NPM philosophy. As public sector organisations consider how to maintain agility in the provision of services in a new environment, the role of managers and managerial capability is of increasing importance. We have started to track the changes in how managers oversee public sector employees who work from home, and invite others to build on our research.

NOTE 1. For more information on our methods refer to reports: Williamson and Colley (2022); Colley and Williamson (2020).

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Examining the impact of COVID-19 on managing public sector employees  149 Williamson, S., Colley, L., and Foley, M. (2022) Public servants working from home: Exploring managers’ changing allowance decisions in a COVID-19 context. Economic and Labour Relations Review, 33(1), 37–55. doi:10.1177/10353046211055526

12. The governance of public services during COVID-19: a review of challenges and opportunities Rachel Ashworth and Catherine Farrell

INTRODUCTION The global pandemic prompted rapid adaptation across public services, including to systems of decision-making, accountability and public governance. As Lynn et al. (2000, p. 235) note, governance is a loose and often ambiguous term that is frequently used without clear definition. In response, they offer the following: Governance can be defined as regimes of laws, administrative rules, judicial rulings and practices that constrain, prescribe and enable government activity, where each activity is broadly defined as the production and delivery of publicly supported goods and services. In its broadest sense, the study of governance concerns the relationship between governance so defined and government performance.

In addition, Bovaird (2005) highlights a series of key principles that governance systems should embody, including democratic decision-making, accountability, transparency, fair and honest treatment of citizens and coherence in policymaking, while ‘good governance’ is argued to be built upon values which ‘contribute to the good of society’ (Perry et al., 2014, p. 27). Given the nature of governance as outlined above, it is somewhat inevitable that COVID-19 prompted adaptations to our governance systems. The debate is whether these changes brought positive or negative benefits for citizens. In this chapter, we seek to identify the impact of COVID-19 on key aspects of governance that draw on the principles identified by Bovaird, including transparency and democratic decision-making, and review various adjustments that have taken place in governance systems in a number of international contexts. We report evidence that suggests that there has been greater transparency in policymaking during COVID-19, certainly regarding the interface between scientists, politicians and the public (Cairney and Wellstead, 2021). Health data are now provided to the public on a routine basis in some countries, while scientific discussions and debates regarding testing, vaccines and levels of immunity have been brought into the public domain. Meanwhile, there is also evidence of some wider engagement with, and accessibility to, governance processes as our parliaments, local governments and scrutiny committees moved their meetings and operations online, although shifting to virtual forms of public governance could potentially reduce the ‘socialising aspects of accountability’ (Petrakaki, 2018) and present problems for those without access to good technology (Lai and Widmar, 2021). Finally, research suggests that online participation has helped to enhance accessibility and inclusion, with some disabled people reporting a greater involvement in employment, particularly those undertaking 150

The governance of public services during COVID-19  151 desk-based roles (Holland, 2021) and women observing a greater fairness and ability to contribute to online meetings compared with those held face to face (Hibbs, 2022). While it can be argued that some aspects of governance improved, it is also clear that the need to make rapid decisions during a ‘state of exception’ when ‘the conventional order is suspended’ (Andreaus et al., 2021, p. 449), resulted in the adaptation of regular governance processes. Greer et al. (2020, p. 1413) suggest that during the pandemic period an extension of state capacity occurred unaccompanied by appropriate levels of control. For example, contracts for PPE and medical equipment were often awarded at pace and sometimes with scant regard to due process, while governmental appointments to oversee regimes of testing, tracing and vaccinating citizens seem to have fallen outside of usual procedures (BMJ, 2020; Public Accounts Committee, House of Commons, 2021). COVID-19 presents us with a paradox it seems. On the one hand, the pandemic has produced some advances in public governance but it has also further exposed pre-existing governance problems. Whilst there are some variations, these governance effects can be identified right across the world, including in New Zealand where the approach to COVID-19 was particularly cautious (Cumming, 2021). This chapter identifies the main governance challenges associated with COVID-19 and evaluates the impact of the pandemic on accountability and governance mechanisms. The next section of the chapter discusses the broader implications that the pandemic has had for public governance and from this it is clear that a holistic evaluation of the impact on governance per se is beyond the scope of this chapter. Given the principles outlined by Bovaird (2005) and the emphasis on laws, rules, rulings and practices from Lynn et al. (2000), we opt to prioritise the implications for two elements of governance – transparency and accountability in decision-making, and practice and participation in governance processes. We conclude the chapter by reflecting on whether these changes represent short-term adaptations or longer-term shifts in modes of public governance, and in doing so we highlight the opportunities and the challenges of public service governance systems of the future.

PUBLIC SERVICE GOVERNANCE AND COVID-19 It is clear that the pandemic generated a significant level of turbulence across public service organisations. Describing COVID-19 as a ‘game changer for public administration and leadership’, Ansell et al. (2021, p. 949) suggest that the pandemic has impacted already pronounced ‘wicked’ public service challenges with ‘surprising, inconsistent, unpredictable and uncertain’ elements and effects, highlighting the need for strong governance systems in order to respond appropriately to the problems, challenges and turbulence prompted by COVID-19. O’Flynn (2021, p. 965) argues that crises bring the role of government into sharp relief and this was certainly evident during the pandemic, whereby ‘people from every corner of the world expect government to be “out front” battling the virus and providing services and support for citizens’. For Zheng et al. (2023), the pandemic contained the three classic hallmarks of a crisis situation – threat, urgency and uncertainty, referencing Rosenthal et al. (2001) who defined a crisis as a ‘serious threat to the basic structures or the fundamental values and norms of a social system, which – under time pressures and highly uncertain circumstances – necessitates making critical decisions’ (emphases added). It seems clear that COVID-19 presented a ‘classic’ crisis that encouraged individuals to innovate and change what they do (Phillips et al., 2023). In terms of governance, and

152  Research handbook on public management and COVID-19 specifically the definition provided by Lynn et al. (2000) above that highlights its role in constraining, prescribing and enabling government activity, it is clear that such a crisis will prompt changes and adaptations to laws, rules, rulings and practices that could enable effective decision-making but also undermine good governance principles. In order to explore these effects further, the chapter now moves on to focus on the impact of the pandemic on two key aspects of governance: (a) transparency and accountability in decision-making, and (b) practice and participation in public service governance.

TRANSPARENCY AND ACCOUNTABILITY IN DECISION-MAKING For Moser (2001, p. 3), transparency means shedding light on ‘working procedures not immediately visible to those not directly involved in order to demonstrate the good working of an institution’. Transparency is considered to be a vital partner to accountability and plays a key role, as Liston-Heyes and Julliet (2019, p. 659) emphasise, in reducing ‘corruption, waste and mismanagement while also encouraging greater citizen participation’. Transparency is usually promoted through the regular publication of key information relating to government policy and decision-making in anticipation of, and response to, public demands (Worthy, 2010) or so-called ‘information exchange’ (Meijer, 2013, p. 430). Two further elements of transparency identified by Meijer (2013) are ‘inward transparency’ whereby government is monitored by citizens and other stakeholders and also ‘transparency of working and performance’, which enables government decisions to be questioned. COVID-19 has prompted some of the most radical government policymaking of our time, which has often involved rapid and bold decisions that inevitably restricted civil liberties. Moves were taken across the globe to lock down societies and economies, which meant governments intervening to close business organisations, pausing forms of travel, restricting movements, and enforcing new citizenship-based codes of behaviour, such as ‘self isolation’ and the wearing of face coverings, via legislation. Given the radical nature of these decisions, they required considerable explanation and discussion, which, it is argued, promoted transparency and enabled citizens to access their decision makers and understand the rationale behind particular decisions. This transparency in policymaking seems to have increased public trust in experts, such as Chief Scientific Advisers and Chief Medical Officers who made regular appearances in ministerial press conferences right across the world (Cairney and Wellstead, 2021). So it could be that the information exchange required for transparency identified by Meijer (2013) was evident during the pandemic on the basis of the volume and frequency of scientific and medical information transmitted to citizens. In South Korea, for example, Moon (2020, p. 652) suggests that it was ‘thanks to agile, adaptive and transparent actions by the South Korean government, along with citizens’ active participation in social distancing, the rate of infection began to drop dramatically’. The South Korean approach was informed by the country’s prior experience of SARS outbreaks where the ‘position of non-transparency caused public outcry as well as tensions with local governments that wanted to disclose related information’. It also resulted in fewer cases of transmission and lower fatalities from the virus. However, this has come at something of a cost in terms of the wider consequences of the government’s transparent approach.

The governance of public services during COVID-19  153 For example, Ahn and Wickramasinghe (2021, p. 1327) argue that the extension of transparency in this case ‘pushed the limits of accountability’, resulting in the reinforcement of a ‘society of control’. This is because of the use of big data analytics which allegedly shifted accountability from government to citizens. The government used a ‘Smart Management System’, which combined large-scale urban data with individual-level information drawn from those testing positive for COVID-19, with a self-isolation app which mandated twice daily reporting from all those in self-isolation and involved fines for anyone breaching self-quarantine rules. In contrast to other test and trace systems, data from the Smart Management System were shared, not just with those directly impacted, but with entire local populations in order to avoid further transmission. This involved the government directing citizens to a website where they could track the movements of positive cases. Ahn and Wickramasinghe’s (2021) study reports the changes in public’s perception of transparency during the pandemic, highlighting that, in the early days, fearful citizens were happy to prioritise safety and transparency over privacy but as COVID-19 progressed, concerns grew about the need to ensure that personal information was not released. While it was a particular data management system that caused concern in South Korea, these issues have been raised elsewhere regarding the provision of too much information to the public. For example, public service professionals such as paramedics reported concerns that ‘information overload’ was creating fear and uncertainty amongst citizens, which meant they were not presenting for medical treatment and other public services when they were badly needed (Rees et al., 2021). In other nations, the allegation is that governments retained too much information, as Ojiagu et al. (2020) highlight in their research on decision-making in Nigeria, where it is argued that the failure to disclose information on COVID-19 reduced citizen compliance with safety measures. In a fascinating study which involved tracking decision-making throughout the pandemic, Andreaus et al.’s (2021) analysis of 94 Italian government press conferences and online public databases shows how the Italian government’s style of accountability altered during the pandemic. Five different accountability phases were identified with associated varying levels of transparency ranging from rebuttal, where the government failed to identify a societal need for sharing information, through to dismissal, reactive, proactive and finally coactive, where account-giving led to a widened disclosure of information to combat the challenging economic situation and take actions to mitigate any future risk. Research reveals that the pandemic afforded governments an opportunity to engage in transparency and accountability differently, as Demirag et al. (2020) demonstrate in their analysis of the way that the Turkish government somewhat opportunistically re-presented the case for public–private financed hospitals during the pandemic. Here, the authors conclude that the emotions and anxiety of the pandemic enabled the government to underplay prior financial and budgetary concerns and legitimate a public interest case for proceeding with the hospitals based on a form of ‘emotional accountability’. While populations across the globe became used to receiving regular updates from politicians and senior medics that explained the scientific rationale for decision-making, the need for urgent government decision-making and particularly the procurement of medical equipment meant some bypassing of traditional accountability mechanisms as decisions were often considered exceptions to the usual legal frameworks (Andreaus et al., 2021). For example, Boughey’s (2020) analysis of the Australian government’s decision-making demonstrates a reduction in accountability during the pandemic. This takes three forms including: the avoidance of Parliamentary oversight, with many decisions proceeding through the National

154  Research handbook on public management and COVID-19 Cabinet or via delegated legislation; a lack of clarity regarding administrative orders and whether they have a legislative requirement that is legally enforceable; and the degree of police discretion when enforcing extraordinary powers which lack a right of appeal. Boughey (2020) also highlights claims that the police service potentially exceeded its authority in the disproportionate enforcement of COVID-19 measures. Similar findings were observed in a study of the UK where Stott et al. (2021) identified considerable ambiguity around the enforcement of emergency COVID-19 powers regarding the policing of a vigil to remember a woman who had been murdered. There are multiple examples of opaque decision-making worldwide. In the US, whilst proper processes for the awarding of contracts in a pandemic situation had already been reviewed and agreed, once the crisis hit, traditional mechanisms were compromised during the allocation of $60 billion worth of contracts, with over 50 companies selected to manufacture supplies that did not meet standards (Taylor, 2021). In the UK, Sian and Smyth (2022) also report that public accountability mechanisms were put to one side as the UK Government used the Coronavirus Act (2020) and a Procurement Policy Note (PPNO1) to award contracts against four emergency tests, rather than the usual processes of tender. Sian and Smyth’s (2022) analysis focused on three key elements of public accountability in relation to the procurement of Personal Protective Equipment (PPE) – non-publication of legally required contract details; conflicts of interest in the award of fast-track contracts; and inadequate risk assessment and management of contracts – and reveals fundamental deficiencies regarding legal accountability and audit mechanisms. Emphasising the importance of transparency when a national emergency involves the suspension of usual accountability arrangements, Sian and Smyth conclude that ‘public accountability mechanisms were compromised during the pandemic’ and that there was ‘gross mismanagement of PPE (and other) contracts’ in a context where open tendering and Parliamentary scrutiny were both absent (Sian and Smyth, 2022, p. 152). A National Audit Office report highlighted that £17.3 billion of contracts was allocated to suppliers without the usual award notices, £10.5 billion of which was awarded without competition (NAO, 2020) (see Allen, this volume for further discussion of PPE procurement in the UK). The frequent suspension of traditional public accountability mechanisms prompted citizens and civil society organisations to ‘hold their governments to account’ in different ways. For example, Sian and Smyth’s (2022) study shows how Freedom of Information legislation was used by organisations such as Transparency International, Open Democracy, and the UK Anti-Corruption Coalition, which published a COVID-19 statement, to open up decision-making. Clearly, it is evident that whilst many governments provided information to the public during the pandemic, it is also the case that the opportunities for public questioning of key data were limited, thereby failing to meet two of Meijer’s (2013) criteria for transparency in governance. Having reviewed some of the emerging research on the impact of the pandemic on accountability and transparency in decision-making, we next turn to practice and participation in public governance during COVID-19.

The governance of public services during COVID-19  155

PRACTICE AND PARTICIPATION IN PUBLIC GOVERNANCE The practices of governance were hugely impacted by COVID-19, with the vast majority of governance meetings moving from in-person formats to virtual settings overnight. Following the ‘work from home’ and ‘social distancing’ announcements made by many governments, Parliaments were required to pass new emergency laws and the need to meet virtually was de facto imposed. In response, across the world, many countries introduced video conferencing in place of in-person parliamentary and committee meetings, for example in Germany, Lithuania, Norway and Canada. In France, the Assemblée Nationale only permitted remote debating and voting for COVID-19 related matters. Other countries changed their rules around the proportion of elected members required to be in the chamber for voting (Ireland and Germany) or shifted meetings to a larger premises as was the case in Switzerland (Curtis and Kelly, 2020). White (2020, p. 2) identified the need for this speedy transition in relation to the UK Parliament: the questions around constructing a virtual parliament also go to the heart of our democratic process. At a time of national crisis, it is essential that government can continue to function and that the public maintains its trust in it. Parliament is central to both of these … . The need for parliamentary proceedings to be broadcast live wherever possible and recorded accurately for posterity is more important than ever.

However, the transition to conducting meetings virtually was a challenge for many parliaments and local governments as this practice was largely unfamiliar, as White (2020, p. 1) emphasises in relation to the UK: ‘Parliament does not exactly have a reputation for innovation where digital technology is concerned.’ This issue reflects the situation in other countries too where technology had not previously been used to enable virtual meetings. Within the Swedish context, Blom et al. (2022, p. 2563) highlight the ‘rapid transformation from on-site to on-line meetings that has neither previously been seen as a format nor a means of digital government’. The shift to the virtual world for governance meetings has had an impact on aspects of accessibility and therefore the inclusion and participation for a range of individuals. Research findings from Hibbs (2022, p. 18) indicate that remote meetings have enabled those who may not have been able to attend ‘in person’ meetings to take part virtually, thereby improving the access of women and others to participate in democratic forums such as council meetings. This led her to observe that: remote meetings, therefore, were considered an organisational shift which had improved the experiences of councillors who were negatively affected by previous physical presenteeism of in-person meetings, and councillors interviewed during the pandemic were hopeful that the lifting of lockdowns would mean ‘a different way of working’ and did not want a return to ‘the old norm’.

As indicated in the title of Hibbs’s paper, ‘I was able to take part in the chamber as if I was there’, the accessibility for some women taking up democratic roles was enhanced. In addition, there is evidence that women were both given greater opportunities to contribute in virtual meetings and also more likely to be listened to, particularly where the Chair invited questions and used the ‘mute’ button for any members attempting to talk over others (Farrell et al., 2022). More widely, and facilitated by technology, virtual meetings have also enhanced access for some individuals with disabilities, in particular those with physical needs who may pre-

156  Research handbook on public management and COVID-19 viously have been unable to attend in-person meetings. As argued by McNamara and Stanch (2021, p. 152) ‘as more work is being performed remotely and more meetings are conducted virtually, new opportunities for disabled workers have emerged. Inclusive practices that may have previously been viewed as special requests are now suddenly routine.’ Whilst COVID-19 improved the accessibility of some individuals to governance roles and prompted a more fundamental shift to flexible and remote working, which has delivered equality benefits, it is important to note that the wider context of the pandemic presented a series of challenges for women, including additional caring responsibilities as Casey et al. (2022, p. 1) emphasise: job losses in sectors predominated by women, and a re-inscription if not an exacerbation of the domestic division of labour, alongside increases in rates of violence against women. Early research findings have moreover shown that women, and especially poorer, already marginalized black and minority ethnic women, were disproportionately affected by the pandemic.

This situation may have, in turn, impacted the extent to which women come forward and get involved in governance roles in the first place as networks and contacts may be hard to maintain in the virtual world (Milliken et al., 2020). The shift from the ‘in person’ governance forum to the virtual world also presented challenges to those with limited digital access. Lai and Widmar (2021, p. 458) highlight that the digital divide restricted opportunities for those without access to good IT equipment and the internet, observing ‘a negative correlation between rurality and internet speed at the county level, highlighting the struggle for rural areas [in the US]’. The digital divide was evident in many countries, including India where digital access had implications for those participating in governance roles, as without appropriate technology many individuals were further isolated and unable to access employment (Tandon et al., 2022). Similarly in China, Song et al. (2021) report on the limited digital access of older people, which reduced their participation in public forums providing key information relating to government advice and policy at different stages of the crisis. There is limited evidence to date on whether shifting from ‘in person’ to ‘remote’ virtual meetings impacted on the quality of governance in terms of facilitating greater transparency and widening the participation of the public, given that meetings were often live-streamed and recorded. Findings from Blom et al. (2022) indicate that the switch to virtual meetings had an impact on the length of meetings and the Chair’s speech time with both taking longer. Primarily, this was due to the need for the Chair to ensure members understood procedures relating to making a contribution to the meeting. In contrast, early findings from Farrell et al. (2022) indicate that remote meetings have promoted aspects of governance, particularly transparency and the participation of the public, whilst also enhancing accountability. Farrell et al. (2022) offer a comparison of local government meetings before and during the COVID-19 pandemic, with evidence that virtual meetings also facilitated a wider attendance at meetings, including councillors, officers and invited expert guests due to the convenience of being able to meet online. Given the interesting effects of the shift to online governance, there has been some consternation at the move in England in April 2021 to withdraw the legislation enabling virtual meetings. Local authorities attempted to reverse this High Court decision (Ministry of Housing, Communities and Local Government, 2021) but failed when the Court argued that meetings which are ‘open to the public’ or ‘held in public’ under the Local Government Act

The governance of public services during COVID-19  157 1972 require physical public access and ‘remote access does not do this’. This is in contrast to Wales where the Local Government and Elections Act 2021 allows local councillors to continue to attend meetings remotely. This is part of a wider strategy in Wales to enhance democracy, particularly the participation of a wider range of individuals in politics dating back to the Local Government (Wales) Measure 2011 which permitted remote attendance at local authority meetings. It also reflects a broader encouragement from the Welsh Government in relation to working remotely.

REFLECTING ON COVID-19 AND GOVERNANCE As the United Nations has emphasised in its 2020 COVID report, the pandemic ‘struck at a time of dwindling trust in representative governance’ with confidence in governments already at a low level. Governments were already trying to respond to a series of longstanding accountability and governance challenges, including questions around the calibre, capacity and diversity of governors, underwhelming levels of interest and engagement in decision-making processes by the public, and the lack of meaningful data to hold decision-makers to account. Evidence on whether these have been exacerbated or alleviated by COVID-19 is mixed. In relation to transparency, there is some evidence this has been enhanced and that there is a greater appetite for public engagement due to the regular government briefings outlining and explaining government decisions and providing an evidence base. However, the need for rapid decision making meant governments moving outside of established accountability processes, especially when it came to the awarding of contracts (see Allen, this volume). Meanwhile, the practices of governance also changed with a radical shift to virtual meetings, which in some ways has further democratised the processes of government, potentially widening the potential pool of governors and enabling more equal participation in meetings, with some evidence of improved accessibility, inclusion and participation, in particular for some women and for those with particular disabilities. In contrast, the accessibility of others who may not have access to IT may have been more limited. It is clear from the OECD’s (2022) review of governance practices during COVID-19 that when government departments and agencies worked together, the outcomes were more positive. Here, the OECD draws on evidence from Denmark and France where governments quickly established decision-making arrangements to enable inter-agency collaborations comprising a range of different professional interests to respond to the pandemic. Further, the review highlights that ‘many countries created ad hoc structures that played a co-ordination role on specific topics. The multiplicity of structures meant that there could be an overlap in staff attending each meeting, which improved communication across the different groups/ committees’ (OECD, 2022, p. 12). However, these multiple arrangements also present a danger that responsibilities for policy and the practice of accountability could become blurred and opaque. There is no doubt that the pandemic opened up certain processes of decision-making and shed some light on the nature of evidence-based policymaking. Moving forward, a key question is whether the new governance processes and practices we observed during COVID-19 will be retained or lost. Maintaining an emphasis on transparency in terms of evidence-based decision-making with politicians and experts presenting to the public was a unique feature of the pandemic which clearly enhanced information exchange (Meijer, 2013). Interestingly,

158  Research handbook on public management and COVID-19 the UK government is considering adopting a similar approach in relation to the ‘cost of living crisis’ with a series of public briefings with ministers and economists. It is imperative that governments share their learning from the pandemic and begin to develop robust plans that will enable them to make decisions in a future crisis quickly but through processes that are consistent with standard accountability principles and mechanisms. In particular, there is an urgent need for ministers worldwide to develop protocols that enable them to engage in real-time and appropriate procurement procedures. Finally, the pandemic has accelerated the use of technology in democratic forums and other governance settings. Virtual meetings enabled governance processes to continue to operate through the crisis and seem to have widened participation in decision-making for some individuals while narrowing it for others. The shift to the virtual world does not appear to have impacted negatively on governance itself with greater opportunities for the public to view meetings electronically, therefore enhancing aspects of public participation, accountability and transparency. Adopting technology to enable governance where appropriate to broader the diversity of governors and inclusion within meetings should now be a priority, although it is evident that this aspect is under threat in some areas, such as England. Moving forward, it is likely that forms of ‘hybrid’ meetings which permit both remote and ‘in person’ attendance will be adopted in many countries, thereby retaining some of the opportunities presented by the pandemic.

CONCLUSION COVID-19 is a crisis that threatened all aspects of societal, economic, civic and public life, including the governance of public services. It challenged governments across the world to make instant decisions around the delivery of services and provision of equipment in challenging and uncertain situations and under time constraints. The United Nations has emphasised the importance of post-crisis review, encouraging parliaments across the world to exercise their duty to ‘to hold governments to account for the quality of pandemic response and recovery efforts’ (United Nations Development Programme, 2020, p. 1). Any analysis of pandemic response during the pandemic must incorporate an emphasis on governance given the centrality of the relationship between governance and government performance (Lynn et al., 2000). Our preliminary analysis demonstrates that COVID-19 prompted some governance improvements when aspects of transparency were enhanced through the presentation and questioning of information, which in turn may enable wider citizen participation and engagement in governance (Liston-Heyes and Julliet, 2019). There is now an urgent need for behavioural public management researchers to continue to assess the impact of the provision of this additional scientific and medical information. Detailed evaluation of accountability impacts should also continue as further information on the processes and procedures of awarding of contracts is revealed. Finally, it will be important for governance scholars to continue to track and assess the value of doing governance differently to inform future mechanisms that widen access and inclusion. Research on public governance will be imperative in facilitating a greater understanding of whether pandemic-prompted changes to our governance systems can, and should, sustain into the future.

The governance of public services during COVID-19  159

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PART III SUCCESS, FAILURE, AND IN-BETWEEN: WHAT THE PANDEMIC TAUGHT US

13. Responding to COVID-19 in Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities: the importance of strengths-based public administration, cultural safety and working in genuine partnership Catherine Althaus, Dawn Casey and Lucas de Toca

INTRODUCTION COVID-19 has thrown into stark relief the importance of governments working in partnership with the societies they serve. Citizens have to buy into the strategic direction of public management and the paths that are pursued to confront major crises such as the pandemic. Otherwise, there is either societal revolt or ineffective outcomes. Yet not all societies are monolithic or monocultural. They often feature distinct diversity and a multitude of sub-communities with unique histories, cultures, traditions, values and worldviews. Ignoring this reality risks diminishing public management effectiveness. Embracing it positions public administration with new opportunities. The mainstream western concept of Max Weber’s ‘ideal type’ of bureaucracy is aimed at population-wide, universal policymaking (Althaus 2022). The ‘ideal type’ bureaucracy demands officials to operate according to the ‘special virtue’ of sine ira ac studio, which means they must undertake their activities without anger and passion or without affection or enthusiasm. This detachment, coupled with application of ‘objective’ expertise and universal rules is intended to avoid problems associated with nepotism, the privileging of charisma and single-case reasoning. Such machine-like application of legal-rational rules provides powerful aids to policymaking performed at scale. Behind every act of bureaucratic administration lies a system of rationally debateable ‘reasons’, thereby providing robust accountability and impartiality to support mass democracy. Recognition of societal diversity, however, brings personalistic tendencies into public management processes, showing up deficiencies in the universal policymaking machine of Weberian bureaucracy and revealing how relationality can be essential in how policies are designed, implemented and evaluated (Althaus 2022). Such relationality is needed because it both accommodates the specific needs of particular communities and fits worldviews other than those assumed by mainstream western public management approaches. A perfect case to exemplify the benefits of working collaboratively with specific communities in a relational manner is the self-determination and strengths-based public administration approaches embedded in the COVID response by Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities in Australia working in partnership with mainstream public management institutions. Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples are the oldest continuing culture on the planet with over 75,000 years of connection to the country. This chapter documents the 162

Responding to COVID-19 in Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities  163 achievements of Indigenous communities and the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Community Controlled Health Sector (ACCHS) across Australia in protecting this cohort from COVID-19. A historical first was achieved by authentically working in partnership and with a strengths-based approach to public administration – for the first time ever in modern history an Indigenous population achieved better outcomes in response to a health crisis than non-Indigenous counterparts. What our chapter shows is that strengths-based public administration and self-determination associated with Australia’s COVID-19 response enabled positive outcomes to be achieved with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities. The ‘COVID-effect’ of this case points to the success that is possible when genuine collaboration occurs between mainstream and Indigenous approaches to public management. This empirical evidence of success supports what has long been said in theory and by Indigenous peoples themselves over many decades – focus on our strengths and assets, let us practise control and self-determination and we will thrive (Halseth and Murdock 2020). This testifies to the benefits of a strengths-based approach not only for Indigenous communities, but also for public management more broadly. The relevance of strengths-based policymaking links to contemporary trends calling for a positive approach to public administration (Douglas et al. 2021) in that it moves us away from a focus on failures, blunders and problem framings towards privileging how to learn from success. Yet it is distinct, in that it particularly emphasises the discourse, and associated policymaking and public management action, that shapes how we view the world, the peoples, places and issues that are under scrutiny, and our responses to this. While positive public administration elevates the ‘bright side of governance’ (Douglas et al. 2021, emphasis added), strengths-based policymaking calls for deliberate attention to the inherent assets, resilience, and wisdom of the societies that such governance serves. As such, it brings both sides of the ledger together, progressing the calls of scholars who prompt us to allocate ‘dedicated effort to learning how to learn from “what works” in public policy’ (Douglas et al. 2021, p. 444, emphasis in original). The COVID experience of our case adds applied impetus to an already solid foundation of both practice, and theoretical and empirical scholarship arguing in favour of self-determination (for example Spreitzer and Porath 2014) and strengths-based policymaking (see Rapp and Goscha 2006; Maton et al. 2004) as a desirable approach to how we conceive of policymaking and respond to its challenges and opportunities. This chapter sets out how Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities drew on processes of collective action, coordination, and communication, facilitated through a self-determined health network architecture, to stand as a remarkable success story in COVID‑19 response. As mentioned above, the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander COVID-19 primary care response through 2020 and the first half of 2021 is the first public health response in modern history whereby Indigenous peoples have experienced better health outcomes than the non-Indigenous population. Australia’s COVID-19 response from the beginning of 2020 through to June 2021 achieved the unimaginable, where cases in Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples accounted for only 0.6 per cent of cases reported nationally (Commonwealth of Australia, Department of Health 2021). In Australia, since the start of the pandemic to 31 July 2022, the aged standardised COVID-19 case rate among Aboriginal and Torres people was 1.1 times the rate observed among non-Indigenous people. This compares with United States data, for example, which shows that within American Indian (AI) and Alaska Native (AN) populations, case numbers

164  Research handbook on public management and COVID-19 are 1.5 times higher than the general population (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention 2022). Alaska data (Ward et al. 2022) is worse, indicating rate ratios for AI and AN people living in Alaska (compared with White people) were 2.2 for age-adjusted cases, 2.7 for hospitalisation and 2.9 for mortality rates. We explore how Australian success in this crisis response is attributable to self-determination and strengths-based public administration and can be extended to other areas of policies and programs supporting Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples in non-crisis public management environments. The chapter also explores lessons that can improve wider practices and concepts of public management into the future such as: ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ●

early action and leadership; genuine co-design and partnership and using governance effectively; sector-led engagement; embedding Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander perspectives into the mainstream response; supporting workforce capacity; developing and using communications which are effective, widespread and culturally appropriate communications; data; and addressing logistical challenges.

SELF-DETERMINATION AND STRENGTHS-BASED PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION Indigenous peoples have long argued the case of self-determination as the preferred public administration mode for their lives. This is supported by the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples (United Nations General Assembly 2007), which in turn is a reflection of the Charter of the United Nations (United Nations 1945), the International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights (United Nations General Assembly 1966b) and the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights (United Nations General Assembly 1966a) and the Vienna Declaration and Programme of Action (United Nations General Assembly 1993). Self-determination affirms the right of all peoples to freely determine their own political status and pursue their economic, social and cultural development. Cornell (2005, p. 207) makes it clear from United States empirical evidence that the self-determination of which we speak must embed at least three realities to be fulsome, and not just rhetoric. These factors include: (a) sovereignty or self-rule, (ii) capable governing institutions; (iii) a congruence between formal governance institutions and indigenous political culture. Thus, self-determination fully realised acknowledges the need to cement and align resourcing and capacities with authority, worldviews and cultural traditions. Without this, self-determination is a hollow claim. As such, until full self-determination takes place and the harms of past injustices against self-determination are rectified, Indigenous peoples are forced to operate through and along pathways towards self-determination. One of the key elements that ought to structure such pathways is the principle of strengths-based public administration, a deliberate ‘conceptual framework for approaching

Responding to COVID-19 in Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities  165 development and intervention’ (Fogarty et al. 2018, p. viii) that counters implicit and explicit deficit narratives that paint particular peoples and issues as ‘problems’. The infiltration of deficit into policy design and public management cannot be underestimated. When strength is foregrounded, a flip can occur which can open up new possibilities, privilege new data, and deliver otherwise unforeseen improvements and success. Such was the case with Indigenous communities in Australia and the COVID-19 response.

INDIGENOUS COMMUNITIES AND COVID-19 Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, and people living in remote communities, are priority population groups for COVID-19 vaccination because they are at greater risk from COVID-19. This is due to factors such as higher rates of chronic health conditions, some cases of crowded living conditions, and potential difficulties accessing health care services (AIHW 2022). The effective management of COVID-19 in Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander populations is primarily due to Australian public management cultivating genuine partnerships with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples and communities to deliver culturally safe primary care services. The story of this success is due to public management in Australia delivering on what Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people and their communities have been asking for decades: recognition of Indigenous peoples’ self-determination; facilitation of bespoke culturally safe communication materials and public relations resources; autonomy to make their own decisions; and autonomy to pursue their own responses and policies. Historical First in Success with the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander COVID-19 Primary Care Response On 21 January 2020, the Australian Government added COVID-19 as a Listed Human Disease under the Commonwealth Biosecurity Act 2015 (the Act), enabling the use of enhanced biosecurity measures to protect Australians from COVID-19. Shortly after, on 23 January 2020, Australia recorded its first case and numbers were slowly growing. A month later, by 22 February 2020, 22 cases had been notified nationally. Of these cases, 15 were linked to travel from Hubei province prior to 1 February 2020 and the remaining seven were returning passengers from the Diamond Princess Cruise ship (Commonwealth of Australia, Department of Health 2020). By 27 February 2020, the Prime Minister announced the activation of the Australian Health Sector Emergency Response Plan for Novel Coronavirus. Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander leaders and communities were making early commentary on the need for action, protection and preparedness for COVID-19 at the start of 2020. For example, the National Aboriginal Community Controlled Health Organisation (NACCHO), together with sector experts, developed recommendations for primary health care teams to support COVID-19 prevention and management in Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities (NACCHO 2020). Many of NACCHO’s state and territory peak affiliate members had developed pandemic plans after the H1N1 influenza pandemic in 2009–10 and called on governments to act. The Indigenous primary care sector led the way in delivering communications and public health messaging, often using well-known role models in Aboriginal Community Controlled Health Services (ACCHS).

166  Research handbook on public management and COVID-19 On 5 March 2020, the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Advisory Group on COVID-19 (the Advisory Group) was established to provide culturally appropriate advice to the Australian Government on health issues related to COVID-19. The Advisory Group is discussed in more detail below. The Advisory Group supported early engagement, shared decision making and genuine partnerships between NACCHO, ACCHS and local, state and federal government, and this was critical to Australia’s response. The ACCHS sector was motivated, with established relationships and services to influence and inform the response to COVID-19 in communities. On 8 June 2021, the Australian Government launched the National COVID Vaccine Taskforce, known as Operation COVID Shield (the Taskforce), to ensure efficient and effective distribution and delivery of, and access to, COVID-19 vaccines for all Australians.

SETTING THE FOUNDATIONS: THE ABORIGINAL AND TORRES STRAIT ISLANDER PRIMARY HEALTH CARE SYSTEM PRIOR TO COVID-19 The ACCHS Sector ACCHS support local Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities to tailor primary health care services to support their physical, social, emotional, and cultural wellbeing (NACCHO n.d.). The first ACCHS was established in Redfern, Sydney over 50 years ago in 1971 – the same year that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples were first included in the Australian census (NACCHO n.d.). There are now over 144 ACCHS located across Australia (NACCHO n.d.), which are led by NACCHO. Roughly 50 per cent of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people attend an ACCHS for their primary health care needs. This existing network of culturally safe primary care services was fundamental in establishing and facilitating the delivery of the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander COVID-19 vaccine program. When COVID-19 vaccines became available in Australia in 2021, the Taskforce worked in collaboration with NACCHO and ACCHS to distribute vaccine doses to ACCHS clinics across the country. The Taskforce supported clinics with training to administer vaccines to their local communities and also developed communication materials and public relations messages for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people and communities about what COVID-19 is and why the COVID-19 vaccine is important. Localised approaches, including cross-government work between the National Indigenous Australians Agency, and state and territory governments, were used to meet individual community needs and address vaccine hesitancy issues. Approximately 50 per cent of adult Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people have at least one chronic health condition (ABS 2019), thus rendering them particularly susceptible to the worst outcomes of COVID-19. However, during the initial phase of the pandemic, up to June 2021, the age standardised case rate among Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people (26.7 per 100,000 population) was less than one quarter of the rate observed in the non-Indigenous population (118.1 per 100,000 population). This result has been made possible through ensuring critical access to data in a timely manner. ACCHS played a central role in COVID primary health care response, including community preparedness, offering tests,

Responding to COVID-19 in Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities  167 supporting people with COVID to isolate, and supporting social and emotional wellbeing. In 2021, the Advisory Group recommended that self-identification at the point of care phase was the preferred way to ascertain Indigenous status where Indigenous status was relevant. This advice was formally incorporated into guidance for all health providers, including ACCHS. In addition, contact tracing for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Island people assisted in minimising the risk of contracting COVID-19. ACCHS have been critical in facilitating contact tracing, with health workers within ACCHS being invaluable with regards to their links to community, on-the-ground knowledge and provision of culturally safe care. The crucial role played by ACCHS rests on the trust it engenders with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples. Such activities could not be performed by government because of well-placed historical distrust in assimilation and eradication policies undertaken by colonial institutions, which informs many Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander perceptions and experiences of the Australian government. Moreover, relying on ACCHS conforms with principles of Indigenous data sovereignty, which stipulate that Indigenous peoples should govern and control the collection, application and value of data that is created with or about themselves (Kukatai and Taylor 2016; Walter et al. 2020).

RESPONDING TO COVID-19 IN RURAL AND REMOTE COMMUNITIES The 2009 outbreak of the H1N1 flu affected rural and remote Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities – particularly those in Top End Northern Territory – to a greater extent than the general population (Flint et al. 2010). Lessons learnt from managing the impact of this virus indicated that preventative measures needed to be taken to protect this population from COVID-19. Point of Care Testing Point of Care Testing (PoCT) has been a key contributing factor to the success of the COVID‑19 response. Polymerase chain reaction (PCR) PoCT is ‘a form of testing in which the analysis is performed where the health care is provided close to or near the patient’ (Australian Government Department of Health and Aged Care 2013). PoCT was initially introduced to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities through the Test Treat and Go (TTANGO) program. TTANGO was implemented in 2011 to facilitate accessible testing to address high rates of sexually transmitted infections (STIs) in Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities (TTANGO2 2021). The program utilised 33 testing machines placed in remote locations around the country to enable accessible, on-the-spot testing for STIs. Four tests can be completed at once and each test takes 45 minutes. On 16 April 2021, a rapid COVID-19 PoCT program was announced and established using the resources and program insights from the existing TTANGO program. All machines were repurposed for COVID-19 testing and an additional 50 were initially acquired by the Government for the program. The National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Advisory Group on COVID-19 (the Advisory Group) was consulted to determine where newly acquired machines would be placed, based on community need. The first test took place on 21 May

168  Research handbook on public management and COVID-19 2021 and there are currently 100 PoCT sites located around the country, plus additional machines operated by state and territory governments. Being able to access COVID-19 test results ‘on-the-spot’ means that people living in remote locations, with limited access to primary care, only need to make one trip to receive care and will obtain their COVID-19 test results prior to returning to their household. If testing positive, the appropriate care/quarantine response can be enacted. This minimises the likelihood that individuals who test positive will spread the virus to the other people living in their household, particularly if they are experiencing overcrowded living conditions. If a positive test occurs, individuals operating the PoCT tests have been trained to call a helpline to run through results and determine next steps, which may include retesting and/ or removing the positive case from the community. Through 2020 and most of 2021 when Australia’s regional and remote communities largely had zero, or very few COVID cases, PoCT provided a critical platform for early detection and action, enabling a quick public health response. It was agreed between government and the peak Aboriginal land councils/health organisations that best practice would be for individuals who received a positive COVID-19 test to be immediately isolated from their community to reduce the likelihood of spreading the virus. This would be achieved by working in partnership with the Royal Flying Doctor Service (RFDS) and local community to fly affected individuals out of their community to a nominated quarantine facility. Remote community modelling provided information to support this approach and facilitate community conversation and planning in advance of cases, so that such an approach would not be unexpected if needed. Royal Flying Doctor Service (RFDS) For over 90 years, the RFDS has been providing medical services to people living in rural and remote communities who cannot access primary care services (RFDS n.d.). The Commonwealth government, in partnership with the health sector and states and territories, engaged with the RFDS to expand its contractual arrangement to assist with COVID testing and swab transfer, patient transfer and early patient evacuation, and vaccine administration services for remote and hard-to-reach communities that do not have access to a primary care provider or require additional workforce support and assistance. With 23 aero-bases across the country, and its regular servicing of rural and remote areas, the RFDS has been well placed to provide vaccine administration to all communities in Australia, including sovereign waters, creating opportunities for whole-of-community vaccinations and vaccine equity. Since the first vaccination clinic, run from 19 May 2021 to 17 June 2022, the RFDS has administered over 77,000 COVID-19 vaccinations in remote areas across Australia.

WHY HAS THE ABORIGINAL AND TORRES STRAIT ISLANDER COVID-19 PRIMARY CARE RESPONSE BEEN SUCCESSFUL? The low rate of cases among Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people, in comparison with other Indigenous populations globally, can be attributed to the swift and effective response led by the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander health sector with all levels of Government. Four central factors can be credited for the efficacy of this response. These are: commitment to working in accordance with the Principles of the National Agreement on Closing the Gap,

Responding to COVID-19 in Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities  169 working in genuine partnership with the ACCHS sector and communities, targeted communications, and efforts made to understand and tailor the response to be culturally safe. National Agreement on Closing the Gap On 22 March 2019, the historic Partnership Agreement on Closing the Gap 2019–2029 (the Agreement) between all Australian Governments, the Coalition of Peaks (a representative body of over 70 Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander community-controlled peak organisations and members, directly accountable to their communities) and the Australian Local Government Association (ALGA), was signed (Closing the Gap in Partnership, 2020). The Agreement is a driving force in informing effective and culturally safe programs and policies involving Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people. All elements of the Australian Government’s Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander health response to COVID-19, including the establishment of the Advisory Group, were developed in accordance with the Principles of the National Agreement on Closing the Gap, which include the following: ● ● ● ●

shared decision-making; co-design; elevating the community-controlled sector; and prioritising Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples.

National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Advisory Group on COVID-19 Of central importance to the efficacy of the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander primary care response to COVID-19 has been the government’s dedication to Closing the Gap by working in genuine partnership with the ACCHS sector and Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities. The driving force in enabling this collaboration is the Advisory Group. Advisory Group members include NACCHO, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communicable and infectious disease experts, state and territory representatives, Public Health Medical Officers from state and territory ACCHS, sector representatives from ACCHS, and two key Commonwealth departments: the Department of Health and Aged Care and the National Indigenous Australians Agency. This membership ensures the Advisory Group is sector-driven, prioritises Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander perspectives and utilises the leadership and expertise required. The Advisory Group is co-chaired by the Department of Health and Aged Care and NACCHO. A key component of the Advisory Group’s work was to develop and deliver a Management Plan for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Populations (Management Plan) and provide advice on implementation of the Australian Health Sector Emergency Response Plan for Novel Coronavirus for Indigenous Australians. When drafting the Management Plan and preparing the COVID-19 response, it was important to consider how Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples intersect with other populations and settings. This includes but is not limited to people living with a disability, aged care, homeless populations and the LGBTIQ+ community. The Management Plan drew on these population settings in the planning for COVID-19 response. In future responses, we should always consider what other population

170  Research handbook on public management and COVID-19 groups Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people interact with and how to tailor a culturally appropriate response in these contexts. The need for a specific plan for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people was recognised early. In developing the Management Plan, the Taskforce leaned heavily on the expertise and technical guidance of the Communicable Diseases Network Australia representatives, and the Indigenous health sector. Key to this was the consideration of other unique population settings, such as remote communities, detention centres, and hostels and boarding schools, where many Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people are represented. The Management Plan was critical in ensuring funding and policy guidance has been directed and beneficial to health services on the ground. In reflecting on the development of the plan and other guidance, the Advisory Group recognised the need for an equitable focus on planning in remote, rural and urban settings. The Advisory Group has been critical in bringing together Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people and all levels of government to advise on the implementation of the COVID-19 response as it relates to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people. It is a key mechanism through which Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander voices and perspectives are heard at key government forums, including the Australian Health Protection Principal Committee and National Cabinet. Communications National COVID-19 campaign advertising materials are adapted for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people and communities across urban, regional, remote and very remote Australia. Early campaigns included the Protect Yourself and For All of Us campaigns. More recently, the Department of Health and Aged Care released the Boost and Make Wintertime the Best Time campaigns. A First Nations-owned public relations company was engaged to develop targeted communication materials for the ACCHS sector and communities. These materials prioritise remote communities and Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander languages (translated to 15 languages), and all communication products and resources are publicly available from the Australian Government Department of Health and Aged Care website. The Advisory Group’s Communication Working Group also supports the development of COVID-19 communication materials and public relations messages by reviewing, guiding and providing cultural insights and recommendations on campaign products, including radio and television scripts and social media animations. Cultural Safety Cultural safety is a crucial component of making health care services accessible to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people. According to the Cultural Respect Framework, a culturally safe health care system ‘respects Indigenous cultural values, strengths and differences, and also addresses racism and inequity’ (AIHW 2021). This means taking a holistic approach to the health and wellbeing of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples, rather than focusing only on physical health. The Taskforce, in partnership with the ACHHS, recognises the importance of providing culturally safe options to access COVID-19 vaccines.

Responding to COVID-19 in Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities  171 One of the most important lessons from the COVID-19 pandemic was the critical need to consider cultural, social and emotional wellbeing impacts. These aspects were considered as an aftermath to the social distancing and travel restrictions as part of Australia’s response. Particularly in Victoria, which experienced a long period of 262 days in lockdown, there has been a great impact on Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples’ emotional and social wellbeing, including being isolated from family and community. In future pandemic responses, it would be wise to consider mental health support and impacts in the very beginning phases of preparedness. The Taskforce considered cultural impacts of COVID-19 measures by establishing a Cultural Working Group that developed guiding principles for how culture should be at the forefront of any health decisions impacting Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander people and communities. This considered the impact of sorry business (cultural practices that occur around someone’s death), where funeral numbers were restricted, and limitations put in place for ceremonial gatherings, including family and kinship cultural responsibilities. Considering Social and Environmental Factors Research demonstrates associations between an individual’s social and economic status and their health. For example, low levels of education and literacy are linked to low income and poor health status and affect the capacity of people to use health information; poverty reduces access to health care services and medicines; overcrowded and run-down housing associated with poverty contributes to the spread of communicable disease; and smoking and high-risk behaviour is associated with lower socio-economic status (Australian Government Department of Health and Aged Care 2013). Infrastructure has also been highlighted as a critical need in a pandemic response. When services had to divert provision to telehealth through telephone or videoconferencing mechanisms, it was infrastructure that often limited the speed of transition. This is relevant not only for remote Australia, but also for urban locations where bandwidth and family access to internet or phone was also limited. However, once access to telehealth was provided, there was a rapid uptake, demonstrating that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander health services can undertake this level of service provision, which can facilitate access to specialists over the longer-term. Later in the pandemic response, QR check-in codes, websites to apply for broader travel permits, and apps for registering the results of Rapid Antigen Tests all also presumed a level of access to IT and comfort operating these platforms in English. To ensure an effective health response, especially in a pandemic, recognition of the social determinants of health, health infrastructure and continuity of other health care such as chronic disease is essential.

A NEW NORMAL FOR ABORIGINAL AND TORRES STRAIT ISLANDER PRIMARY CARE SYSTEMS There is no question that COVID-19 has imparted many lessons about what constitutes effective, culturally safe primary care and it is hoped that lessons learnt will be extended to non-crisis public management. Australia has demonstrated that an effective public health response can be achieved with genuine partnership and when the voices of Aboriginal

172  Research handbook on public management and COVID-19 and Torres Strait Islander peoples and health experts are prioritised, in this case led by the Advisory Group. A selection of the key lessons learnt thus far are detailed below. It’s Not Over Yet: Lessons Learnt in Managing Primary Care Policies and Programs for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Peoples and Communities While the Australian Government response to COVID-19 provided a range of measures and activities in response to known issues and challenges, several ongoing learnings and processes remain points for consideration. All stakeholders should continue to discuss early, openly and learn from the following: ● Surge resourcing across multiple dimensions, including increased testing, workforce boosting at all levels, and aeromedical retrieval capability to extract positive or suspect cases, where appropriate. A key challenge has been workforce capacity shortages and mobility issues, such as border restrictions in remote and regional Australia. ● Genuine co-design and partnership is critical across all levels of government. Forums that support engagement and communication across all sectors and jurisdictions, and which include government agencies such as the Department of Health and Aged Care, the Department of Education, Skills and Employment, Services Australia, and the National Indigenous Australians Agency, provided important intel. For example: ● arranging for safe travel of boarding school students to and from remote communities; and ● arranging for prisons to work with ACCHS to cook and freeze food to provide to remote communities in lockdown. ● Embedding the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander health sector in the response is essential not only for providing guidance, but in taking action. For example, ACCHS: ● were utilised to undertake culturally safe contact tracing and provide support for positive cases and those in quarantine or isolation; and ● were prioritised for access to vaccines so they didn’t have to ‘compete’ with other primary care and state clinics for vaccine doses. ● The need for housing, food and pharmacy security was highlighted in the early days of the response with border closures and concerns regarding support for people isolating safely and effectively at home. ● Very local responses were effective at increasing vaccination uptake, including via door-to-door vaccinations, and ACCHS supporting vaccination ‘hubs’ in surrounding communities to avoid travel in/out of the outbreak community. ● The need for effective, widespread and culturally appropriate communications materials was recognised from the start. Communication materials need to support locally developed content, diversity of expert voices, familiar faces and locations. Geotargeted social media messaging in the 2021–2022 outbreak areas was used to remind people to get tested, isolate, and what the symptoms of COVID-19 are. ● Ensuring the most vulnerable people are looked after by supporting other health care needs, including for people with disability, mental health concerns, and alcohol and other drug dependencies.

Responding to COVID-19 in Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities  173

WHERE TO FROM HERE FOR SELF-DETERMINATION AND STRENGTHS-BASED PUBLIC MANAGEMENT BASED ON COVID-19 SUCCESS? This chapter presented the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander COVID-19 primary care response case as an unprecedented example of success featuring lessons not only for future interactions between mainstream public management processes and institutions with Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities, but also for broader public management. Key to the success was movement along self-determination pathways by embracing and building on strengths-based public management. While there is still a long way to go to achieve the fullness of self-determination as envisioned by Cornell (2005), this health success story presents a significant empirical case in support of strengths-based initiatives including turning to, and working in genuine partnership with Aboriginal community-controlled organisations as well as embedding cultural safety, regular and Aboriginal-led communications, and thoughtful consideration of social, economic and environmental determinants of health. While strong evidence exists theoretically and practically for strengths-based public administration and self-determination, the COVID effect of this case acts like a ‘shot in the arm’ to boost this evidence into mainstream accepted public management circles. The fact that such success took place at scale across the entirety of the country makes the case hard to refute. Authors such as Fforde et al. (2013) show how discourse directly links to outcomes. While we have had to continue using the terminology of ‘Closing the Gap’ in this chapter because it remains the used title of a key policy position within Australia, such terminology is often seen as still mired in a deficit approach. The power of shifting away from deficit to strength moves public management as it pertains to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples away from blame and shame towards aspiration and hope. Success breeds success and the COVID-19 response that Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples achieved shifts the dial not only on what is possible but what can no longer be held as an excuse. This is a proud moment in Australian public management history, one achieved through the leadership of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples coupled with genuine partnership and authentic privileging of Indigenous worldviews. And all done in the face of Indigenous peoples lacking a national representative body and the prolonged continuation of over 200 years of ‘unfinished business’ (Elder 2017). It provides impetus, if Australian public management takes notice and acts with integrity, to move further towards self-determination and strengths-based policymaking, not only because it’s the right thing to do but because it works.

REFERENCES Althaus, C. (2022). Complementary bureaucracy: Reimagining Weberian impersonalism with indigenous relationality. Perspectives on Public Management and Governance, 5(2), 135–150. Australian Bureau of Statistics. (2019, December 11). National Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Health Survey. Retrieved from: https://​www​.abs​.gov​.au/​statistics/​people/​aboriginal​-and​-torres​-strait​ -islander​-peoples/​national​-aboriginal​-and​-torres​-strait​-islander​-health​-survey/​latest​-release Australian Government Department of Health and Aged Care. (2013, 12 May). Review: Policies, Procedures and Guidelines for Point-of-care Testing. Retrieved from: www1​.health​.gov​.au/​internet/​ publications/​publishing​.nsf/​Content/​qupp​-review

174  Research handbook on public management and COVID-19 AIHW (Australian Institute of Health and Welfare). (2021, April 30). Cultural Safety in Health Care for Indigenous Australians: Monitoring Framework. Retrieved from: https://​www​.aihw​.gov​.au/​getmedia/​ 49704f50​-e57f​-403b​-9fb3​-0757f2249a54/​Archived​_Cultural​-safety​-web​-report​-pdf​.pdf​.aspx AIHW (Australian Institute of Health and Welfare). (2022, July 7). Indigenous Health and Wellbeing. Retrieved from: https://​www​.aihw​.gov​.au/​reports/​australias​-health/​indigenous​-health​-and​-wellbeing Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC). (2022). Risk for COVID-19 infection, hospitalization, and death by race, ethnicity. Retrieved from: https://​www​.cdc​.gov/​coronavirus/​2019​-ncov/​covid​ -data/​investigations​-discovery/​hospitalization​-death​-by​-race​-ethnicity​.html Closing the Gap in Partnership. (2020, July). National Agreement on Closing the Gap. Retrieved from: www​.closingthegap​.gov​.au/​national​-agreement Commonwealth of Australia, Department of Health. (2020). Communicable Diseases Intelligence. COVID-19, Australia: Epidemiology Report 4. Retrieved from: https://​www1​.health​.gov​.au/​internet/​ main/​publishing​.nsf/​Content/​C50​CAE02452A4​8A7CA25873​20081F7BF/​$File/​covid​_19​_australia​ _epi​_report​_4​_reporting​_week​_ending​_1900​_aedt​_22​_feb​_2020​.pdf Commonwealth of Australia, Department of Health. (2021). Communicable diseases intelligence. COVID-19 Australia: Epidemiology Report 45. Retrieved from: https://​www1​.health​.gov​.au/​internet/​ main/​publishing​.nsf/​Content/​C50​CAE02452A4​8A7CA25873​20081F7BF/​$File/​covid​_19​_australia​ _epidemiology​_report​_45​_reporting​_period​_ending​_4​_july​_2021​_reporting​_period​_ending​_4​_july​ _2021​.pdf Cornell, S. (2005). Indigenous peoples, poverty, and self-determination in Australia, New Zealand, Canada and the United States. In R. Eversole, J.-A. McNeish, A. D. Cimadamore (eds), Indigenous Peoples and Poverty: An International Perspective. London: Zed Books, 199–225. Douglas, S., Schillemans, T., ‘t Hart, P., Ansell, C., Bøgh Andersen, L., Flinders, M., Head, B., Moynihan, D., Nabatchi, T., O’Flynn, J., Peters, B.G., Raadschelders, J.S., Alessandra, S.E., & Torfing, J. (2021). Rising to Ostrom’s challenge: An invitation to walk on the bright side of public governance and public service. Policy Design and Practice, 4(4), 441–451. Elder, C. (2017). Unfinished business in (post) reconciliation Australia. Australian Humanities Review, 61(May), 74–93. Fforde, C., Bamblett, L., Lovett, R., Gorringe, S., and Fogarty, B. (2013). Discourse, deficit, and identity: Aboriginality, the race paradigm and the language of representation in contemporary Australia. Media International Australia, 149(November), 162–173. Flint, S.M., Davis, J.S., Su, J-Y, Oliver-Landry, E.P. Rogers, B.A., Goldstein, A., Thomas, J.H., Parameswaran, U., Bigham, C., Freeman, K., Goldrick, P. and Tong, S.Y.C. (2010). Disproportionate impact of pandemic (H1N1) 2009 influenza on Indigenous people in the Top End of Australia’s Northern Territory. Medical Journal of Australia, 192(10), 617–622. Fogarty, W., Lovell, M., Langenberg, J., and Heron, M.-J. (2018). Deficit Discourse and Strengths-based Approaches. Changing the Narrative of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Health and Wellbeing. Melbourne: The Lowitja Institute (in conjunction with National Centre for Indigenous Studies, Australian National University). Halseth, R. and Murdock, L. (2020). Supporting Indigenous Self-determination in Health: Lessons Learned from a Review of Best Practices in Health Governance in Canada and Internationally. Prince George British Columbia: National Collaborating Centre for Indigenous Health. Kukatai, T. and Taylor, J. (Eds). (2016). Indigenous Data Sovereignty: Towards an Agenda. Centre for Aboriginal Economic Policy Research College of Arts and Social Sciences Research Monograph No. 38. Canberra: Australian National University Press. Maton, K.I., Dogden, D.W., Leadbeater, B.J., Sandler, I., Schellenbach, C.J., and Solarz, A.L. (2004). Strengths-based research and policy: An introduction. In K.I. Maton, C.J. Schellenbach, B.J. Leadbeater, and A. L. Solarz (Eds), Investing in Children, Youth, Families, and Communities: Strengths-based Research and Policy. Washington, DC: American Psychological Association, 3–12. National Aboriginal Community Controlled Health Organisation (NACCHO). (2020). Supporting Prevention and Management of COVID-19 for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander People. 26 May. Retrieved from: https://​www​.naccho​.org​.au/​supporting​-prevention​-and​-management​-of​-covid​-19​-for​ -aboriginal​-and​-torres​-strait​-islander​-people/​

Responding to COVID-19 in Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities  175 National Aboriginal Community Controlled Health Organisation (NACCHO). (n.d.). Aboriginal Community Controlled Health Organisations (ACCHOs). Retrieved from: www​.naccho​.org​.au/​ acchos Rapp, C.A. and Goscha, R.J. (2006). The Strengths Model Case Management with Psychiatric Disabilities. 2nd Edition. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Royal Flying Doctor Service (RFDS). (n.d). History. Retrieved from: www​.flyingdoctor​.org​.au/​about​ -the​-rfds/​history/​ Spreitzer, G.M. and Porath, C. (2014). Self-determination as a nutriment for thriving: Building an integrative model of human growth at work. In M. Gagné (Ed.), The Oxford Handbook of Work Engagement, Motivation, and Self-Determination Theory. Oxford: Oxford University Press. TTANGO2. (2021). About the Program. Retrieved from: www​.ttango​.com​.au/​about​-ttango​-2/​ background United Nations. (1945). Charter of the United Nations. 24 October. 1 UNTS XVI. United Nations General Assembly. (1966a). International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights. United Nations Treaty Series, vol. 999, p. 171. Adopted 16 December. United Nations General Assembly. (1966b). International Covenant on Economic, Social and Cultural Rights. United Nations Treaty Series, vol. 993, p. 3. Adopted 16 December. United Nations General Assembly. (1993). Vienna Declaration and Programme of Action. 12 July. A/ CONF.157/23 United Nations General Assembly (2007). United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples. 61/295. Resolution [without reference to a Main Committee (A/61/L.67 and Add.1). Adopted 13 September. Walter, M., Lovett, R., Maher, B., Williamson, B., Prehn, J., Bodkin-Andrews, G., and Lee, V. (2020). Indigenous data sovereignty in the era of big data and open data. Australian Journal of Social Issues, 56(2), 143–156. Ward, L.A., Black, K.P., Britton, C.L., Tompkins, M.L., and Provost, E.M. (2022). COVID-19 cases, hospitalizations, and deaths among American Indian or Alaska native persons – Alaska, 2020–2021. Morbidity and Mortality Weekly Report, 71, 730–733.

14. A review of COVID-19 organisational recovery in a UK metropolitan police force utilising a complexity theory framework Phil Davies

INTRODUCTION The police response to the COVID-19 pandemic was and continues to be a complex and multifaceted operation. In the United Kingdom, as elsewhere across the globe, in 2020 and 2021 hardworking and dedicated public servants were pulled from their roles and operated outside of their comfort zones to support a rapidly evolving and changing scenario. The findings of this study illustrate an environment that is readily relatable to the ontology of complexity theory that deals with the study of complex, dynamic, non-linear, self-organising and emergent open systems. The policing system in this case transformed itself through the work of leaders and their responsibilities in responding to the new environment. In this chapter, a case study is explored in the management of the pandemic by the police, through the lens of complexity theory. The next section describes complexity science as currently interpreted by thinkers in social sciences and public administration research. The subsequent section identifies a bridge between the theoretical and the methodological using mathematical modelling. The fourth section summarises the fieldwork and its translation into models, prior to a final section that provides discussion and conclusion. The focus of this chapter is the principle of non-linearity and the fundamental conceptual difficulties in the concept of ‘planning’ in any open system, particularly when an extreme event occurs. The interconnectivity of human networks resolved the contingency issues, not the plans themselves, and providing a structured way of assessing and including this in future business planning is a novel public management concept worthy of further work. The pandemic provided a macabre but opportune situation to advance understanding of catalytic change in organisations beyond metaphorical use of complexity concepts, which is often the limits of its use in public administration thinking (Burnes, 2005; Cairney and Geyer, 2017; Castelnovo and Sorrentino, 2018). This was due to the required interaction at multiple organisational levels with people and functions to an extent not undertaken prior to COVID-19. The chapter concludes with a call for the operationalisation of complexity theory in public management, starting with contingency planning, but with the potential for all manner of business planning activities.

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COVID-19 organisational recovery in a UK metropolitan police force  177

USE OF COMPLEXITY SCIENCE IN ORGANISATIONAL MANAGEMENT THEORY There is no unified definition of complexity theory within the multi-disciplinary landscape that has adopted it as an ontology. Complexity is a philosophy of science ‘derived from the natural sciences concerned with phenomena and events that cannot be explained by traditional positivistic scientific methods’ (Haynes, 2008 p. 402). A complex system has the following descriptors (among many published variations and additions), as summarised by Snowden and Boone (2007): ● It involves large numbers of interacting elements. ● The interactions are nonlinear, and minor changes can produce disproportionately major consequences. ● The system is dynamic, the whole is greater than the sum of its parts, and solutions can’t be imposed; rather, they arise from the circumstances. ● The system has a history, and the past is integrated with the present; the elements evolve with one another and with the environment; and evolution is irreversible. ● Unlike in ordered systems (where the system constrains the agents), or chaotic systems (where there are no constraints), in a complex system the agents and the system constrain one another, especially over time. There are four characteristics of a complex system that are directly relevant to this case study, introduced by way of further explanation to the broad ontological framework: self-organisation, non-linearity, ‘edge of chaos’ dynamics, and emergent properties. In this context, self-organisation refers to the agents in the system reorganising themselves without top-down policy intervention (bottom-up reaction). Non-linearity is a succinct description of the scenario as it played out. Changes in the spread of the disease and the Government and citizen response to it did not follow a predictable linear path. ‘Edge of chaos’ is a term frequently referred to by complexity authors relating to a point far-from-equilibrium where new system states can be formed, such as in the dynamic creation of operational response that permanently altered relations with public health and the police hitherto called for but not realised; and emergent properties such as the higher level ‘learning’ platforms nationally developed through interactions of agencies at a lower more tactical level. Complexity theory within public management is becoming a recognised field, but without current consensus about the contribution the approach can make to theory and practice (Cilliers, 1998; Richardson and Cilliers, 2001; Sawyer, 2005; Miller and Page, 2007; Morçöl, 2012). Policing is yet to adopt complexity theory as a framework for policy and organisational management, even though it displays most of the characteristics of a complex system, for example in this case study in relation to the ability of a system to reconfigure itself within a changing environment. This chapter seeks to contribute to this debate and offer an example of a promising route to engage with management practitioners within policing in the case of recovery work for COVID-19. A selection of senior practitioners engaged with pandemic response found that their contingency plans did not survive contact with their operations, and the development of new functional networks was vital to responding to the non-linear and chaotic dynamics of the pandemic (see also Fenton-O’Creevy et al., this volume, for a discussion of the limitations of contingency planning in policing).

178  Research handbook on public management and COVID-19 General complexity as an ontology put forward by Byrne and Callaghan (2014) requires that one tries to comprehend the relations between the whole and the parts, substituting reductionism with a realist principle that uses both qualitative and quantitative data in supporting management models. Prigogine and Stengers (1984), Mitleton-Kelly (2006), Morçöl (2012) and Johnson (2013) take a pluralist phenomenological approach to complexity. By examining the local context, networks and relationships of human systems, insight into the macro properties of the system can be gained. The system that is examined here, policing, is not in equilibrium, and this was never more so than during the UK’s response to COVID-19. Uncovering Hypernetworks In complexity science, connections matter (Barabási, 2014). If you do not understand the relationship between things, you are less likely to successfully model the behaviour of the system. Johnson (1995b, 2013) provides a mathematical method for modelling that provides a useful tool for insight on the system. In mathematics, a vertex is a point or a node, which when connected to other vertices becomes a simplex if the vertices have a relational connection. Where the relations between each connected vertex are explicit and important, that simplex is referred to as a hypersimplex. Hypersimplices linked together form a hypernetwork (Figure 14.1). For our purposes, the algebraic content is less important than the aid to modelling narrative. The qualitative aspects of human systems can be represented as a ‘backcloth’ (structure) of hypersimplices, with activity in the system represented as ‘traffic’ along it (Johnson, 1995a). If the traffic or backcloth changes, the other is impacted.

Figure 14.1

The construction of a hypernetwork

Uncovering these relationships can be challenging, and qualitative data is an essential source of information for constructing useful hypersimplex models of human activity. In the study reported on in this chapter, semi-structured interviews were undertaken with senior police officers involved in the response,1 either directly as part of the national team, or as members of Greater Manchester Police in the organisation’s interactions with Operation Talla (described below). Grounded Theory as established by Glaser and Strauss (1967), and described in Birks and Mills (2015), provides an effective process for explicating embedded processes within interview accounts that can be coded and modelled using hypersimplices. Social phenomena are recognised as complex and therefore difficult to understand. A quantitative investigation alone perpetuates a reductionist approach to social sciences that is more likely to miss the context that influences the cause and effect on these phenomena (Haynes, 2008). A purely constructionist or interpretative approach falls into the trap of treating complexity theory as a metaphor for social systems, as argued by Eppel (2017). Using Grounded Theory for explor-

COVID-19 organisational recovery in a UK metropolitan police force  179 ing and coding qualitative data from agents (actors) as a precursor to hypersimplex modelling is a novel mixed-method approach. Policing in the United Kingdom The Police Service of England and Wales is devolved into 43 constabularies that are roughly coterminous with county or metropolitan civic boundaries (with some exceptions through historic amalgamation). Each force is operationally led by a Chief Constable, with a hierarchical rank structure below replicated across the country. Chief Constables are governed by locally elected Police & Crime Commissioners or Metropolitan Mayors, who are usually, but not always, affiliated with one of the major political parties in the UK. A national framework of coordination and policy support is overseen by the National Police Chiefs’ Council. National Police Coordination Centre (NPoCC) and Operation Talla as Hypersimplices Throughout the accounts of the participants, the National Police Coordination Centre (NPoCC) and Operation Talla are frequently referred to. The NPoCC is responsible for coordinating the deployment of police officers and staff from across UK policing to support forces during large-scale events, operations and in times of national crisis and civil emergencies. Coordination for the policing response to COVID-19 fell within the remit and capabilities of this function. Operation Talla was developed as an additional response function to the pandemic beyond the contingency plan within weeks of the UK outbreak in recognition of the unanticipated scale and complexity of the policing response. The governance structure followed a standard UK emergency service Gold/Silver/Bronze (GSB) format, where ‘Gold’ sets the strategy, ‘Silver’ develops and manages the tactical plan to deliver the strategy, and ‘Bronze’ is the operational delivery of the plan. In policing, each of these roles requires training, examination, and operational accreditation to a standard format (Figure 14.2). Drawing on the discussion above, conversion of the Silver Group relationships to a hypersimplex provides a visible demonstration of the complexity of interactions that are potentially taking place (Figure 14.3). Each member in this case has a direct interaction with the others in the forum.

FIELDWORK ACCOUNTS Chief Superintendent Sara Crane. Operation Talla Recovery, Reform and Learning Programme Lead At the beginning of the pandemic, Sara Crane was involved in the local organisational response for Devon and Cornwall police but was quickly moved into the Operation Talla structure as the project lead for the recovery, reform and learning team. Recovery and organisation learning was one of 15 interconnected work streams within Operation Talla (see Figure 14.3), all of which had their own objectives, networks and trajectories. The structure was based on the Department of Health & Social Care flu pandemic plan. At an early stage it was recognised at a national level that ‘real-time learning’ was embedded into the response work. This was to capture an evidence base for longer term police reform and provide rapid distribution of learn-

180  Research handbook on public management and COVID-19

Source: Hannah Wheeler.

Figure 14.2

Operational Talla GSB

Figure 14.3

Hypernetwork of the Operation Talla Silver Group

ing to Police Forces during the response period to aid their local activities. Her programme board included representation of stakeholders from ‘across the system’, including the College of Policing, Her Majesty’s Inspectorate of Constabulary and Fire & Rescue (HMICFRS), staff association representation, and the National Crime Agency (NCA). During this period the College and HMICFRS reconfigured their business-as-usual work to support the operation by

COVID-19 organisational recovery in a UK metropolitan police force  181 seconding personnel, particularly with regards to peer support, operational learning briefings, and knowledge sharing events. The virtual format of these events was a new initiative borne from necessity which would ultimately be embedded into business as usual for the college. The recovery and learning programme had significant support from the Operation Talla leadership team, and more than a year after the first national lockdown in 2020 Sara continued to receive this despite the scaling back of response operations in many Forces in the country. Sara reflected on the variety and inconsistency of local responses to the pandemic throughout the operation, describing different management and tolerances for risk, often responding to local context. For example, higher levels of local sickness and infection rates leading to a greater focus on Personal Protective Equipment (PPE) management beyond national guidance, whilst others had collapsed their regional ‘Gold/Silver/Bronze’ operational response structures to a more modest local process despite relatively high residual levels of infection in communities. With the longevity of the pandemic, Sara has seen a transition from fully engaged regional fora to a more sporadic structure, and with this being a principal method of cascading detailed information from the central team has resulted in a reduced two-way communication process. This observation is not accusatory. Sara recognised that different Forces were transitioning and maturing at different speeds to a ‘new normality’, with various early Operation Talla activities, such as PPE management, health and safety, and organisational learning, moving to ‘business as usual’ reality. This added complexity at a national level in relation to engaging and communicating effectively. UK policing during this time also had to contend with responding to the ‘Black Lives Matter’ movement, the COP26 United Nations Climate Change Conference, and ongoing challenges of legitimacy in the application of COVID-19 restriction enforcement legislation. Variation in local response and interpretation was a factor Sara and her team had to deal with from the start. A good example was the development of guidance in relation to PPE. The national guidance changed many times, and local interpretation of that guidance, and officer compliance with it, resulted in numerous anecdotal differences emerging on when and where PPE was worn. This had a temporal element to it too, reflecting the various phases of the pandemic, its impact on society and local force risk assessments and the standard of PPE use. Sara reflected on how, even though recovery as a work stream had early national impetus and structure, some Forces were more interested in and ‘preoccupied’ with response support from the national framework. Initially, not many Forces fed back that they had established recovery strands beyond a single-point-of-contact, with notable exceptions such as Greater Manchester Police and Devon and Cornwall Constabulary, which Sara used as examples of good practice. As policing matured to the longevity of the pandemic, more Forces engaged in organisational learning and development, with a recognition that new ways of working can be implemented on the back of what was learned from the COVID-19 response, in particular the introduction of agile working enabled by mobile technology. A hypernetwork can be extracted from the data that provides a model of Sara’s environment as it developed during the pandemic (Figure 14.4). Some connections are explicit (black lines) and some are implied (grey lines) from the interview data. Multiple connections of the same type are represented as one vertex to aid interpretation of the model. The space between the vertices has meaning as a representation of the relationship between parties.

182  Research handbook on public management and COVID-19

Figure 14.4

Hypernetwork of Sara Crane’s COVID system

Superintendent Hannah Wheeler. Operation Talla Public Protection Equipment (PPE) and Business Continuity Lead Hannah is a Superintendent in the Metropolitan Police, who at the time of the COVID-19 outbreak was on secondment to HMICFRS. Like others interviewed, she responded to an urgent call to support the response where there was no precedent. Her assignment was to coordinate the national supply of PPE to Forces. There was no formalised contingency plan arrangement in place or NPCC lead for the function. In the initial stages of the pandemic Hannah encountered what she described as ‘panic buying’ of PPE by Forces individually as there was no national procurement mechanism. This had some unfortunate consequences of defective and inappropriate PPE being purchased. Hannah quickly established a team to build a national capability for PPE supply and advice. This required personal network contacts and goodwill from Chief Constables to support the team. Early engagement with the Home Office and a joint meeting of police, National Health Service (NHS) and Fire and Rescue identified there were no rules of engagement over PPE supply and it was clear there was not enough available to service everyone’s needs. The NHS naturally took priority over what stocks were available to government sources. There was no funding stream at the time for generating supply and the Home Office COVID-19 Response Team was advocating a reimbursement regime. This left Hannah with no capital and a series of ‘IOU’s being written for prospective suppliers willing to work at risk for the police service. The dental industry, for example, was no longer operating in lockdown and supported the cause. A hangar at Royal Air Force Heyford used by Thames Valley Police was appropriated for use as a warehouse, having good air and road connections for national distribution. The Royal Logistics Corp of the British Army were called in for support, and an infrastructure was soon developed to manage the stock. In the early days, communications with Forces proved difficult as there was no consistency of contact points for PPE, ranging from procurement leads, to finance leads to local COVID Silvers. Often attendance at meetings would be delegated down and key messages would get lost in translation. Stock would arrive in Forces and no information was coming back on onward distribution. A ‘bottom-up’ feedback approach with the Police Federation was established to close that gap.

COVID-19 organisational recovery in a UK metropolitan police force  183 Despite being inundated with cold-calling entrepreneurs selling their PPE at inflated prices, Hannah and her contract manager identified appropriate sources for equipment. A payment structure was established with each Force being individually contacted to contribute to the national effort. Hannah had a further interdependency playing out internationally – most of the stock was coming in from Chinese suppliers. They were having their own COVID-19 crisis, as were those suppliers in countries on the supply route. Orders would get repackaged mid-transit and what arrived was not always what was ordered. Government guidance on use of PPE changed many times during Hannah’s work on Operation Talla. This created difficulties amongst Forces, and it was identified that local adaption was occurring. By the time the lockdowns had finished, the team were expecting and had prepared for a rise in PPE requirements as more public contact grew, but the opposite occurred. It was suspected that the workforce had grown weary and confused with the advice. Early renditions of guidance created conflict with Public Health England based on the definition of ‘emergency first responder’ and there were concerns from Health that if the Police mirrored their own practices, then PPE supplies would run out. On the other side of the system, pressure was applied from staff associations and Forces for the health and safety of police officers and staff. Hannah created a network of stakeholders to unify the advice including Public Health England, the Defence Science and Technology Lab, the Health & Safety Executive and staff associations (Figure 14.5). This was aligned to the growth of knowledge medically on the nature and cause of infection and transmission of COVID-19 and was developed into a ‘push button’ dashboard of scenarios to reduce the overwhelming nature of policy and guidance in circulation. This method proved very successful. Ultimately the learning generated from the police PPE hub informed the development of a new long-term solution managed by the Department of Health and Social Care, and reserves of PPE have been built up nationally.

Figure 14.5

Hypernetwork of Hannah Wheeler’s COVID-19 system

In this example, a ‘virtual’ hypersimplex was created to deal with the financing of PPE. No funds existed, but the ‘traffic’ in the system demanded it was needed and so an IOU ‘backcloth’ was created until the system could adapt. These are things that can be anticipated and modelled.

184  Research handbook on public management and COVID-19 Assistant Chief Constable (ACC) Nick Bailey. GMP COVID-19 Gold Commander Nick Bailey was an Assistant Chief Constable (ACC) in Greater Manchester Police (GMP) at the start of the pandemic, leading the Specialist Operations portfolio. In January 2020 as the infection began to spread in China, Nick invoked local Civil Contingencies Act processes with senior partners, in the first instance to respond to community cohesion issues, but also refreshing the contingency plans for pandemic response. Greater Manchester has a large Chinese population and is formally twinned with Wuhan, the city at ground-zero of the outbreak. Consequently, GMP was seeing an increase in hate crime towards Chinese community residents. At first the contingency plan review was seen as something of an exercise, and there was even tactical aid and PPE provided to Wuhan as part of an agreement with the Chinese Ambassador to support community reassurance and relationships. By March 2020, as cases started appearing in the UK, Nick held his first Strategic Command Group (SCG) meeting with other public sector leads as part of standard multi-agency critical incident procedures, but it was clear from the start that this was being treated as a health issue only and the role of policing was unclear. The newly reviewed GMP Business Continuity Pandemic Plan was being used ‘as a prompt’. Given the large and devolved governance structure of the Greater Manchester Health Sector, many independent actions were underway outside of the SCG that they did not have clear sight of. When lockdown was announced by the Government in March 2020, with no warning to the SCG, business continuity plans were invoked, and the group went onto a major incident footing. Early topics of conversation and action were lack of PPE, enforcement of lockdown, and management and wellbeing of homeless communities. Within GMP every function that had a part to play in the contingency plan started to report into a COVID Gold group chaired by Nick, and he learned very quickly that the structure was insufficient to cope with the complexities of running GMP and managing a COVID-19 response. The business continuity plan did not survive long. The Deputy Chief Constable (DCC) then became the Gold Commander, and each Assistant Chief Constable (ACC) had a Silver role in reporting in their business continuity responses. Nick retained the Chair of the SCG. From the outset, a political dimension to the pandemic developed which was less pronounced in other Forces. This was due to an elected metropolitan Mayor of an opposing political party to the Government. The exchanges between the Mayor and the Prime Minister would eventually make national news, with the infection rates and lockdown restrictions in the region correlated by some to a north/south divide of governmental financial support,2 particularly for impacted businesses and the wider economy. Other more sombre logistical processes were starting to develop. Owing to the potential volume of deaths that could be experienced in the Greater Manchester area, GMP supported the planning and delivery of a large-scale mortuary provision, built, stocked, and staffed within a week of inception, including a fully protected police-led body recovery team. Fortunately, the full extent of these provisions would never be tested. Nick describes how the impact of lockdown and the rules on self-isolation impacted the organisation. At the time there was no vaccine and working from home was developed as the only viable option for keeping the functions of the organisation working outside of frontline response. This required a significant mobilisation and redistribution of IT equipment and rapid deployment of new mobile communication tools (two of which had previously struggled for investment as projects). The recent deployment of a new Command & Control software

COVID-19 organisational recovery in a UK metropolitan police force  185 package also allowed innovative deployments of non-urgent calls for service being managed from call operators’ homes. By July 2020, the system was adapting as the country was released from the first lockdown. Nick recalls SCG responsibilities being delegated more frequently, and issues being managed effectively, with police attention being drawn to ‘Black Lives Matter’ protests in the region. It was then that it was recognised that infection rates were growing in the Greater Manchester area again, particularly in socio-economically deprived areas with high multiple occupancy, where ethnic minority communities were disproportionately represented. This became the start of an ongoing position where local lockdowns were enforced for periods of time longer than many regions of the UK. The first GMP knew of a second national lockdown was its announcement by a Government tweet in late July 2020. Nick used the governance processes of the SCG to declare a critical incident to re-galvanise partnership working (Figure 14.6). The political pressure for police response to compliance, fixed-penalty notice administration, and management of ongoing public protests, including newly emerging resistance to vaccination measures over the summer was acute. Despite all this pressure Nick believes that the reinvigorated SCG process worked well, particularly following greater inclusion and contribution from GM Health as it matured.

Figure 14.6

Hypernetwork of Nick Bailey’s COVID system

Superintendent Andy Sidebotham. GMP COVID-19 Response Hub Commander At the time of the outbreak, Andy Sidebotham was the Operations Superintendent in the Salford District of GMP. In March 2020 he was asked to set up a ‘Covid Silver Hub’ at Headquarters. He spent the next 12 months managing this hub. Andy recalls the initial planning conversations focusing on the deployment of specialist operations resources to support the wider public service effort, but they expanded exponentially to how the organisation was going to cope with lockdowns, staff sickness, isolation processes and several other factors that did not feature in the GMP Pandemic Contingency Plan. Human resource management became critical, requiring policy positions on sickness, wellbeing, agile working, pay, core training provision and maintaining operations and business support. A separate but closely aligned ‘People Hub’ was

186  Research handbook on public management and COVID-19 established to support Andy with professional HR advice and logistics. The hub’s focus then turned to supporting the police response to community cohesion issues and keeping up to date with the Government’s response. Andy recalls the gov.uk website on ‘Corona Virus’ being updated up to four times a day making it impossible for his small team to read and provide updates and impact assessments to Command in a timely fashion, so he called in analysts from GMP’s Performance Branch to stop their day jobs and start developing environmental scanning products for the response effort. These impact assessments proved vital for the hub to get ahead of the work and plan GMP’s response strategy effectively. The next big challenge coming Andy’s way was the GMP response to the national NHS ‘Test and Trace’ process. With a lack of priority being given nationally for police staff testing, and with the support of local health partners GMP’s COVID Hub developed an internal testing and tracing function to be more responsive to the scenario. The logistics and activities of responding to positive tests of GMP staff became a major part of the hub’s operations going forward to restrict the spread of infection within estate and operations. The GMP ‘test and trace’ team became so effective in their role that the organisation began to outsource their work to the UK Border Force, who were struggling to manage the impact of the process. During the first lockdown, Andy’s hub responsibilities turned to the administration of lockdown enforcement. Again, this was not a scenario covered in existing contingency plans. Andy felt this was an entirely new dimension of legitimacy for frontline officers to respond to in relation to interpreting an ever-changing ruleset on breaches and the use of fixed penalty notices (FPN) on the public. Although clear guidance was being provided by Operation Talla, Andy felt that this was very contentious legislation likely to be subjected to legal appeal, and so built a quality assurance process into the submission of FPNs. This required another secondment of local criminal justice staff away from their day jobs into the hub (Figure 14.7). The longevity of the requirement to respond to the pandemic and the significant coordination work Andy was required to undertake between ACC portfolios who were all making significant decisions on GMP operations stretched the GSB structure to the limit, and it was agreed with the DCC that a ‘programme management’ process was required to coordinate organisational recovery. A separate recovery work stream was then developed.

APPLICATIONS OF COMPLEXITY SCIENCE IN CONTINGENCY PLANNING As part of the GMP Recovery Programme, a ‘lessons learned’ exercise was undertaken for the business continuity plan that was initially utilised. Published business continuity plans are a statutory obligation under the Civil Contingencies Act 2004 and follow an accepted model of good practice. The review highlighted several options for inclusion of additional functional elements but retained its mechanistic structure. This is no surprise. The more popular theories of management science and systems thinking which public sector planning draw from have their grounding in deterministic, positivist epistemologies. They do not take account of human participation in organisational systems and the impact of novel change and coping with conditions of great uncertainty (Stacey et al., 2000), which paradoxically is what contingency plans should be there for. The GMP plan accounted for the establishment of controls in functions such as human resources, infection control, communications, IT, command and control and many others, but without recognition that these parts of the system demonstrate non-linearity,

COVID-19 organisational recovery in a UK metropolitan police force  187

Figure 14.7

Hypernetwork of Andy Sidebotham’s COVID system

sensitivity to initial conditions, and susceptibility to human freedom of response. Contingency plans need to take account of human agency and connections that demonstrate effective adaption to the complexity arising from the control functions required to respond to critical incidents. Findings from this study show that complexity theory application can support a more effective contingency planning process. To illustrate, the accounts of the participants in this study were modelled into a hypernetwork which demonstrates the interconnected human activities that are required to ‘get the job done’ beyond the functional descriptive priorities set within a contingency plan. It is argued that contingency planning needs to consider the complex networks that can be created as part of the development of mitigation to critical scenarios. For example, the hypernetwork of the system’s response to PPE shortages can be mapped out if the network is understood. Drawing from the participants’ accounts the scenario below played out. Owing to increased concern regarding protecting officers from infection, GMP Police Federation raised concerns about the lack of PPE. At the same time the Silver Hub was concerned with the impact ‘test and trace’ would have on abstractions without PPE as a mitigation. Advice was sought from Operation Talla via the contact meetings on guidance for specification and use of PPE, and access to supplies. The issue was raised at COVID Silver Group, and the National Police Wellbeing Service and Public Health England were consulted. Information was then passed to the PPE function, and equipment with the right specification was ordered and the logistics managed at RAF Heyford. Advice was cascaded back to Forces and GMP acquired its own suppliers. Lessons learned were simultaneously fed through to the Organisational Learning Programme. A representation of this model is demonstrated by combining the relevant hypernetworks (Figure 14.8). A future contingency plan on PPE supply would benefit from identifying the resources and process required to effectively traverse this hypernetwork, which Johnson (2013) calls q-transmission.

188  Research handbook on public management and COVID-19 The route R of this PPE impact network connects four sets of vertices within the simplices: < s1, s8, s13 > < t6, t9, t11 > < w1, w2, w4, w5, w6 > < c1, c2, c11 > where w2 = t11, and c2 = t6.

Figure 14.8

Combined hypernetwork and the scenario of PPE supply and demand

In order to redesign systems it is important to understand these kinds of ‘traffic’ relationships and the social ‘backcloth’ they run on (Johnson 2013), where the backcloth is a representation of relatively fixed structures in systems, and traffic is the activity over time and space within the system. Johnson, building on the work of Atkin (1981) has modelled a number of human systems using this method, but never in policing, or using data gathered through Grounded Theory. Coding the Accounts for Additional Context at the Micro Level – the Backcloth In addition to network connections, the data from the interviews can provide concepts common to each contributor to the response that can add additional context to hypersimplices at a micro level, as a summary of their experiences and expectations of a future pandemic response event. This demonstrates the method can be used at any scale of the system. From four interviews, 944 open codes (analysis) were identified, which through Grounded Theory were grouped into concepts, and ultimately into categories encompassing the context of their operating environment at a micro level (a vertex) (Table 14.1).

COVID-19 organisational recovery in a UK metropolitan police force  189 Table 14.1

Grounded theory coding of participants operating environment

No. of open codes

Axial coding (concepts)

Selective coding (categories)

60

The pandemic response had Scale, Complexity and Pace.

The operating environment provides the

40

Politics will inevitably play a part in your response.

context for response, in an open system

35

The reaction of society to the situation influenced the response,

where responses of other systems will

including the international community.

impact yours.

133

Networks, Partnerships and Relationships were essential

Connections matter, and your response

components of response, and they matured over time.

will be dictated by networks, relationships,

92

Communication, and the absence of it will influence the

and the effectiveness of communications

effectiveness of the response.

between them.

49

Mobilisation of resources will require people to stop their day jobs People will be mobilised beyond their

85 58

108

and focus on new challenges beyond their skillsets.

skillset and comfort zone, but their

The learning came from people within the system or those

experiences will shape the learning for the

impacted by the response.

future.

Pre-pandemic planning and structure did not withstand the

Planning does not end with the start of the

response and dealing with unknowns and adaption to change

response, it should continue throughout,

became more important.

and the response must be adaptable to

Administration, finance and logistics requirements should not be

change.

underestimated, and should be given focus from the start. 44

Not all risks can be accounted for. Not all impacts can be mitigated. Being responsive is more important.

75

The structure and process for response required continually adaptation, control and decisive action. Entropy sets in over time without refocus.

124 41

Decision-making, Risk Management and Governance with good

Empathetic leadership, decisiveness,

situational awareness was invaluable.

and effective risk management lead to

Strong leadership with empathy and inclusivity supported effective successful responses. response, motivation and wellbeing.

Comparison with the GMP Contingency Plan The current GMP contingency plan summarises the whole PPE network described in Figure 14.8 with the instruction: The PPE requirements in the event of a pandemic Flu or other infectious disease will be agreed by the Health and Safety Unit in conjunction with Public Health England (PHE) guidance … supplies will be sourced by the Procurement Unit.

The GMP plan (GMP, 2020)3 adhered to national standards and great effort and thought was taken to construct it. There were assumptions on how a pandemic would occur and how it would be managed that included sensible establishment of functions such as command structure, health and safety, PPE use (although not how to practically procure it), phases of escalation and return to normality. It had no temporal element to it, as in what to do if the situation is prolonged, or what networks of support would be required for those invoking the plan. It follows the current dominant way of thinking about organisations that reduces phenomena to their parts. As a mechanistic document it focuses on process and an expectation of a deterministic future of events, which complex adaptive human systems do not display. Given it is a restricted document under the Government Protected Marking Scheme, its detailed content

190  Research handbook on public management and COVID-19 cannot be described here, but it clearly follows a rationalist teleology4 (Stacey et al., 2000) and, it is argued, has limited value in non-linear scenarios, which COVID-19 clearly was – so ‘people got things done anyway’ outside of the plan.

CONCLUSIONS Paradoxically, developing a contingency plan based on mechanistic or systematic perspectives (a rationalist teleology) cannot cope with conditions of great uncertainty, as the experience with COVID-19 has demonstrated. A new method is required for policing and, based on the analysis presented, it is argued that a complexity theory framework should be at the heart of it (a transformational teleology). The findings of this research indicate that the things that need to get done will get done either despite of, or in addition to, the plans as laid down. This is entirely expected through the lens of complexity theory, and therefore can be accounted for to improve the successful deployment of plans. Contingency plans lay out what needs to be done, not how it will be done, who is going to do it, and what relationships are likely to exist between interdependencies. As this study has shown, the plans utilised in practice during the pandemic crisis failed to address these phenomena when they occurred. Hypernetworks provide an appropriate formalisation for reconstructing models of complex social systems to identify possible futures and support the development of improved planning for ‘far from equilibrium’ events. Designing for every eventuality is impossible and impractical. Design that is resilient to rapid self-transformation with the right network of agents is within our grasp, to achieve the objectives of critical event response more effectively, demonstrating the power of this approach to policing in particular, but to management in the public sector more broadly. The findings of this study have wider implications for public management practice by providing a directly relevant and contemporary use of complexity theory concepts that have until now been the focus of metaphor and analogy. The ‘COVID effect’ has been to demonstrate to all those involved in a managerial role, that existing ideas of control, predictability, boundaries, and process driving the response can struggle with the complexity, interconnectivity, and non-linearity of public leadership in the twenty-first century, particularly during extreme events.

NOTES 1. Identities are revealed by their permission. 2. In the UK, a long-running political argument exists where northern cities perceive that social and economic investment is weighted towards London and surrounding counties in the south. Manchester, as the largest northern city, amplifies these perceptions through political rhetoric from a largely Labour local government in opposition to the current Conservative UK government. 3. This chapter is not intended as direct criticism of the existing contingency planning process. 4. Movement into the future for a chosen goal (in this context).

COVID-19 organisational recovery in a UK metropolitan police force  191

REFERENCES Atkin, R. (1981). Multi-Dimensional Man: Can Man Live in 3-Dimensional Space? Penguin Books. Barabási, A.-L. (2014). Linked. Basic Books. Birks, M. and Mills, J. (2015). Grounded Theory: A Practical Guide, 4th ed. SAGE Publications. Burnes, B. (2005). Complexity theories and organizational change. International Journal of Management Reviews, 7(2), 73–90. Byrne, D. and Callaghan, G. (2014). Complexity Theory and the Social Sciences: The State of the Art. Routledge. Cairney, P. and Geyer, R. (2017). A critical discussion of complexity theory: How does ‘Complexity Thinking’ improve our understanding of politics and policymaking? Complexity, Governance & Networks, 3(2), 1–11. Castelnovo, W. and Sorrentino, M. (2018). Engaging with complexity in a public programme implementation. Public Management Review, 20(7), 1013–1031. Cilliers, P. (1998). Complexity and Postmodernism: Understanding Complex Systems. Routledge. Eppel, E. (2017). Complexity thinking in public administration’s theories-in-use. Public Management Review, 19(6), 854–861. Glaser, B. G. and Strauss, A. L. (1967). The Discovery of Grounded Theory: Strategies for Qualitative Research. Aldine. GMP. (2020). GMP Business Continuity Pandemic Plan. Greater Manchester Police. Haynes, P. (2008). Complexity theory and evaluation in public management: A qualitative systems approach. Public Management Review, 10(3), 401–419. Johnson, J. (1995a). A language of structure in the science of complexity. Complexity, 1, 22–29. Johnson, J. H. (1995b). The multidimensional networks of complex systems. In D. Batten, J. Casti, and R. Thord (Eds), Networks in Action, pp. 49–79. Springer. Johnson, J. (2013). Hypernetworks in the Science of Complex Systems. World Scientific. Miller, J. and Page, S. (2007). Complex Adaptive Systems: An Introduction to Computational Models of Social Life. Princeton University Press. Mitleton-Kelly, E. (2006). A complexity approach to co-creating an innovative environment. World Futures, 62, 223–239. Morçöl, G. (2012). A Complexity Theory for Public Policy. Routledge. Prigogine, I. and Stengers, I. (1984). Order Out of Chaos: Man’s New Dialogue with Nature. Verso. Richardson, K. and Cilliers, P. (2001). What is complexity science? Emergence, 3, 5–22. Sawyer, R. K. (2005). Social Emergence: Societies as Complex Systems. Cambridge University Press. Snowden, D. and Boone, M. (2007). A leader’s framework for decision making. Harvard Business Review, 85(11), 1–9. Stacey, R. D., Griffin, D. and Shaw, P. (2000). Complexity and Management: Fad or Radical Challenge to Systems Thinking? Routledge.

15. Policing the pandemic: deciding and acting in the face of uncertainty and the unexpected Mark Fenton-O’Creevy, Nicky Miller, Helen Selby-Fell and Benjamin Bowles

INTRODUCTION Although most high impact decisions in the public sector are taken in conditions of deep uncertainty, there is a major gap in research to help decision-makers cope with these conditions. Much advice for decision-makers is relevant to tame problems for which probabilities are calculable and optimal choices modelable (Tuckett et al., 2018). As Boin and Lodge (2016, p. 289) argue, public management scholars have been “strangely absent” from debates about transboundary crises and deep uncertainty, focusing largely on “routine processes of governance”. Despite great interest in complex wicked problems there has been insufficient attention to the challenges of public management, faced with the “surprising, inconsistent, unpredictable, and uncertain” (Ansell et al., 2021, p. 950). In the context of a pandemic followed by a European war, against the backdrop of a climate emergency, this problem of public management resilience in the face of deep uncertainty needs urgent attention. Uncertainty and the unexpected place a premium on effective sensemaking, constructive doubt (Fenton-O’Creevy and Tuckett, 2021), and what Weick and Sutcliffe (2015) have described, in their work on ‘high reliability organisations’, as “collective mindfulness”. In this chapter, we develop insights relevant to the delivery of frontline public services in the face of crisis and uncertainty, drawing on high reliability organisation theory as an organising theme for our discussion of two United Kingdom (UK) police force responses to the pandemic crisis and the relative success of these responses. Significant research has been conducted into how high reliability organisations (HROs) maintain consistent standards of safety and reliability despite complex operations and dynamic environments. These organisations face potentially dangerous consequences of failure but maintain high reliability in their operations, despite frequent unanticipated events (e.g., in contexts such as fighting wildfires, aircraft carrier operations and management of nuclear power stations). As Weick and Sutcliffe (2011, p. 21) note: Success in working under these conditions is due in part to mindful organizing that allows people to notice the unexpected in the making, halt it or contain it, and restore system functioning. The hallmark of an HRO is not that it is error-free but that errors do not disable it.

Important elements of policing, such as firearms operations, terrorism and public order response have this requirement for high operational reliability in the face of risks of dangerous failures, complex operations, uncertainty, and the unexpected. For the COVID-19 crisis, police forces needed to ensure public safety and public compliance with pandemic regulations whilst maintaining public legitimacy. They needed to 192

Policing the pandemic  193 maintain reliable operations, to combat crime and protect the public, despite the pandemic’s impact on operational capability. This had to be achieved despite deep uncertainty about how the pandemic, its hazards, and political responses would unfold. Despite these challenges, an independent review found UK policing to have achieved a largely resilient and successful response to the pandemic. Successful in the sense that forces adapted and innovated rapidly to ensure continued operational effectiveness (see also Davies, this volume). They innovated to exploit opportunities presented by the crisis, for example using reductions in street crime to improve operational outcomes in tackling serious crime. They worked to achieve public compliance with pandemic restrictions in ways that largely maintained public legitimacy (HMICFRS, 2020). We draw on HRO theory to examine reasons for success and identify ways that policing and other frontline public services can improve resilience and responsiveness to crisis. Research into organisations that consistently achieve high reliability in the face of the unexpected suggests they can “respond in real time, reorganizing resources and actions to maintain functioning despite peripheral failures” (La Porte, 1975, p. 353). To achieve this, Weick and Sutcliffe (2015) argue that these organisations demonstrate collective mindfulness, the collective capability to discern discriminatory details about emerging issues and to act swiftly in response to these details. They identify five primary dimensions of collective mindfulness from research, arguing that HROs are: 1. committed to resilience (the capabilities needed to detect, manage, and recover from errors and the unexpected); 2. reluctant to simplify (avoid simplifying information and unexpected events into familiar categories too quickly); 3. sensitive to operations in an evolving situation (anticipating and noticing what is actually happening regardless of intentions, designs, and plans); 4. preoccupied with failure (paying attention to weak signals indicating vulnerability to problems and hazards); and they 5. defer to expertise regardless of hierarchy. In this chapter, we draw on our empirical research to review the extent to which the policing organisations we studied, as they responded to the pandemic, were characterised by these elements of collective mindfulness, and draw on HRO theory to frame lessons for the future.

RESEARCH METHODS AND CONTEXT Our study draws on detailed interviews with 16 senior officers and staff1 in two (of 45) territorial UK police forces, conducted between October 2020 and March 2021, and engagement with the 24 member forces of the Open University Centre for Policing Research and Learning, including a workshop on emerging findings with member representatives in April 2021. The forces studied comprise a large metropolitan force (Metro) and a smaller force with significant rural and coastal policing (Rural),2 chosen as having major differences in size and in the challenges they face. The UK model of policing reflects a largely decentralised approach with 43 regional forces across England and Wales, each led by a Chief Officer who has direct responsibility for oper-

194  Research handbook on public management and COVID-19 ational policing decisions. Each of these 43 forces are governed by a locally elected Police and Crime Commissioner (PCC) who holds the Chief Officer to account and sets the strategic objectives and the force budget. Each of the forces has their own autonomy of decision making within some constraints. The two centralised forces of Scotland (Police Scotland) and Northern Ireland (Police Service of Northern Ireland) have different governance arrangements. The research was carried out within an ‘engaged scholarship’ approach (Van de Ven, 2007). In such research, researchers are partners with the decision-makers, who are involved throughout the research process, together tailoring the work to make it useful for their ongoing practice and mindful that outputs match their needs. The focus was the experience of senior policing leaders in navigating the crisis, deciding, and acting in the face of deep uncertainty.

DELIVERING POLICING OPERATIONS WITH HIGH RELIABILITY IN A CRISIS We frame our findings through the lens of HRO theory and Weick and Sutcliffe’s (2015) account of the five elements of collective mindfulness. We now consider each of these elements. Commitment to Resilience Allenby and Fink (2005, p. 1034) define resilience as “the capability of a system to maintain its functions and structures in the face of unexpected events and to degrade gracefully when it must”. Other definitions of resilience often add the ability to rapidly learn and grow in the face of disruption. The two forces studied largely demonstrated these capabilities during the pandemic. Mostly reliable service was maintained, with careful protection of core services. There was both top-down and bottom-up innovation in response to new demands, and periods of reduced street crime were exploited to achieve core goals such as supporting vulnerable groups and tackling serious and organised crime. Careful attention to prioritisation of key services, through a red– amber–green rating approach, supported planning for graceful and planned degradation of service should the need arise. Two important capabilities underpinned this resilience. Both forces had well-practised capabilities and routines in strategic command of major and critical incidents and had leaders and workforce familiar with facing uncertainty and the unexpected on a regular basis. Dealing with critical incidents are what we do the best … There is no calmer environment than us being hit with a panic… (Metro)

Many interviewees emphasised the role of values in navigating uncertainty, mentioning both policing and personal values and the role of a National Decision Model for policing which places ethics at the heart of decision-making processes (College of Policing, 2014). The most mentioned was the principle of ‘policing by consent’. This was core to policing public compliance with COVID-19 regulations in the UK. Since the foundation of modern British policing by Robert Peel in 1829, this ideal of policing by public consent and minimal reliance on force

Policing the pandemic  195 has been a core value expressed in the still enduring principles for UK policing (Home Office, 2012; Reith, 1956). Very early in the crisis the ‘four Es’ approach to enforcement of COVID-19 related regulations was developed by the National Police Chiefs Council (NPCC). This mandated that, faced with unprecedented restrictions on public freedoms during periods of lockdown, officers should adopt a staged approach to breaches of regulations, first engaging with members of the public, explaining the rules, encouraging compliance, and only taking enforcement action as a last resort. We were conscious of not wanting it to affect our relationship with our communities because policing by consent is a very treasured part of our policing approach. (Metro)

While some tension developed with public, media, and political pressure for stronger enforcement, this principle remained important. This tension between political pressures for strong enforcement and policing by consent has been a constant theme since the establishment of “modern”3 British policing (Taylor, 2016). Despite these strengths, our analysis identified three issues worth attention in ensuring future resilience: preparation for crises, the limits of strategic command approaches, and the resilience of the wider public services system that policing is part of. 1. Preparation for crises A common view among interviewees was that prior work on contingency planning and pandemic exercising had been of very limited value in responding to the pandemic (see also Davies (this volume) for a discussion of the limitation of current police contingency planning): We looked at our business continuity plans and [none of our] plans really reflected what we thought we were facing. (Rural)

There was an important alternative perspective offered by one officer, who suggested that what was of considerable use was not the plans that had been made, but knowledge from multiple contingency planning processes (including planning for Brexit), which led to a detailed understanding of operational interdependencies, such as the operation of key supply chains: [Prior continuity planning] was incredibly useful because it gave us that immediate understanding of which elements of the force we could close down, what are the critical dependencies … [And] it really brought to light the supply chains and the risk that sits within the supply chains. (Metro)

This is an important insight. In business continuity planning and exercising, in contexts of significant uncertainty, it is the planning process not the specific plans which may be more valuable. Good anticipatory thinking is often less about planning based on forecasts than expert bets on what to pay attention to, in order to make sense of an evolving situation (Klein et al., 2011). There is a premium on the ability to entertain constructive doubts about how a situation has been understood, whilst acting decisively, but with willingness to revise understandings and plans (Fenton-O’Creevy and Tuckett, 2021). The problem with risk-register style approaches to continuity planning for future crises, is that they can encourage singular hazard scenarios with an unjustified level of specificity. For example, before the pandemic, the UK government’s national risk register of civil emer-

196  Research handbook on public management and COVID-19 gencies (Cabinet Office, 2017) identified a pandemic as its top risk but this was specifically identified as an influenza pandemic risk with contingency planning strongly influenced by this assumption. There is an important lesson about preparedness for policing and wider public services. The most important use for risk scenarios is to use many potential crises of different natures to test current capabilities and to improve understanding of the kinds of capability development that improves resilience to wide ranges of threats and hazards, including those still unforeseen. This places a premium on exercising and business continuity planning in a way that fosters capturing and disseminating knowledge that may be relevant to a much wider set of events than were considered in the process, rather than just situation-specific plans. The utility of this approach is illustrated by the value of Brexit planning for understanding supply chain issues in the different context of a pandemic. Despite the concerns about the effectiveness of prior pandemic plans, gaps in planning were quickly recognised and addressed, not least through the rapidly engaged strategic command approach. However, as we now discuss, faced with these unusual challenges, strategic command capabilities came under significant strain. 2.

The limits of strategic command capabilities in a crisis of highly extended scope and uncertain duration The strategic command approach, first developed in 1985, is a central feature of UK policing and one adopted by other frontline public services. This incident command approach has three levels of command: strategic (Gold), tactical (Silver) and operational (Bronze). Bronze commanders lead operations on the ground in response to operational objectives set by Silver commanders, who are charged with the overall running of an incident response. Gold commanders, for serious incidents, have strategic oversight of the incident and set tactical parameters for Silver and Bronze command. For major incidents, they chair the (often multi-agency) strategic command group. Senior officers have significant training in and experience of strategic command, and UK police forces have well-developed systems and protocols to support these processes. This expertise was essential in enabling a rapid and resilient response to the pandemic crisis. However, as the crisis progressed, capabilities came under significant strain. Strategic command approaches tacitly assume a time-limited context for critical and major incidents. This assumption has been severely tested by the pandemic, leading to impacts on physical and mental wellbeing for those in command roles, with multiple participants emphasising the impacts on wellbeing. Police leaders, everyone thinks they are really strong and super resilient, we can go on forever. And you can’t. (Metro) The first two Bronzes both went off with stress/depression. They are making … life impacting decisions and the guidance was changing on a daily basis. (Rural)

Another key issue concerned the difficulty of drawing boundaries around the ‘incident’. The pandemic affected almost all aspects of policing. Early on, the chain of strategic command for the crisis response came under significant pressure with both forces seeking urgent guidance, and decisions being requested on many aspects of ‘business as usual’ in these unusual circumstances.

Policing the pandemic  197 It felt at times like on top of my day job I was running the [whole force], because it felt like everything I was doing was setting direction for how the entire organisation would run. … you just can’t do it. (Metro)

Whilst the strategic command approach was a crucial element of policing resilience, there is also important learning about the boundaries of this capability. Processes need adaptation in the face of crises of extended duration to support the wellbeing of those in command roles and attention should be given to defining boundaries of command responsibility where those crises are of extended scope. The resilience of the wider system 3. Organisations depend for their resilience on the wider system they are part of. For policing COVID-19, this included multi-agency working and relationships with politicians and media. Most participants reported good and deepening relationships with partner organisations through the crisis, not least through local resilience forums. However, concerns were raised about the capabilities of partner organisations in responding to major incidents, leading to pressure on policing representatives to lead on issues which fell outside their core expertise. As one officer described: There is [a need to review] the wider system and the support the government bring to that system to support us in a future crisis … . (Metro)

There were questions about the role of government communication. Policing organisations are used to both policy churn and political and media scrutiny, but the intensity and pace of both were unusually high during key periods of the pandemic, and this combined with sometimes unclear and contradictory messaging from politicians. We don’t make the laws … we have to interpret them. … we sometimes had less than 24 hours to actually interpret that law operationally and legally and then apply it. (Metro) [Ministers misinterpret their own guidance in press conferences] …a lot of it is very much in the media gaze and in the face of quite strong political pressures as well. (Metro)

Whilst public accountability is important, intense external scrutiny and scapegoating, from politicians, media, and publics, can reinforce cultures of blame within policing organisations. As we explore below, reinforcing blame cultures leads to the wrong kind of preoccupation with failure. It risks reducing the ‘conceptual slack’ needed to respond effectively to the unexpected. In summary, organisational resilience is not just a property of the individual organisation, it also emerges from the effective functioning of wider networks and partnerships. In the public sector, resilience can also be harmed by failures of political communication and control. Reluctance to Simplify As the heart of ‘reluctance to simplify’ is the concern that fixing a story of ‘what is going on’ too early, often leads to becoming stuck in a single story, using ready-made frames and categories and their accompanying operational policies and practices. Such stories develop their

198  Research handbook on public management and COVID-19 own momentum and can drive inattention to cues that don’t fit the narrative (Fenton-O’Creevy and Tuckett, 2021). Perhaps aided by the unfamiliarity of the circumstances senior officers found themselves navigating, there were indications of early willingness to stay with the confusion and complexity of events and keep updating understanding. For example: There were quite a lot of examples of the thing that we thought we were doing is not producing the effect that we hoped for. So, if I think through my [COVID-19] strategy, I wrote version one [but] by the time I handed over to [X] after eight weeks we were on about version nine or ten. (Metro)

A key capability that helps HROs avoid becoming stuck in an oversimplified single story is ‘conceptual slack’ – the availability of a sufficient diversity of perspective, and openness to different perspectives, avoiding the tendency to treat new situations as just another version of the routine and familiar. Research on HROs highlights the importance of informal networks in containing crises (Weick and Sutcliffe, 2011). In a command-and-control structure where decision dialogue is typically up and down a chain of command, there are often questions of where diversity of perspective comes from. Some resolved this through reliance on using ‘critical friends’ as a sounding board. … with experience, you phone a friend. Critical friends in this environment are huge. [My opposite number in a neighbouring force] and myself were having almost regular calls, ‘what do you think? how?’, just to get a feel for about how that group think around things. (Rural)

This included getting perspectives from partner organisations. However, some felt this happened less, because of a tendency to have an inward focus. In highly hierarchical organisations, generating sufficient conceptual slack can be challenging. This challenge is recognised in many military organisations, leading to forms of leadership training and doctrine that seek to ensure the conceptual slack associated with sufficient diversity of perspective, and attention to context, in interpreting policies and orders (see, for example, Clarke, 2017, on ‘intelligent disobedience’). Some concerns were expressed that suggest strategic command structures and practices could reduce conceptual slack and encourage too rapid simplification and convergence to a single story, under the pressures of this highly extended crisis. [We] don’t necessarily always consult widely enough or we don’t necessarily consult the right people, we don’t necessarily look at… where it might be working better … or learning from other organisations. … we are quite impulsive and want to make decisions and want to make them quickly. (Metro)

Especially in crises of extended duration, strategic command practices would benefit from structures and tools that enhance and embed rapid lateral consultation and seeking greater diversity of perspective. Sensitivity to Operations in an Evolving Situation Decades of work practices research show a mismatch between formal operating procedures and actual practices (e.g., Brown and Duguid, 1991; Carvalho et al., 2018). No set of rules can foresee the complexities of real, messy, working reality even in mundane operational tasks,

Policing the pandemic  199 never mind amidst the challenges of an unfamiliar situation. All work requires some degree of improvisation and moment-to-moment adaptation to achieve its goals. Policies and procedures may also be bypassed or acted on in a ‘tick box’ way for other reasons, including misunderstanding, work pressure, or competing directives. Sensitivity to operations is concerned with maintaining current awareness not of what ‘should’ be happening but what is happening operationally. It requires sensitivity to weak signals that events may not be unfolding as expected and effective communications channels and practices that avoid blaming the messenger or disregarding information that is inconsistent with current assumptions. A common theme in interviews was the value of experience as a firearms4 or public order commander5 in managing the dynamic and uncertain situation presented by the pandemic. Participants emphasised the value of their prior experience of needing to stay alert to the unexpected and continually update their understanding. Most also emphasised that the pandemic generated unfamiliar challenges so prior assumptions did not hold. As one senior officer described: When I was a firearms commander … you always knew what the threat was, whether it was an individual, a weapon. You would go through things like what the capability was, but with COVID we didn’t really know what it was, and we didn’t know how it would impact on the organisation. (Rural)

Nonetheless, efforts were quickly made to ensure effective information on the operational impacts of the pandemic and to regularly update contingency planning. For example, setting up HR rapid reporting processes on sickness levels, identifying and rating (red, amber, green) which critical services were at risk, establishing truncated training schedules, and identifying qualified staffing capacity to ensure coverage of critical services. Strategic command approaches did largely succeed in ensuring sensitivity to operations in the pandemic. However, an important question for police forces may be whether capabilities for sensitivity to operations need extending beyond the context of critical and major incident strategic command to the longer-term management of policing. Preoccupation with Failure Preoccupation with failure is not about an obsession with past failures, nor about blame. It is about systematic alertness to small cues that events and the consequences of actions may be unfolding differently to what was expected (Weick and Sutcliffe, 2015). One way of understanding this capability is as ‘sensitivity to vulnerability of operations’. In policing, the preoccupation with the potential for failure is manifest in the strong focus on risk assessment, risk mitigation and contingency planning. This was evident in policing responses to COVID-19, with early effort devoted to identifying priorities for protecting policing functions, contingency planning, and risk and threat assessments. However, there were blind spots. It may be that the very success of the strategic command model meant that less attention was paid to how it could be adapted in the context of a crisis of extended duration and scope. First, while attention was given to workforce wellbeing, it is less evident that sufficient attention was paid to the potential for burnout in senior roles. Second, there is evidence that officers can be prone to preoccupation with failure in a less helpful sense; making defensive decisions to minimise the potential for future blame.

200  Research handbook on public management and COVID-19 Defensive decision-making occurs when decision-makers choose an option that is not best for the organisation’s goals but is likely to avoid negative personal consequences if things go wrong, or alternatively push decisions upwards to avoid accountability (Artinger et al., 2019). Officers of public organisations are rightly held accountable for their decisions and thus reasonably focus on recording defensible reasons for decisions. In UK policing the ‘National Decision Model’ (NDM: College of Policing, 2014) is a core tool for decision-making, with a code of ethics at its heart, and was frequently mentioned in interviews. Whilst for some it was seen as useful for ensuring all important aspects of a decision had been reviewed, for others it was primarily a tool for recording a defensible basis for decisions: Whether it leads to better decisions? I would listen to argument, but it certainly leads to more defensible decisions. (Metro)

Tomkins et al. (2020, p. 101) note in their discussion of leadership challenges within policing, that “police leaders both expect and experience more responsibility than control; more blame than praise; and interpretations of failure based more on personal fault than on situational or task complexity”. Much police decision-making during the crisis was the subject of intense scrutiny from the media, the public, and politicians. This could exacerbate fear of blame and a tendency to turn making defensible decisions into defensive decision-making. … sometimes people make wrong decisions in good faith with catastrophic outcomes and then society wants to punish people if they make judgement errors. … nobody will want to make decisions if every time they get something wrong, they are going to be [punished], either they will cover up their mistakes or they won’t make the decisions in the first place. (Rural) They were getting enquiries that frankly should have been dealt with at sergeant level, coming into [senior] level or my level and it just got ridiculous … it almost felt like they just wanted me to say that’s okay, so if it all went wrong it is not them it’s me that’s got that responsibility. (Metro)

Strong capabilities in risk assessment and mitigation, and contingency planning clearly contributed to sensitivity to operational vulnerability to failure. We also identify the risk of blame cultures contributing to defensive decision-making, a problem that can be particularly prevalent in public sector organisations (Artinger et al., 2019). Deference to Expertise Regardless of Hierarchy Faced with new threats, HROs typically have structures and routines in place that migrate decisions to people and teams with appropriate expertise, regardless of formal hierarchy (Chassin and Loeb, 2013). This includes the rapid assembly of informal groups to bring appropriate knowledge and expertise to bear on unexpected problems. Rigid reliance on hierarchy in command-and-control based organisations can be problematic for developing these kinds of lateral informal and adaptive approaches, which depend on bypassing formal hierarchical structures. Nonetheless, policing organisations develop formal and informal mechanisms for identifying and using diverse sources of expertise in decision-making and rapid response to incidents and the unexpected. In the two forces studied, one mechanism for deploying appropriate expertise to the demands of the pandemic was greater integration of police staff6 in the strategic command

Policing the pandemic  201 structure, albeit that this required significant adaptation to new ways of working for many police staff. Another concerned the development of approaches to rapid consultation. For example: Normally in HR policy, by the time you have written it, consulted it, passed it around, checked it, it is sort of six months … What we had to do was condense the consultation period, into a few hours rather than a few months. (Metro)

Although there was some use of lateral networks to increase diversity of perspective, some felt the constraints of operating in a command-and-control focused hierarchy meant that diversity of perspective could be limited, leading to oversimplification: [There is] this desire to bound everything, [and] not deal with the wicked things, only deal with the simple things. … . Police officers generally aren’t used to dealing with nuance they deal with black and white and those things that are black and white are things that they have been told to do, … the hierarchy works against us in that way; because you get told to do things much more than in other organisations. (Metro)

While the use of advisers to strategic commanders and use of lateral networks does increase conceptual slack, there is scope for expanding the range of perspectives available to commanders in crises of extended duration.

CONCLUSIONS In the face of unexpected events generated by a global pandemic and at times disorganised central government communication and coordination, the forces studied achieved a largely successful, resilient response. They adapted and innovated rapidly to ensure continued operational effectiveness. They innovated to exploit opportunities and worked to achieve public compliance with pandemic restrictions in ways that largely maintained public legitimacy. In concluding, we draw on HRO theory to frame our findings on key factors underpinning this success and key lessons that can be drawn for policing and for the wider public sector. Factors Supporting Success A clear element of crisis performance was a commitment to resilience, underpinned by well-practised capabilities and routines in the strategic command of major and critical incidents, and leaders and workforce practised in facing the unexpected. This included well-practised, dynamic approaches to risk assessment and mitigation, and the development of accelerated innovation, consultation, and policy-development processes. The core role of values of British policing was a valuable resource for resilience and navigating uncertainty. Specifically, the central role of policing by consent in supporting and engendering the cooperation of communities with extensive restrictions on their freedoms. Another factor concerned reluctance to oversimplify narratives about the unfolding challenges police leaders faced and a willingness to remain open to what Fenton-O’Creevy and Tuckett (2021) call constructive doubt. This was exemplified by a mindful approach to

202  Research handbook on public management and COVID-19 revising plans and strategies as the crisis evolved and the use of strong core values to navigate uncertainty. Strategic command approaches did largely succeed in ensuring sensitivity to operations in the context of an evolving pandemic, innovating to insure timely and relevant information about pandemic impacts on operational capabilities. This was underpinned by leaders’ experiences, in domains such as public order and firearms command, in managing dynamic and uncertain situations. It was supported by early efforts to ensure rapid and timely information flow on how current operational capabilities were being impacted. However, we raised questions about whether this sensitivity to operations was mostly confined to strategic command processes. Sensitivity to operational vulnerability manifested through a strong focus on risk assessment, risk mitigation and contingency planning, with much early effort devoted to identifying priorities for protecting core policing functions, contingency planning and risk and threat assessments. Finally, while it was not clear that policing organisations routinely show deference to expertise, regardless of hierarchy, the informal use of lateral networks played a significant role in increasing diversity of perspective and conceptual slack. Learning for the Future Prior pandemic exercising and contingency planning produced plans that were of little direct help. However, forms of exercising and contingency planning not directly focused on pandemic planning, produced relevant capabilities and knowledge. Crucially, faced with uncertain futures, there is a premium on modes of planning which support the capability to monitor and adapt rather than predict and plan (see, for example, Stults and Larsen, 2020). The value of planning for specific contingencies and exercising for specific hazards and threats may be less in the specific plans they produce than in the ways they expose organisational capabilities to a wide range of tests; generating understanding and improved capabilities which are relevant to a wide array of situations, including yet unknown challenges. It is notable that understanding about police supply chain issues during COVID-19 came out of planning for Brexit. There would be significant benefit in planning exercises and the ways in which learning is captured from them with this insight in mind: that the true value of multiple simulated-incident exercises is less plans for specific hazards or threats, than in building preparedness for the unexpected that is robust to a wide range of threats and hazards. Despite the crucial role of strategic command capabilities in enabling crisis resilience, there were signs that this mode of operating may require adaptation for major incidents of highly extended duration and scope. It is worth questioning whether the very success of strategic command capabilities in policing might create a blind spot in relation to the need to significantly adapt this mode of organising for unbounded crises of extended duration. Given the role of strategic command approaches across frontline UK public services, this need for adaptation may have much wider application. Public agency crisis management approaches tacitly assume bounded scope and duration. A clear lesson of the pandemic is that these assumptions should be re-examined, and attention paid to future scenarios in which crises are of extended duration and scope. The difficulties in drawing boundaries around the COVID-19 crisis and its duration placed significant stress on the wellbeing of those in the chain of command, reducing conceptual

Policing the pandemic  203 slack in command teams. Concerns were expressed suggesting hierarchical policing command structures and practices could, sometimes, reduce conceptual slack and encourage too rapid simplification and convergence to a single story, under the pressures of a crisis. This question of the role of conceptual slack in public sector crisis responding lies at the heart of debates in the crisis management literature about the relative value of hierarchical forms of incident command versus coordination approaches which emphasise looser forms of network-based collaboration between agencies and between units, especially as scale and complexity increases (see, for example, Chang, 2017; Christensen et al., 2016). All public bodies should be accountable to their publics. However, intense media and political scrutiny, especially when accompanied by a simplistic hunt for scapegoats, can contribute to cultures of blame within public management. These conditions increase the risk that a focus on making defensible decisions shifts to a primary focus on protecting reputation and avoiding blame rather than achieving operational goals. Some important challenges to resilience have also come from the embeddedness of policing in a wider system, not least from the pace of policy churn and inconsistent messaging from government. The policing experience highlights the need to develop better government communication and coordination practices during national crises. Lessons for Public Sector Frontline Resilience While this chapter has focused on the specific context of UK policing, we believe that some of the lessons have important broader implications for public management resilience to crisis. First, we highlight the value of an HRO theory frame for frontline public services, especially in the context of increasingly uncertain futures. Second, we highlight an important lesson about contingency planning. Over-specific plans for forecast hazards are likely to be ineffective. The value of exercising and planning based on future scenarios does not lie in the utility of specific plans but in the knowledge and capabilities they develop to respond to a wide range of unexpected threats and hazards. This insight requires different approaches to capturing learning from exercising and scenario-based planning. Third we have highlighted the role of strong core values, as a guide in the face of unexpected crises. Shared values around ‘policing by consent’ supported rapid agreement and rollout of the largely successful ‘four Es’ framework for pandemic policing. Fourth, we highlight the role that political, public and media scapegoating can play in reinforcing cultures of blame that risk appropriate attention on making accountable decisions shifting into defensive decisions made to defend against future blame. Finally, the very success of proven capabilities can create a reluctance to question the need to adapt those capabilities in the face of new kinds of challenges.

NOTES 1. 2. 3.

One officer was less senior but chosen for the specific role they played. We provide only this limited description of the two forces to protect their anonymity. Normally taken to date from Robert Peel’s reforms

204  Research handbook on public management and COVID-19 4. UK police officers are not routinely armed. Policing operations involving firearms are conducted by authorised firearms officers and overseen by senior officers trained and certified in command of such operations. 5. Public order commanders are senior officers trained and certified for the command of policing operations which concern events and incidents that present a risk to public safety or have a potential for serious disorder (for example major protest marches, large football matches). 6. UK police officers have a distinct legal role, with legal powers beyond those of other citizens. Other police force employees are referred to as police staff (e.g. finance, HR, information analysts).

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Policing the pandemic  205 Reith, C. (1956). A new study of police history. London: Oliver and Boyd. Stults, M., and Larsen, L. (2020). Tackling uncertainty in US local climate adaptation planning. Journal of Planning Education and Research, 40(4), 416–431. Taylor, D. (2016). Conclusions and the contentious question of ‘policing by consent’. In Beerhouses, brothels and bobbies: Policing by consent in Huddersfield and the Huddersfield district in the mid-nineteenth century (pp. 263–285). Huddersfield, UK: University of Huddersfield Press. Tomkins, L., Hartley, J., and Bristow, A. (2020). Asymmetries of leadership: Agency, response and reason. Leadership, 16(1), 87–106. Tuckett, D., Smith, L., and Good, D. (2018). Good, decision-making under uncertainty: The current research landscape and a future research agenda: Report to EPSRC/ESRC/NERC. Retrieved from http://​cruisse​.ac​.uk/​wp​-content/​uploads/​2020/​05/​Final​-Version​-Current​-Research​-Landscape​.pdf Van de Ven, A. H. (2007). Engaged scholarship: A guide for organizational and social research. Oxford University Press on Demand. Weick, K. E., and Sutcliffe, K. M. (2011). Managing the unexpected: Resilient performance in an age of uncertainty (Vol. 8). John Wiley & Sons. Weick, K. E., and Sutcliffe, K. M. (2015). Managing the unexpected: Sustained performance in a complex world (3rd ed.). Hoboken, NJ: John Wiley & Sons.

16. Trust, capacity and management of vaccine rollouts Adam Hannah, Katie Attwell and Jordan Tchilingirian

INTRODUCTION The rollout of COVID-19 vaccinations has been among the largest global experiments in the provision of public goods. At the time of writing, more than 12 billion doses have been administered in under two years, generally delivered free at the point of service. However, despite a rapidly developing literature on various elements of the pandemic, there has been little explicit focus on vaccination in public management and related disciplines. Partly, this is because scholars are still reflecting on the complex experiences of the initial period of the pandemic. However, it also reflects a general lack of attention to vaccination within the discipline (although see Baekkeskov, 2016). In this chapter, we seek to outline the role that public management scholarship can play in understanding the success and failure of vaccine programs, focusing on the role of public trust and state policy capacity. Trust and capacity have been perennial concerns for public management scholars, particularly since the rise of New Public Management (Painter and Pierre, 2004; Van de Walle et al., 2008). The pandemic has highlighted various ways in which capacity and trust deficits can stymy effective public health responses (O’Flynn, 2021). This is especially the case in a crisis context, where citizens may look to states in ways that are unprecedented in ‘normal’ times (Boin et al., 2017). Trust and effective crisis management are thought to be closely related, given the importance of public communication and compliance and the need for adaptive decision making under uncertainty (Christensen and Lægreid, 2020). This is also reflective of related literature in health policy, which suggests that citizen trust – including trust in the state and medical authorities – shapes the extent to which individuals are influenced by public health messaging (Han et al., 2021; Pagliaro et al., 2021). Unsurprisingly then, trust and capacity are also critical elements of successful vaccination programs. Successful programs require more than just the procurement and distribution of vaccines (although these tasks are sufficiently challenging). States also need to actively build awareness and acceptance (through public messaging and campaigns) and engage third-party intermediaries (such as medical professionals). Outreach activities can prove challenging when individuals perceive their personal risk of severe disease to be low. Some groups can also be difficult for governments to reach with vaccines or with successful persuasive messages. Cultural and ethnic minorities may be disengaged from health services (Jamison et al., 2019), while for others the embrace of alternative health philosophies may lead individuals to eschew state advice (Wiley et al., 2021). Over the last decade, governments, international organisations, researchers, and the media have increasingly focused on the refusal or delay of available vaccines (Dubé et al., 2021). Increasingly, attention has been paid to vaccine ‘hesitancy’ – understood as resulting from 206

Trust, capacity and management of vaccine rollouts  207 a lack of confidence in the vaccines, complacency about their importance, or (in)convenience of access (SAGE Working Group on Vaccine Hesitancy, 2014). In our view, the hesitancy paradigm tends to inappropriately individualise the problem of non-vaccination (Attwell et al., 2022). Instead, we consider the specific capacity and trust challenges that emerge, from the perspective of the state. Clearly, a major task for any government engaging in a mass vaccine rollout is to cultivate trust, or address deficits. Doing so is more than just a simple matter of finding the right messages or the right combination of carrot and stick. Here, we make three primary arguments. First, cultivating trust requires a foundation of understanding public attitudes and behaviours. This has been challenging in several ways, given the time and resource constraints of a global pandemic. Second, cultivating trust requires political leadership and effective framing of problems and interventions. Yet, fringe elements or parties may benefit from seeking to undermine those messages, while leaders may also seek to avoid blame where there are failures or backlash. Finally, cultivating trust requires the ability to satisfice public demands. However, in relation to vaccination, the demands are often in tension, from support for more immediate, coercive measures, to requests for more time or information, to demands for the ability to opt-out entirely. As such, governments have faced difficult choices in deciding which interventions to prioritise. The chapter proceeds as follows. We start with an outline of Brenton et al.’s (2022) policy capacity framework, which argues that the ability to successfully utilise capacity has three main dimensions: administrative resources, political management, and public demands. We then apply this analysis to our case study, which focuses on the COVID-19 vaccine rollout in Australia. Establishing a precise threshold for success in relation to COVID-19 vaccination is perhaps unrealistic, given the ongoing nature of the pandemic. Nevertheless, despite early supply issues, by early 2022 Australia had achieved some of the highest vaccination rates in the world, and at the time of writing over 96 per cent of the population aged 16 and over had received two doses. For Australian governments, the level of vaccination in early 2022 was felt to be sufficient to relax travel and other restrictions that had been in place throughout 2020 and 2021. At the same time, we identify several important capacity and trust challenges that have impacted the ability to identify, reach and provide appropriate services to some populations, including the most vulnerable. Finally, we assess broader lessons for future policymaking that may be drawn from the analysis.

CONCEPTUALISING POLICY CAPACITY AND TRUST FOR VACCINATION Trust and capacity issues contribute to the success (or otherwise) of vaccination campaigns. In terms of capacity, lower- and middle-income countries have often struggled with a lack of public health resources – such as staffing and adequate training – and even access to vaccine supply chains. Factors such as conflict or corruption may also pose threats to design and implementation of successful vaccination policies. Even in wealthier countries, governments have been ill-equipped to address local vaccine misinformation or hesitancy that may circulate amongst populations, or to collect adequate demographic data on under-vaccinated populations that would help government health workers to better reach them with vaccines (Attwell, Harper, et al., 2021).

208  Research handbook on public management and COVID-19 Trust in governments and expertise is also crucial to the success of vaccination programs. For example, Denemark et al. (2022) found that high distrust in civil servants correlates with high levels of vaccine hesitancy amongst the population. Another recent study of 12 countries (including high, middle, and low income) found that health systems are generally regarded as the most trustworthy source informing their COVID-19 vaccine decision-making (Solís Arce et al., 2021). However, the vaccine social science literature has generally not been systematic about how it engages with the challenges of distrust in government, nor are analyses informed by relevant concepts from public management and related disciplines. Here, we redress this by utilising Brenton et al.’s (2022) policy capacity framework, which was developed from an extensive review of existing literature on policy and state capacity. The framework identifies three main dimensions of capacity: administrative capital, political management and demand ‘satisfiction’. Administrative capital refers to the resources or inputs available to government, such as employees, skills and expertise or financial resources. Political management is concerned with how administrative capacity is utilised in policy delivery, mediated by institutional constraints and the political process. Demand ‘satisfiction’ refers to the ability of government to sufficiently (rather than perfectly) meet expectations of key stakeholders or the public (or ‘satisfice’, a portmanteau of satisfy and suffice). In our view, each dimension of the framework has something to offer for the study of vaccination programs, particularly in a pandemic context. With regard to administrative capital, vaccine rollouts stretch resources in ways that go beyond the sufficient supply of vaccines. Reaching those who do not immediately and enthusiastically turn up to be vaccinated also requires the ability to collect, analyse and utilise data about unvaccinated populations and then tailor interventions to drive uptake. The dimension of political management comes into play through the ability of governments to effectively channel resources. This process depends on prioritisation by political leaders and the ability to manage conflicts and blame avoidance within public institutions. It includes the ability to mitigate attempts by fringe and mainstream politicians to undermine vaccine rollouts for their own political or ideological ends. Finally, satisficing stakeholder or public demands proves challenging given the immense attention focused on the vaccine rollout. This generates a variety of public expectations as to its management by the state. Those who are vaccine hesitant or face access barriers are exercising demands on the state to communicate, reach or make space for them. Other parts of the public instead demand the state punish or coerce those who are unvaccinated. In the next section, we explore these three challenges through analysis of the COVID-19 vaccine rollout in Australia.

THE AUSTRALIAN COVID VACCINE ROLLOUT Resourcing Challenges: Can the State Understand and Respond to the Unvaccinated? When considered in relation to the first capacity dimension – administrative capital and resources – Australia’s vaccine rollout began with several advantages. In global terms, Australia maintains a well-resourced health system with high rates of childhood vaccination. Despite a slow start, it has been able to procure and deliver COVID-19 vaccinations at among the highest rates in the OECD. Still, Australian governments have faced a range of challenges in understanding who remains unvaccinated and why, and then being able to respond.

Trust, capacity and management of vaccine rollouts  209 Adapting systems designed for the regular and targeted nature of childhood vaccinations to the whole population has proved challenging, as has mobilising sufficient and coordinated resources to understand and communicate with more vulnerable populations. A major challenge is that responsibility for vaccination and the resources to enable it are divided between the Australian Commonwealth and state governments in ways that are not necessarily clear. The Commonwealth has been responsible for procurement, approvals, and recommendations, coordinating the vaccination of specific workforces (such as aged care residents and workers), and some dissemination channels (general practitioners and respiratory clinics). It also maintains the Australian Immunisation Register (AIR). However, states have been responsible for the vaccination of most other key workers and have operated their own hubs accessible to the general population, as well as designing and targeting outreach for those communities who need it. Communications and persuasion have been undertaken by both levels of government, but there were significant delays to commencing these campaigns, in part due to supply problems. Attitudinal research undertaken prior to the COVID-19 vaccine rollout in Australia alerted government officials that some would likely not accept the vaccines (Dodd et al., 2021). However, concerted efforts to understand and reach these communities were delayed by the need to reach key population groups and workers quickly, and then by a decision to focus on vaccinating the general population. In terms of understanding who is unvaccinated and why, Australia’s federal and state or territory governments have been reliant on the AIR. An individual’s status on AIR determines their interactions with state and federal governments, and is the source of the vaccine passport that may be required for work, study, or social life. Aggregate data are also used to determine coverage rates at national, state, and local levels. AIR is the oldest electronic vaccination register in the world (Hull et al., 2009), and – fortuitously for the imminent COVID-19 pandemic – the register expanded to cover adults in 2016. Because of AIR’s age and the difficulties in updating it to carry out new functions, the information it captures is limited. It records whether an individual is Aboriginal or Torres Strait Islander. It also captures an individual’s age, place of residence, registered medical practice, and where they received a vaccine (Department of Health, 2018). Other than a formal medical exemption, there is currently no facility to record reasons why an individual is unvaccinated. Examples of other key data points missing from AIR are demographic data that can signal to governments that individuals might speak a language other than English at home, disability status, or socio-economic indicators that might mean a person needs extra support to access vaccinations. To fill informational gaps, Commonwealth government departments instead combined datasets, looking at what is known about the socio-demographic features of specific geographic regions with sub-optimal vaccine coverage (Department of Health, 2022a). This can provide more information for targeting messages or services to communities, but still does not indicate whether individuals are actively choosing not to vaccinate or face other barriers. The Commonwealth also contracted a market research firm to assess public sentiment about vaccination (Department of Health, 2022b). However, from publicly available information this appears to assess only nationwide population sentiment. Moreover, the Australia health care system largely lacks capacity to reach out to individuals based on specific health or attitudinal characteristics. While Australians have recently been moved to electronic health records on an opt-out basis, there is limited ability to connect

210  Research handbook on public management and COVID-19 to relevant health factors (for example, to identify that a person has diabetes and should be invited for an additional vaccine dose). The electronic health records are currently dominated by non-searchable PDFs, meaning that their ability to ‘talk to’ other databases (such as AIR) is limited. To learn more about who is (un)vaccinated and why, some Australian states have collected demographic data at their own state-run clinics. Research by authors two and three as part of the Coronavax project (as yet unpublished; see Attwell, Carlson, et al., 2021) indicates that Western Australia and Victoria collaborated in building snap data repositories, but other states such as New South Wales did not systematically collect this data. However, state-run hubs have been skewed towards vaccinating health workforces and other priority populations earlier in the rollout. As such, states have limited ability to collect data on the rest of the population, most of whom were vaccinated via medical clinics or pharmacies. Throughout all these processes, the gathering of data to determine which groups are falling behind and why has been intermittent and patchy. Governments in Victoria, New South Wales and Western Australia partnered with or funded academic research groups to conduct qualitative research into barriers and drivers of vaccination amongst the general population and specific groups; members of this authorial team led such initiatives (Attwell, Carlson, et al., 2021; Bolsewicz et al., 2021; Kaufman et al., 2021). The work of researchers has drawn attention to barriers facing Aboriginal and culturally and linguistically diverse groups, for example (Bryant et al., 2021). These barriers include access issues, a lack of culturally appropriate information, and safety concerns or misinformation that flows through particular communities. Mobilising resources to address these more specific challenges is itself difficult, especially in a context where vaccination rates of 80 and 90 per cent among the general population have been required to relax unprecedented restrictions on social and economic life. That Australian governments relied on military personnel (Commonwealth) and law enforcement (Western Australia) to lead the vaccine rollout is indicative of their priorities. Even where under-served populations could be identified, there have been limitations in terms of the time, investment and ability to build partnerships with trusted civil society groups who could provide local knowledge and aid service delivery. Political Management: Negotiating Politicised Framings of Hesitancy, Risk, and Blame The allocation of resources, collection of data, and design of programs are clearly essential for effective vaccine rollouts. However, their effectiveness may be mediated by the second capacity dimension, political management, which reflects the “calibre of political leadership” and “receptiveness to and judicious use of expert advice” (Brenton et al., 2022). Here, we focus particularly on the ways in which political leaders have sought to maintain (or undermine) public legitimacy of the vaccine rollout. We also explore how elite discourse has shaped policymakers’ understanding and prioritisation of specific challenges and their decisions about where scarce resources should be distributed. The politicisation of vaccination has been of concern to scholars, policymakers, and the media for some time, especially in childhood settings. However, given the scale and impact of COVID-19 and the need for close to universal vaccination, the political forces shaping vaccination policy have greatly expanded in range. Concerns about vaccination have risen to the front of the agenda for an array of anti-establishment political forces, particularly (although not exclusively) on the right, and even some more mainstream parties.

Trust, capacity and management of vaccine rollouts  211 While most Australian leaders framed vaccination as a positive good and a matter of great urgency, several national political figures explicitly spread misinformation about COVID-19 vaccination or expressed an unwillingness to be vaccinated (Paine, 2021). These included members of the government itself – Queensland Liberal Senator Gerard Rennick maintains an online form for citizens to report instances of adverse reactions, as well as a separate “medical whistleblower form”. Rennick claims to have been “overwhelmed with the amount of whistleblowers from the medical industry that are coming forward” (Rennick, n.d.). In November 2021, the Guardian (McGowan and Knaus, 2021) reported that Rennick’s Facebook following increased by over 500 per cent in three months since he began sharing unverified stories of adverse events. Rhetoric around choice and misinformation regarding the safety of vaccines is hardly new (and concerns around mandates are not prima facie illegitimate). However, the fact that national politicians and even members of the government found new audiences by drawing on these frames suggests a challenging environment for public agencies seeking to reach those not enthusiastic about vaccination. It is not just fringe political figures who provide challenges for the management of vaccine rollouts. Political leaders themselves are likely to attempt blame avoidance in instances where difficulties are encountered. The focus on hesitancy and misinformation help to enable this (Attwell et al., 2022). Comments by West Australian Premier Mark McGowan reflect a blame avoidance framing. At a 17 January 2022 press conference, when asked to account for lower rates of vaccination among Indigenous people in his state, McGowan first noted the government’s “huge efforts to get Aboriginal people vaccinated”, and continued that “at the end of the day, people need to go and get it done” (ABC News, 2022). In December the previous year, McGowan also raised the prospect that misinformation spread by white supremacists targeting Aboriginal communities was contributing to lower rates (Lucas, 2021). While misinformation can certainly undermine confidence, in February 2022, WA’s vaccination rate for Indigenous Australians remained the lowest in the country, with less than 70 per cent over 16 vaccinated, compared with over 92 per cent of the overall 16-plus population (Attwell et al., 2022). Yet the “Keeping Culture Safe and Strong: Vaccination Focus” campaign only began in late November, 10 months after vaccination commenced in the state (WA Department of Health, 2021). Clearly, prioritisation by political leaders shapes the urgency with which resources (vaccines themselves and persuasive communication campaigns) are deployed by public agencies. However, this prioritisation also informs public understandings of the urgency in accessing those resources. Infamously, Prime Minister Scott Morrison repeatedly stated that Australia’s newly commenced vaccine rollout was “not a race” (Taylor, 2021), seeking to claim credit for the fact that Australia has put itself into position to have a manufactured vaccine here in Australia. We’re not relying, like most of the countries in the world, for vaccines to be coming from somewhere else.

This compares unfavourably with a country such as Chile. There, facing public anger over not only a damaging wave of cases in 2020 but also broader unrest over the country’s neoliberal economic order, the government placed the utmost emphasis on securing doses from all possible sources and ensuring a swift rollout (Castillo et al., 2021). Despite generalised distrust of political elites, Chile’s vaccine rollout has been amongst the world’s most successful.

212  Research handbook on public management and COVID-19 Responding to Active and Hidden Demands: Assessing How Interventions Cultivate or Undermine Trust Thus far, we have focused largely on the ‘supply-side’ of policy capacity – the resourcing and data collection challenges facing public agencies, and the ways in which these may be exacerbated by the framing of those populations by political leaders. However, capacity can also be understood as having a third dimension: the degree to which governments can satisfice (or reasonably satisfy) the demands placed upon them. In responding to the pandemic, a major demand is to reduce disease risk as quickly as possible through vaccination. However, the vaccine rollout has seen citizens make a variety of more nuanced demands on the state, some of which are in clear tension with the use of coercive measures to rapidly increase vaccination coverage. Vaccine delay or rejection is not always recognised as an engagement with the state, since it is usually conceptualised as a form of opting out, or opting into a counter community or identity (Sobo, 2016). Yet, where governments institute vaccine mandates, non-vaccinating citizens must either accept penalties, procure permission to not participate, or actively demand opt-outs for personal belief (which they sometimes do vociferously) (Mello et al., 2015). Even the silent non-complier makes a demand on the state: for choice, for the right to refuse, for service personalisation, or perhaps just for more time or better persuasive information and public communication (Gofen and Needham, 2015). Western Australian research conducted mid-rollout with migrant and refugee women found that some were so alienated from the vaccination program that they remained unvaccinated – they could not access information in their language and did not know how to book appointments (Carlson et al., 2022). Similarly, research on the experiences of children and young people with disability in the pandemic has found that many experienced difficulty in securing vaccinations, including navigating booking systems and accessing services appropriate to their needs (Dickinson et al., 2021). Through their non-vaccination, citizens may express ‘hidden’ demands for better access and outreach, or even improved social or economic conditions. For example, a study of disability support workers found vaccine hesitancy to be associated with frustration with treatment of workers in the sector (Dickinson et al., 2023). Yet, as we discussed above, states may instead choose to depict such populations as recalcitrant and look for easy levers to ‘make’ them vaccinate. Vaccine mandates are attractive in this regard because they are cheap, relatively easy for governments to introduce, and can often be effective in attaining high vaccine uptake quickly. They can change behaviour without necessarily changing minds. Through mandates, governments can shape the choice architecture for their own public sector employees, as well as pushing vaccine enforcement widely onto third party agents (such as employers or hospitality operators). Governments can also rely upon claims about protecting public safety to justify implementing mandates. Accordingly, mandates for COVID-19 vaccines have been employed in a range of global contexts (Attwell, Rizzi, et al., 2021). While vaccine uptake in Australia – both for COVID-19 and childhood vaccines – is very high, there is a significant price to pay for those who resist. Holdouts to COVID-19 vaccine mandates have conducted public protests, changed business operations from dine-in to takeaway, and started new careers. At the same time, governments also face demands from a much bigger group of pro-vaccine constituents to impose consequences (such as mandates) upon non-compliers. Polling suggests mandates for childhood and COVID-19 vaccinations are broadly popular in Australia

Trust, capacity and management of vaccine rollouts  213 (Smith et al., 2021). As such, arguments about protecting the vulnerable – for example making public spaces or workplaces safe for people who are immune compromised – are persuasive. Governments who fail to protect vulnerable individuals from unvaccinated people may face castigation or blame, particularly as non-vaccinators are generally held in poor regard by the public and the media (Rozbroj et al., 2019). These mutually exclusive demands from pro- and anti-vaccine populations in any given society pose significant challenges for governments. On the one hand, the work of outreach and persuasion to unvaccinated populations is difficult and time consuming. Instruments that punish non-vaccinators are also broadly popular. Yet, the risk remains that individuals who choose vaccination in the face of coercion or even give up their participation in mainstream society over the mandate issue may be further alienated from public services, and perhaps radicalised into fringe political movements.

CONCLUSION: CAPACITY AND TRUST FOR FUTURE HEALTH CRISIS According to Moynihan (2020, p. 21), “crises reveal government capacity” (see also O’Flynn, 2021). The COVID-19 vaccination rollout has revealed capacity challenges – and points of friction between citizen and state – across multiple dimensions. Here, we have focused on three: the capacity of public agencies to mobilise resources to understand and reach unvaccinated citizens; the capacity of political leaders to appropriately frame risk, blame and urgency; and the capacity of the state to negotiate the conflicting demands of citizens without further undermining trust. More broadly, the vaccination case reiterates points made in recent public policy and management scholarship on ‘robustness’ (Howlett et al., 2018). Crisis response commonly necessitates innovation, adaptation, and flexibility. However, this is best done when building on existing (and perhaps even excess) capacities and reserves of trust – these generally cannot be summoned according to need. Put simply, the three capacity challenges discussed in this chapter are likely to be more acute when a crisis emerges following a longer period of government neglect or ignorance. Countries with effective systems for childhood vaccination, in which citizens have regular, convenient, and affordable access to health providers, began their rollout at a significant advantage. The more that public trust and resources can be built and maintained, the less likely it is that states will have to rely on blunt or coercive measures that may undermine public trust. To return to the case study of Australia, while there were initial supply issues as well as pockets of refusal and specific communities and groups the state struggled to reach, the overall picture is one of high public willingness to accept and high government capacity to deliver vaccines. Even while we have noted the limitations of Australia’s digital health infrastructure, the fact that it had a longstanding immunisation register that also covered adults placed it at a significant advantage. More broadly, its success is in line with what would be expected given the quality of Australia’s health system, high childhood vaccination rates, and the high levels of trust in medical authorities. On the other hand, pre-existing distrust in public agencies and medical authorities may be exacerbated during times of crisis. This has been seen in a wide range of countries during COVID-19 – the United States and Russia are but two prominent examples of political and

214  Research handbook on public management and COVID-19 social distrust hampering a vaccine rollout (Skjefte et al., 2021). The US and Russia are also notable as two countries that have sufficient capacity to develop and produce their own vaccines. Global disparities in vaccine access have been startling, and have continued more than 12 months after initial doses were delivered in western countries (Rydland et al., 2022). Despite the concerns about hesitancy discussed earlier, supply has remained a far more fundamental concern for billions of people. Entrenched local economic or social inequalities may further impede the state’s ability to reach or persuade citizens – even as health risks are significantly more acute for such groups. In Australia, the degree to which vaccination rates have lagged for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples is such an example. While the reasons for those lower rates are complex – and include the legacies of historical injustices – literature from public health and public management emphasise more general links between inequality, deficits of trust, and barriers to accessing services and civic participation (Elgar, 2010; van Holm, 2019). Much can be done at a program level to improve access and outreach, but addressing deeper capacity and trust deficits will require ongoing political prioritisation. A major challenge, then, for scholars and practitioners in public management and public health, is how to maintain pressure and attention as the agenda moves on from acute crisis management. There will be significant pressure to wind down programs, reallocate resources, and press pause on potential avenues for learning. Ironically, this temptation may be most difficult to resist in countries which have done enough to satisfice the various public demands faced during the crisis period. However, as the Australian example shows, doing so risks ignoring key inequalities and trust deficits that have been made visible during the COVID-19 period.

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Trust, capacity and management of vaccine rollouts  215 Brenton, S., Baekkeskov, E., and Hannah, A. (2022). Policy capacity: Evolving theory and missing links. Policy Studies, 1–19. https://​doi​.org/​10​.1080/​01442872​.2022​.2043266 Bryant, J., Bolt, R., Blaxland, M., Gardner, K., Beadman, M., Doyle, M., Graham, S., Newman, C., Murphy, D., Bell, S., Beetson, K., and Wilms, J. (2021). Perspectives of COVID Vaccines Among Aboriginal People Living in Western Sydney. UNSW Centre for Social Research in Health, Sydney. https://​doi​.org/​10​.26190/​3E4S​-0S29 Carlson, S. J., Edwards, G., Blyth, C. C., Nattabi, B., and Attwell, K. (2022). ‘Corona is coming’: COVID‐19 vaccination perspectives and experiences amongst Culturally and Linguistically Diverse West Australians. Health Expectations, 25(6), 3062–3072. Castillo, C., Villalobos Dintrans, P., and Maddaleno, M. (2021). The successful COVID-19 vaccine rollout in Chile: Factors and challenges. Vaccine: X, 9, 100114. https://​doi​.org/​10​.1016/​j​.jvacx​.2021​ .100114 Christensen, T., and Lægreid, P. (2020). Balancing governance capacity and legitimacy: How the Norwegian government handled the COVID-19 crisis as a high performer. Public Administration Review, 80(5), 774–779. https://​doi​.org/​10​.1111/​puar​.13241 Denemark, D., Harper, T., and Attwell, K. (2022). Vaccine hesitancy and trust in government: A cross-national analysis. Australian Journal of Political Science, 57(2), 145–163, doi:10.1080/1036 1146.2022.2037511 Department of Health. (2018). Using the Australian Immunisation Register. Australian Government Department of Health. https://​www​.health​.gov​.au/​health​-topics/​immunisation/​health​-professionals/​ using​-the​-australian​-immunisation​-register Department of Health. (2022a). Australian Immunisation Register linked to the Multi-Agency Data Integration Project. Australian Government Department of Health. https://​www​.health​.gov​.au/​initiatives​ -and​-programs/​australian​-immunisation​-register​-linked​-to​-the​-multi​-agency​-data​-integration​-project Department of Health. (2022b). Operation COVID Shield COVID-19 Vaccine Sentiment Summaries. Australian Government Department of Health. https://​www​.health​.gov​.au/​resources/​collections/​ operation​-covid​-shield​-covid​-19​-vaccine​-sentiment​-summaries Dickinson, H., Smith, C., and Yates, S. (2021). Locked Out: Vaccination Discrimination for Children and Young People with Disability. Report prepared for Children and Young People with Disability Australia (CYDA). https://​www​.cyda​.org​.au/​images/​pdf/​locked​_out​_vaccination​_report​_​.pdf Dickinson, H., Kavanagh, A., Dimov, S., Shields, M., and McAllister, A. (2023). Political legitimacy and vaccine hesitancy: Disability support workers in Australia. Policy and Society. https://​doi​.org/​10​ .1093/​polsoc/​puac030 Dodd, R. H., Cvejic, E., Bonner, C., Pickles, K., McCaffery, K. J., Ayre, J., Batcup, C., Copp, T., Cornell, S., Dakin, T., Isautier, J. M., and Nickel, B. (2021). Willingness to vaccinate against COVID-19 in Australia. The Lancet Infectious Diseases, 21(3), 318–319. https://​doi​.org/​10​.1016/​ S1473​-3099(20)30559​-4 Dubé, È., Ward, J. K., Verger, P., and MacDonald, N. E. (2021). Vaccine hesitancy, acceptance, and anti-vaccination: trends and future prospects for public health. Annual Review of Public Health, 42(1), 175–191. https://​doi​.org/​10​.1146/​annurev​-publhealth​-090419​-102240 Elgar, F. J. (2010). Income inequality, trust, and population health in 33 countries. American Journal of Public Health, 100(11), 2311–2315. https://​doi​.org/​10​.2105/​AJPH​.2009​.189134 Gofen, A., and Needham, C. (2015). Service personalization as a response to noncompliance with routine childhood vaccination. Governance, 28(3), 269–283. https://​doi​.org/​10​.1111/​gove​.12082 Han, Q., Zheng, B., Cristea, M., Agostini, M., Bélanger, J. J., Gützkow, B., Kreienkamp, J., Collaboration, P., and Leander, N. P. (2021). Trust in government regarding COVID-19 and its associations with preventive health behaviour and prosocial behaviour during the pandemic: A cross-sectional and longitudinal study. Psychological Medicine, 1–11. https://​doi​.org/​10​.1017/​S0033291721001306 Howlett, M., Capano, G., and Ramesh, M. (2018). Designing for robustness: Surprise, agility and improvisation in policy design. Policy and Society, 37(4), 405–421. https://​doi​.org/​10​.1080/​14494035​ .2018​.1504488 Hull, B. P., Deeks, S. L., and McIntyre, P. B. (2009). The Australian childhood immunisation register—a model for universal immunisation registers? Vaccine, 27(37), 5054–5060. https://​doi​.org/​ 10​.1016/​j​.vaccine​.2009​.06​.056

216  Research handbook on public management and COVID-19 Jamison, A. M., Quinn, S. C., and Freimuth, V. S. (2019). “You don’t trust a government vaccine”: Narratives of institutional trust and influenza vaccination among African American and white adults. Social Science & Medicine, 221, 87–94. https://​doi​.org/​10​.1016/​j​.socscimed​.2018​.12​.020 Kaufman, J., Bagot, K. L., Hoq, M., Leask, J., Seale, H., Biezen, R., Sanci, L., Manski-Nankervis, J.-A., Bell, J. S., Munro, J., Jos, C., Ong, D. S., Oliver, J., Tuckerman, J., and Danchin, M. (2021). Factors influencing Australian healthcare workers’ COVID-19 vaccine intentions across settings: A cross-sectional survey. Vaccines, 10(1), 3. https://​doi​.org/​10​.3390/​vaccines10010003 Lucas, J. (2021, December 2). US white supremacists targeting under-vaxxed Aboriginal communities, WA Premier says. ABC News. https://​www​.abc​.net​.au/​news/​2021​-12​-02/​us​-white​-supremacists​ -targeting​-aboriginal​-communities​-in​-wa/​100670090 McGowan, M., and Knaus, C. (2021, November 22). Liberal MP Gerard Rennick floods Facebook with vaccine posts he admits may not be ‘100% accurate’. The Guardian. https://​www​.theguardian​ .com/​australia​-news/​2021/​nov/​23/​liberal​-mp​-gerard​-rennick​-floods​-facebook​-with​-vaccine​-posts​-he​ -admits​-may​-not​-be​-100​-accurate Mello, M. M., Studdert, D. M., and Parmet, W. E. (2015). Shifting vaccination politics—the end of personal-belief exemptions in California. New England Journal of Medicine, 373(9), 785–787. https://​ doi​.org/​10​.1056/​NEJMp1508701 Moynihan, D. P. (2020). Populism and the deep state: The attack on public service under Trump. https://​ ssrn​.com/​abstract​=​3607309 O’Flynn, J. (2021). Confronting the big challenges of our time: Making a difference during and after COVID-19. Public Management Review, 23(7), 961–980. https://​doi​.org/​10​.1080/​14719037​.2020​ .1820273 Pagliaro, S., Sacchi, S., Pacilli, M. G., Brambilla, M., Lionetti, F., Bettache, K., Bianchi, M., Biella, M., Bonnot, V., Boza, M., Butera, F., Ceylan-Batur, S., Chong, K., Chopova, T., Crimston, C. R., Álvarez, B., Cuadrado, I., Ellemers, N., Formanowicz, M., … Zubieta, E. (2021). Trust predicts COVID-19 prescribed and discretionary behavioral intentions in 23 countries. PLOS ONE, 16(3), e0248334. https://​doi​.org/​10​.1371/​journal​.pone​.0248334 Paine, H. (2021, December 10). ‘Not putting that in my body’: Hanson’s vaccine spray. https://​www​.news​ .com​.au/​lifestyle/​health/​not​-putting​-that​-in​-my​-body​-pauline​-hansons​-covid​-vaccine​-spray/​news​-story/​ ce​533b8be928​e0cfb3e2a62f67929cad Painter, M., and Pierre, J. (2004). Challenges to State Policy Capacity: Global Trends and Comparative Perspectives. Springer. Rennick, G. (n.d.). COVID Vax Medical Whistleblowers Form. Senator Gerard Rennick. Retrieved May 27, 2022, from https://​www​.gerardrennick​.com​.au/​whistleblowers/​ Rozbroj, T., Lyons, A., and Lucke, J. (2019). The mad leading the blind: Perceptions of the vaccine-refusal movement among Australians who support vaccination. Vaccine, 37(40), 5986–5993. https://​doi​.org/​10​.1016/​j​.vaccine​.2019​.08​.023 Rydland, H. T., Friedman, J., Stringhini, S., Link, B. G., and Eikemo, T. A. (2022). The radically unequal distribution of Covid-19 vaccinations: A predictable yet avoidable symptom of the fundamental causes of inequality. Humanities and Social Sciences Communications, 9(1), 1–6. https://​doi​.org/​10​ .1057/​s41599​-022​-01073​-z SAGE Working Group on Vaccine Hesitancy. (2014). Report of the SAGE Working Group on Vaccine Hesitancy. World Health Organization. https://​www​.who​.int/​immunization/​sage/​meetings/​2014/​ october/​SAGE​_working​_group​_revised​_report​_vaccine​_hesitancy​.pdf​?ua​=​1 Skjefte, M., Ngirbabul, M., Akeju, O., Escudero, D., Hernandez-Diaz, S., Wyszynski, D. F., and Wu, J. W. (2021). COVID-19 vaccine acceptance among pregnant women and mothers of young children: Results of a survey in 16 countries. European Journal of Epidemiology, 36(2), 197–211. https://​doi​ .org/​10​.1007/​s10654​-021​-00728​-6 Smith, D. T., Attwell, K., and Evers, U. (2021). Support for a COVID-19 vaccine mandate in the face of safety concerns and political affiliations: An Australian study. Politics, 026339572110090. https://​doi​ .org/​10​.1177/​02633957211009066 Sobo, E. J. (2016). Theorizing (vaccine) refusal: Through the looking glass. Cultural Anthropology, 31(3), 342–350. https://​doi​.org/​10​.14506/​ca31​.3​.04 Solís Arce, J. S., Warren, S. S., Meriggi, N. F., Scacco, A., McMurry, N., Voors, M., Syunyaev, G., Malik, A. A., Aboutajdine, S., Adeojo, O., Anigo, D., Armand, A., Asad, S., Atyera, M., Augsburg,

Trust, capacity and management of vaccine rollouts  217 B., Awasthi, M., Ayesiga, G. E., Bancalari, A., Björkman Nyqvist, M., … Omer, S. B. (2021). COVID-19 vaccine acceptance and hesitancy in low- and middle-income countries. Nature Medicine, 27(8), 1385–1394. https://​doi​.org/​10​.1038/​s41591​-021​-01454​-y Taylor, J. (2021, July 29). From ‘it’s not a race’ to ‘go for gold’: How Scott Morrison pivoted on Australia’s Covid vaccine rollout. The Guardian. https://​www​.theguardian​.com/​society/​2021/​jul/​29/​ from​-its​-not​-a​-race​-to​-go​-for​-gold​-how​-scott​-morrison​-pivoted​-on​-australias​-covid​-vaccine​-rollout Van de Walle, S., Van Roosbroek, S., and Bouckaert, G. (2008). Trust in the public sector: Is there any evidence for a long-term decline? International Review of Administrative Sciences, 74(1), 47–64. https://​doi​.org/​10​.1177/​0020852307085733 van Holm, E. J. (2019). Unequal cities, unequal participation: The effect of income inequality on civic engagement. The American Review of Public Administration, 49(2), 135–144. https://​doi​.org/​10​.1177/​ 0275074018791217 WA Department of Health. (2021, November 22). Keeping Culture Safe and Strong: Vaccination Focus. Government of Western Australia, Department of Health. https://​ww2​.health​.wa​.gov​.au/​News/​2021/​ Keeping​-Culture​-Safe​-and​-Strong Wiley, K. E., Leask, J., Attwell, K., Helps, C., Barclay, L., Ward, P. R., and Carter, S. M. (2021). Stigmatized for standing up for my child: A qualitative study of non-vaccinating parents in Australia. SSM – Population Health, 16, 100926. https://​doi​.org/​10​.1016/​j​.ssmph​.2021​.100926

17. The governance of food security in the post-COVID-19 context: innovative principles for public management in Argentina Joaquín Pérez Martín

INTRODUCTION As in many other countries in the world, the spread and long persistence of COVID-19 has deepened social exclusion, poverty, and food insecurity in Argentina (PNUD Argentina, 2020). This, in turn, is framed in a local context marked by a complex pre-pandemic macroeconomic situation characterized, among other issues of magnitude, by very high inflation rates, a phenomenon that currently has been going on for the last two decades. This situation has affected household incomes, local prices, and food security, particularly among the poorest households that rely on informal jobs. Global food prices have risen sharply – in real terms – since the 2007/2008 global financial crisis, and since then they have not only remained at high levels but have also increased substantially in volatility (FAO, 2022). Throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, between March 2020 and 2022, these rises have become more prominent, increasing the FAO food price index by 62 percent, and severely affecting food security governance, which considers all the drivers, governing activities, and policy outputs and outcomes involved in feeding the population (based on Pérez-Escamilla et al., 2017). In the context of the COVID-19 pandemic, the governance of food security in Argentina has been focused on policies toward sustaining the population’s income levels and reducing the increase in food prices. Although investment in assistance to contain the impacts of the pandemic increased, reaching an equivalent amount of 6.7 percent of the GDP (Ministerio de Desarrollo Productivo, 2020), and new policies focused on both income and prices were designed (Ernst and López Mourelo, 2020), these have not been sufficient to counteract the social and economic impact of COVID-19. Even though this set of policies served as a palliative for millions of people, different public management deficiencies emerged reducing the effectiveness of public resources. Even in the midst of the transition towards overcoming the pandemic, both in terms of the number of cases and deaths in the country, as well as in terms of the evolution of the main socio-economic indicators, food supply conditions remain a problem that transcends the pandemic and impacts the food security of the population. Within this framework, this chapter will first include a brief presentation of the food supply issue and the scope that public management has on its governance, with special emphasis on the provision of healthy diets. Second, it will address in general terms the main challenges that COVID-19 raises for food security governance. In the following section, the focus will be on four innovative principles for public management in the post-pandemic context. To conclude, a set of final reflections on improving governance capacity on food and nutrition security in the post-COVID-19 context is presented. 218

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THE URBAN FOOD SUPPLY IN ARGENTINA Food supply is structured around three economic activities: storage, circulation, and transactions between the supply (agricultural, livestock, and agro-industrial production, mainly rural and peri-urban) and the demand for consumption inside and outside of urban households. This logistical and commercial network is made up of private stakeholders involved in production (primary or industrial), cargo transportation, and wholesale and retail commercialization, where the final transaction with household consumption takes place. Within this framework, this logistical and commercial network makes up an aggregate supply at the neighborhood level with distinct characteristics in terms of price, quality, availability, and diversity of suppliers. The operation of the urban food supply is almost exclusively managed by private actors and structured around the role of supermarket chains that have 40 percent of the market share, thousands of branches, and millions of commercial square meters in the country’s main cities (Pérez Martín, in press). However, supermarket chains have been able to expand differentially among the various food sectors: they dominate in beverages, dairy products, and dry goods, competing with other types of stores; and they have low levels of market share in fresh foods, complementing other commercial typologies, in the case of meat, baked goods, fruits, and vegetables. To achieve a healthy diet in Argentina, the population should increase the consumption of fruits, vegetables (Ballesteros et al., 2022), and dairy products, decrease the consumption of fats and sweets, and improve the diversity and nutritional quality of the consumption of meats and eggs; oils, nuts and seeds; and legumes, cereals, bread and pasta (Zapata and Rovirosa, 2021). Regarding these food needs, Viego et al. (2017) have estimated that between 2011 and 2015 a healthy diet in Argentina was 80 percent more expensive than an unhealthy diet. The characteristics of the Argentine urban system create a very unbalanced territorial distribution not only of the population and economic activities but also of the functioning of food supply networks: the Metropolitan Area of Buenos Aires (AMBA), the main urban agglomeration of the country, concentrates 41 percent of national household spending on food and beverages and the highest per capita and per square kilometer spending, which greatly attracts productive, logistical and commercial actors to operate there (INDEC, 2020). This strong imbalance leads to a dynamic of interaction between the operation of the supply networks of the AMBA – where supermarket chains have an even greater influence on household food purchases and make up a moderately concentrated market structure – and the rest of the country, with a strong influence of the former, given its centrality. In other words, the shape and operation of the logistical and commercial network of the AMBA, in terms of supply and prices, will inevitably influence the food supply of the rest of the country. Looking at the interior of the household economy, the tension between incomes and prices has particularly affected the main expenditure that all households in the country have: food expenses, which demand 22.7 percent of the average family budget (INDEC, 2019). Thus, in the last six years, the prevalence of moderate and severe food insecurity has increased 86 percent, reaching 35.8 percent of the population in the period 2018–2020 (FAO, 2021). Although data for 2021 is not yet available, this situation must have been exacerbated given the growth of poverty, which reached 40.6 percent of the population in the first half of 2021 (INDEC, 2021a), and of inflation, which climbed to 50.3 percent for the food and non-alcoholic beverages category throughout 2021 (INDEC, 2022). Inflation has been the

220  Research handbook on public management and COVID-19 main problem identified by the population in the last 14 months, according to a UDESA (2022) public opinion survey. The worsening socio-economic conditions of households resulting from the pandemic have affected not only food security in terms of access (Bonfiglio, 2021), but also the quality of diets based on their diversity and contribution to household nutrition (Sudriá et al., 2020). Due to the economic restrictions generated by the pandemic, 33.8 percent of households in the AMBA reduced the consumption of at least one food product. This is framed within the context where 49.3 percent of households experienced a decrease in their family income compared with the pre-pandemic situation (INDEC, 2020). Argentina has a long tradition as a major global supplier of agri-food products, so much so that it has historically been identified as the “breadbasket of the world” (Girbal Blacha, 2019), while nowadays it is the third largest global exporter. This trajectory has created a sort of “dream of abundance”: under the neoliberal paradigm, it is assumed that in the face of a globalized and competitive sector, public policy should not influence in any way other than facilitating certain issues. This, in turn, is upheld by the claim that, since supply is abundant, prices in the domestic market would tend to be low, allowing widespread accessibility to food and safeguarding food security, and assuring governance. While the centralized state planning and controlling capacity in the agri-food sector lost relevance due to the deregulation process, the lack of a new organizational plan under the New Public Management agenda (Dickinson, 2016) has been configuring grey areas of unclear influence. As a consequence, one of the most significant impacts of this “dream of abundance” is that the particularities of the logistic and commercial urban elements that configure the domestic food supply lack integration and coordination due to long-term deep fragmentation among different governmental areas (Dickinson and Smith, 2018). On the one hand, there is a ministry of agricultural policies oriented, to a large extent, to exportable production (now the Ministry of Agriculture, Livestock and Fisheries), with a very limited direct impact on trade issues (Lattuada and Nogueira, 2011). On the other hand, there is a secretariat oriented to the domestic market (today the Secretariat of Domestic Trade) with no direct impact on production, exports or sectoral logistics. The present situation of high food prices has brought two relevant effects for Argentina: on the one hand, it benefits the national economy through increased exports, production, and, to a lesser extent, employment, given the enormous relevance of the agri-food sector in the country’s economy (Lódola et al., 2019). On the other hand, it has accelerated the ongoing inflationary process, now widely recognized as a multi-causal phenomenon, in which both macroeconomic elements and others derived from sectoral and territorial issues have an impact. Within this context, the role of public management is very limited, both in terms of participation in some of the urban food supply stages, as well as in terms of policy intervention, coordination, or monitoring of the configuration between the different stakeholders and their operations. In an extremely complex socio-economic context, different kinds of effective responses are demanded from public management, especially, targeting the issue of food prices. However, since the capacity to influence – in some way – the dynamics of articulation of the private actors is so limited, the governance of food security is basically in the hands of the private entities that make up the logistic and commercial networks. In this sense, as Jackson (2015) presents, the state might assume three different roles (allocative, distributional, and stabilization) regarding the food security issue that might be implemented with different measures.

The governance of food security in the post-COVID-19 context  221

TOWARDS FOOD SECURITY GOVERNANCE IN ARGENTINA: PUBLIC MANAGEMENT INNOVATION IN THE POST-COVID-19 CONTEXT The dominance of the private sector in the food supply and the lack of state capacity to influence it has led to the accumulation of a significant number of public policies that have failed in their objectives, either because they have not even been implemented or because the attempts were unsuccessful. It does not seem to be necessary to reform or repeal these laws or regulations, which are still in force, but following Bovaird and Löffler (2015) there is potential to transform from a law-driven perspective towards a service-driven approach under improvements in the public management structure and functioning. Among these, we can mention the Ley de Mercados de Interés Nacional [Law for National Interest Markets] that was sanctioned in 1971, the installation of the Mercado Central de Buenos Aires [Wholesale Buenos Aires Central Market] in 1984 (a topic expanded in Pérez Martín and Barsky, 2021), the Programa Belgrano de modernización del comercio minorista [Belgrano Program for the modernization of retail trade] in 1996, the implementation of the Red Comprar [the Buying Network] in 2014, and the Ley de Góndolas [the Display Racks Law] in 2020. Consequently, the capacity of the governments to design and implement – both politically and technically – public policies focused on food supply has been put in serious doubt. Within this context, the only policy that has been moderately successful in achieving its objectives and lasting for almost a decade, even throughout administrations with different political stances and views on the state’s role, is the so-called Precios Cuidados [Cared for Prices], implemented in 2014. In 2016, in the face of the assumption of an administration that promoted liberal policies, it was announced that this measure would cease to be implemented, although the persistence of high inflation rates and the broad support it had among the population (75 percent rated it positively) forced it to remain in place (Jueguen, 2016a, 2016b). This measure is still in place and has been one of the main policies of the current administration under COVID-19 to curb food price growth, although it has proven to be clearly insufficient. Additionally, in 2021, the Ley de Etiquetado Frontal de Alimentos [the Law on Front-of-the-Food Labeling] was approved and is currently in the regulatory period for its effective application. Unlike the aforementioned policies, the expectation is that its implementation will be successful since it depends exclusively on the adaptation, registration, and control of the packaging used for food and not on the logistical or commercial operation of the supply network, which requires other management capabilities. On the other hand, the experiences of implementing front-of-package food labeling regulations have been very successful in other Latin American countries, substantially improving access to healthier diets. In Argentina, there is a positive expectation to replicate these results, as concluded by Allemandi et al. (2018). As has been noted, COVID-19 has worsened the poverty and social exclusion situation that was pre-existent in Argentina, contrasting even more the abundance of agri-food production and exports with food insecurity, generated by an imbalance between household income and food prices. In addition to this, the political tension caused by such high inflation rates, which is a problem that Argentina has historically carried (Rapoport, 2011), prevents the configuration of a scheme of governance around food security issues, given the urgency demanded by socio-economic indicators.

222  Research handbook on public management and COVID-19 While 60 percent of the population expressed in the UDESA (2020) survey that the pandemic has significantly changed their lives, the capacity of public management to deal with the different kinds and magnitude of problems that have arisen from COVID-19 was not sufficient. The rise of new ways of working, consuming, and living demand new kinds of regulation or policies to increase life quality, especially in a context where the socio-economic indicators diminished. This happened, for instance, with the massive expansion of food e-commerce during the pandemic, which disarticulated and displaced the existing network mostly based in face-to-face commercial linkages and generated different types of challenges in terms of food security governance. For instance, online supermarket purchases tripled – in real terms – during the pandemic (INDEC, 2021b), affecting small retailers and the supply network. The amount, size and role of the actors in the food supply chain are configuring new kinds of complex problems with a high degree of specialization that governments are not ready to deal with. The fragile situation of public management, particularly with the instability, informality and low salaries of public servants at the national and provincial levels, affects the capacity to design and implement new policies in the post-COVID-19 context. Moreover, the pandemic started with a new administration that took office only three months earlier and was adjusting and establishing the working teams in each area. As Oszlak (2020) argues for the Argentinean case, in the post-COVID-19 context what is challenging the public management capacity to efficiently deliver goods, services and regulations to the citizenship are the state “deformity” and the short-term perspective. The first refers to the irregular dimension, responsibilities, operational capacity and efficiency of the different governmental areas that demanded, already, in the pre-pandemic context a comprehensive resources re-assignation. During and after the pandemic, this situation of excessive or scarce capacity linked to the demand of new government services or regulations was intensified. The short-term perspective is due to different elements like the political confrontation between government and opposition, the electoral tension every two years and, regarding food security, the urgency that the inflation rate constantly brings. In terms of implementing measures towards increasing food security governance, government faces a very complex problem, with multiple scales, actors, and synergies that operate at the same time to define food prices and accessibility, as Candel (2014) highlighted. The question that arises in the Argentinean case is who – which institution or governmental area – is in charge of assuring food security, but there is no clear answer for that.

FOUR GENERAL PRINCIPLES TOWARDS INNOVATION IN PUBLIC MANAGEMENT AND GOVERNANCE IN THE POST-COVID-19 CONTEXT Considering the institutional and political context, four general principles are presented below as axes of innovation for public management and post-COVID-19 policies focused on increasing the state capacity of governance of food security, as follows: 1. 2. 3. 4.

Market information and monitoring. Sectoral coordination. Technical and technological development and innovation. Intervention and competition.

The governance of food security in the post-COVID-19 context  223 The implementation of these four principles presupposes a sustained increase in the state’s capacity to improve coordination with the private sector and direct the implementation of improvements in the governance of food security. These four principles are considered complementary and interdependent but depend on the particularities of each food sector and subsector. None of these principles alone is sufficient to have a significant impact on the current food security governance situation. At the same time, it is worth noting there are macroeconomic issues linked to the inflationary phenomenon that go beyond this sectoral and territorial analysis of the operation of food supply and its governance, which can be explored separately and in conjunction with this approach. Principle I: Market Information and Monitoring The first principle aims to promote and strengthen the collection, processing, and – especially – the dissemination of market data and information, first, to be able to monitor the evolution of the main sectoral statistics from both the public sector and the private entities involved. At the same time, the availability of public information and statistics allows the development of activities such as research and sectoral analysis, both by private and public entities, as well as within the framework of academic research, which strengthens the capacity for analysis and planning, both directly and indirectly. This is expected to generate a greater quantity and diversity of knowledge production around sectoral, territorial, and socio-economic issues. Finally, particularly in the agri-food sector, there is the availability and accessibility of market information feedback into the operation of the productive, logistic and commercial sectors and players. That is to say, given that price formation is structured by the interaction of a number of factors throughout the logistical and commercial network, in almost all cases this occurs in private transactions, generally between two parties. In this way, the information that emerges from it is safeguarded among the intervening parties, restricting the generation of public information of sectoral interest. The creation of market information, and in particular its accessibility and dissemination, is a very effective tool for reducing information gaps and transaction costs (Quagliani et al., 2006) and improving competitive conditions, especially benefiting small and medium-sized producers and traders. On the other hand, the availability of information allows government agencies to play a more active role in generating strategies for mass dissemination to sectoral stakeholders, taking advantage of the widespread adoption of technologies applied to smartphones. Principle II: Sectoral Coordination The second proposed principle focuses on the development of logistical and commercial infrastructures, as well as complementary measures that promote interaction among the different stakeholders in order to generate economies of scale, avoiding centralization of the operation. In such a large country, with its population and food consumption so disproportionately dispersed, the development of economies of scale for logistical and commercial operations is essential to ensure an efficient and competitive supply that guarantees the participation of small and medium-sized producers, logistic operators and traders. Otherwise, if infrastructure or mechanisms that territorially concentrate the operation of thousands of players are not fostered, the economy of scale required to supply the AMBA region and the rest of the country will only be attainable by large companies, thus reducing competition. In turn, an uncoordi-

224  Research handbook on public management and COVID-19 nated supply chain prevents more balanced governance between public and private entities, with larger sectoral entities being the ones that can take advantage of this situation. The food sectors most affected by the lack of coordination are those that are mainly retailed outside the supermarket chains (fruits, vegetables, meats and baked goods, as mentioned above). These markets are structured by thousands and thousands of producers, logistic and commercial operators, which has made it difficult, among other reasons, for supermarkets to capture these markets. The aforementioned Law for National Interest Markets has been an unsuccessful attempt to establish a network of wholesale markets that promote the coordination of supply on a national scale. Although it surely has an outdated look in some elements of the current logistical and commercial operation, the guiding principles still seem to be accurate for the characteristics of supply of the country. With the current legal framework of national scope, an operation scheme, investment, and implementation of a series of policies that structure a supply coordination scheme with a service-driven perspective should be planned. Principle III: Technical and Technological Development and Innovation This third principle proposes to promote the development of technical and technological capabilities related to the operation of logistical and commercial services. The scientific development organizations that were established in Argentina in the mid-twentieth century have been dedicated to research, innovation, knowledge transfer, and technical-technological development, exclusively in the sectors of agriculture and livestock in the case of the National Institute of Agricultural Technology and of the industry itself, as in the case of the National Institute of Industrial Technology (Bisang, 1994). In other words, the development of capabilities linked to services has been excluded, while the focus has been placed on those related to the production of agricultural or industrial goods. In this way, logistical and commercial issues have been exclusively relegated to private development and to a large extent relegated from the view of these two institutes. As a result, there has been no promotion of articulation between sectoral actors and the public sector, at least in these types of institutes that allow for mid-term work horizons, outside the turbulent dynamics of politics and public management. This is not a dichotomous question: state or private development, but rather the opposite. These organizations have gone through different moments in terms of their motivations, financing, and relevance, but with their ups and downs, they have been part of the sector’s development together with the private actors, providing feedback and promoting complementary and interactive initiatives. At the same time, they have also provided the basis for the analysis and definition of public policies, whether for promotion, coordination, or regulatory intervention. Thus, food supply – in its logistical and commercial dimensions – has been relegated to the actions of private entities which, due to the nature of their activity, have neither a territorial or sectoral development perspective nor objective, much less do they act to promote food security governance. In this regard, it is interesting to analyze the experience of a relevant initiative in the neighboring country of Uruguay, where in 2010 the National Logistics Institute was launched with the aim of developing research, training, awareness, and advisory services to promote the growth and expansion of the logistics sector, not only nationally but also regionally (Opertti, 2010).

The governance of food security in the post-COVID-19 context  225 Principle IV: Intervention and Competition The fourth and last principle focuses on ensuring levels of competition and fairness in commercial transactions in the retail sector, particularly in supermarket chains. There, the sales of some food sectors (dry goods, beverages, and dairy products, as mentioned above) are mostly concentrated and, given the expansion in thousands of branches and millions of square meters of retail space, the impacts on price setting spread to the rest of the food sectors and their commercial typologies. It is a sector that, at the national level, is deconcentrated, but at the AMBA regional level, from where price setting is structured at the national level, the sector is moderately concentrated, with 80 percent of the branches and 76 percent of the commercial area distributed among only five companies (Pérez Martín, in press). Given the scale of operation of these companies, and the sectoral and territorial impact on food supply, the governance of the operation of the logistical and commercial networks is largely determined by the supermarket chains. In this sense, the recently approved Display Racks Law has – up to the beginning of 2022 – failed in its implementation due to ineffective regulation, as well as to a limited technical and political state capacity to promote its implementation in the face of a few very powerful companies. The focus of this law is the promotion of competition on the supermarket shelves, which is complex to address effectively given the magnitude of the operation, the hundreds of food producers that supply their products, and the millions of consumers who come to do their shopping every day. There is still the possibility of proposing a more effective regulation and implementation of this brand-new legislation towards configuring a competitive commercial environment.

FINAL THOUGHTS: FOOD AND NUTRITION SECURITY IN THE POST-COVID-19 CONTEXT The great agri-food production and export, fundamental to the Argentine economy, contrasts with persistent and growing food insecurity. In this context, the dynamics of external prices – increasing and fluctuating – and the volume that Argentina allocates to the different markets, stress the implementation of two State policies: increasing exports and guaranteeing the food and nutritional security of the population. In turn, at the domestic level, the dynamics of price setting are structured around the central role of supermarket chains. This is complementary to the incapacity of the more decentralized productive, logistical, and commercial sectors to generate economies of scale that allow them to operate efficiently in the AMBA and the national market. Within this context, the different levels of government have not been able to identify the limitations and propose innovative principles in public management to guarantee food security governance in the context of high inflation rates that Argentina has been experiencing in the last decades. This situation is being replicated in most Latin American countries due to the impact of COVID-19 and, more recently, the war in Ukraine that pushed food prices. The role of the state and the capacity of governance in the food security issue is a matter of concern among international institutions such as the FAO, which urges measures among countries to diminish the scope of food insecurity that is affecting 56.5 million people. Recently, in 2021, in the midst of the COVID-19 pandemic, two organizations with relevance to the issue of food supply governance have been created: The Economic and Social

226  Research handbook on public management and COVID-19 Council and the Federal Council for Domestic Trade. The former does not focus exclusively on the issue of food supply but points it out as one of the key topics to be included among the consensual policymaking process for the short, medium, and long term. In the second case, it is an area of provincial participation to develop policies of national scope. Any of these areas could be appropriate to bring together the four general principles that have been presented as axes of innovation for public management and post-COVID-19 policies with a focus on the governance of food security. Reaching a consensus to diagnose and propose new measures to improve access to food and healthy diets for millions of Argentine men and women is urgent.

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18. ‘Build back better’: infrastructure policy’s post-pandemic promise1 Sara Bice

INTRODUCTION The COVID-19 pandemic accentuated our reliance on infrastructure and made prominent the critical infrastructure gaps in diverse communities worldwide. The state of existing infrastructure played a major role in governments’ pandemic responses and i­n citizens’ experiences of the pandemic. For many major cities and urban areas, the pandemic highlighted access to hospitals, reliable internet (Mouratidis, 2021), parks, gardens (Carmona et al., 2020) and food security (Loopstra, 2020) during periods of extended lockdown (Veeroja and Foliente, 2021). For many regional and rural areas and developing economies, the pandemic revealed the quality of local health care facilities, reliance on mass or crowded transport modes requiring close public interaction (Naveen and Gurtoo, 2022) or lack of pharmaceutical manufacturing plants (Maxmen, 2021). This chapter explores the public infrastructure sector during the height of the COVID-19 pandemic. It adopts a social scientific perspective to examine governments’ long-held reliance on infrastructure construction and maintenance as a socio-economic bolster in times of crisis (Vagliasindi and Gorgulu, 2021). By adopting a social vantage point, the chapter highlights the often unacknowledged but common interlinkages between disparate policy arenas, especially health, environment, crisis management and infrastructure planning. These interconnections reflect the knotty nature of contemporary public policymaking, reinforced and, in many places, writ ever larger through COVID-19 pandemic policy responses. The discussion reveals an inflection point for infrastructure selection, planning and delivery that is reflective of the broader, COVID-emergent global policy arena. Here, as Professor Janine O’Flynn writes, ‘We need to move out of our silos … to work at the intersections to make a difference’ (O’Flynn, 2021). The global infrastructure sector will play a central role in post-pandemic socio-economic recovery. To do so, it is vital that policymakers, public managers and private sector developers responsible for project delivery understand and work effectively across these boundaries. It is equally vital that infrastructure delivery-as-crisis-response adopts a human-centred and place-based approach that accommodates the interests and concerns of local communities, even within an environment pressurised for accelerated project delivery. The chapter continues with a brief review of historical reliance on infrastructure investment as crisis-response. It surveys well-known examples from developed nations alongside less-popularised experiences in developing economies to demonstrate the ubiquity of infrastructure as public policy panacea. Common approaches to policymaking and management during crisis and lessons from those experiences are drawn out to suggest the administrative challenges shared by infrastructure stimulus. The chapter then explores very recent COVID-19-related infrastructure stimulus and planning changes, with a focus on Australia 228

‘Build back better’: infrastructure policy’s post-pandemic promise  229 as an illustrative example. This part of the discussion introduces the interlinkages between diverse policy areas and begins to outline the opportunities and challenges of the ‘big build’ from a public management perspective. Recent primary research findings from the Australian National University (ANU) Institute for Infrastructure in Society (I2S) are introduced to contribute public perspectives on the role of infrastructure in socio-economic recovery. The concluding discussion weaves these threads of the big build together to offer a portrait of the ways in which infrastructure stimulus – at least as it is playing out in the instances presented – offers public managers a proven response measure but also a promise of resilience potentially threatened by demands of urgency and acceleration.

INFRASTRUCTURE AS PUBLIC POLICY PANACEA A very brief history: economic stimulus, crisis response and resilience-building via infrastructure is a long-serving mainstay in government tool kits. Governments do not just invest in, deliver and maintain infrastructure, they leverage it as a means of asserting power and control, to advance political agendas, and to discipline major institutions (Bogart, 2022). Concerns for infrastructure informed the United States’ Founders’ choice of a Constitutional system of government (White, 2012). The Raj’s selection of which communities received rail connections throughout India, Bangladesh and Pakistan shaped economic futures by opening and growing connected locations’ economies in the late nineteenth to early twentieth centuries, while those left unconnected experienced substantially slower progress and lower incomes (Donaldson, 2018). In Meiji Japan (1867–1912) government infrastructure investment ‘meant centralization of political control, more responsive national defense, and the ability to spread economic growth to outlying areas’ (Tang, 2014, p. 3). Similarly, relationships between governments’ use of infrastructure as a political asset and economic driver are visible across time and geographies. In eighteenth-century England, Adam Smith asserted the importance of river infrastructure, provoking political divides upand downstream (Bogart, 2017). Selections of railroad locations fuelled economic inequalities in colonial era Kenya (Jedwab et al., 2017). In late nineteenth-century Bogota, Colombia, creation of the city grid originated poorer citizens’ long-term reliance on public transport (Brooks and Denoeux, 2022). Clearly, government decisions about infrastructure shape economies and societies. In contemporary times, China’s US$1 trillion Belt and Road Initiative, launched in 2013, is central to a national narrative of modernisation, economic and technological power and to China’s growing role in less developed economies across the globe (Ferdinand, 2016). Here again, infrastructure serves as policy response, stimulus and psychological prop. Governments historically have also deployed infrastructure for crisis response, as a major means of fiscal stimulus, including job creation, and for bolstering public optimism in a better future; often to all of these ends all at once. Famous twentieth-century examples include: the United States’ ‘New Deal’ through which President Franklin D. Roosevelt responded to the Great Depression largely by creating new public infrastructure via the Works Progress Administration (Hiltzik, 2011), the post-Second World War reconstruction of Europe (Diefendorf, 1989), and the post-atomic bomb reconstruction of Hiroshima (Zwigenberg, 2014). In each of these cases, respective governments saw in infrastructure the shaping of not just new transport and facilities but of new lives and opportunities that would mould post-war identities. More recent examples include Thai, Sri Lankan and Indonesian reconstruction after

230  Research handbook on public management and COVID-19 the 2004 tsunami (Jayasuriya and McCawley, 2008) and Australian responses to catastrophic, climate change-induced bushfires which catalysed not only reconstruction but also policy and social change (Jetten et al., 2021). In these instances, infrastructure as a recovery mechanism reinstituted towns and cities while offering renewed confidence for residents stricken by natural disasters. Pandemic Policy Responses: Infrastructure to the Rescue (Again!) Reliance on infrastructure to energise recovery and bolster national hope remains a fundamental policy response in the COVID-19 pandemic. The United States’ ‘Build Back Better’ campaign provides the most globally prominent example. Initially put before Congress in November 2021, the Bill is a landmark initiative to rebound from the crisis, dedicating an extraordinary US$2 trillion over 10 years to sweeping investments and reforms in everything from pre-kindergarten education to health care and tax reforms to clean energy infrastructure (Prokop, 2021). The Build Back Better Bill is twinned by a US$1 trillion Bipartisan Infrastructure Bill, with US$550 billion devoted to transportation, broadband communications and utilities. At time of writing, the policy rhetoric remained strong, although the Build Back Better Bill remained stalled in Congress, while 40-year-high inflation levels exploded project costs. A ‘Build Back Better’ mantra similarly focused the United Kingdom’s COVID-19 recovery plans (Her Majesty’s Treasury, 2021) with the Parliament pledging historically high levels of infrastructure investment, especially to support their transition to net zero by 2050 via a ‘Green Industrial Revolution’ incorporating clean energy infrastructure. The Build Back Better incantation defines recovery efforts across the G7 in the form of the US-led ‘Build Back Better World’ (White House, 2021), a counter to China’s Belt and Road Initiative. Australia and New Zealand are also pursuing the ‘build back better’ rhetoric via both countries announcing substantial levels of infrastructure investment, with Australia’s marking a historic high for land transport infrastructure (Australian Department of Infrastructure, n.d.). In all these disparate instances, politicians and policymakers position infrastructure as a proven and core crisis response measure, promoting jobs creation, improved land value and amenities, better efficiency for urban areas and accommodation for future population growth. Multi-lateral bodies, including the OECD (2017), World Bank and the United Nations (UN, 2020), also adopt the ‘build back better’ chorus in response to the COVID-19 pandemic (OECD, 2020). All focus many of their policies on infrastructure for pandemic recovery, with the World Bank and UN especially targeting lower to middle income economies. For wealthier nations, the OECD policy response prioritises a ‘green recovery’ (OECD, 2022a) with emphasis on renewable energy and energy security, environmentally friendly transport and resilient infrastructure, incorporating health (OECD, 2021). It also highlights transport infrastructure’s role in meeting global supply chain challenges (OECD, 2022b), currently exacerbated by the war in Ukraine and rising shipping prices. The World Bank, meanwhile, profiles the ‘woefully inadequate’ infrastructure in much of the developing world (Puliti, 2022), pushing recovery policies for improved public transport (Ardila-Gomez, 2020), management of public–private partnerships (PPPs) for infrastructure builds (Sy, 2022), and renewable energy investments (World Bank, 2020), with interventions based on the Quality Infrastructure Investment principles (World Bank, 2021). The United Nations’ broader policy response (UN, 2020) prioritises human rights, wellbeing and sustainability, coupled with sustainable energy systems, transport

‘Build back better’: infrastructure policy’s post-pandemic promise  231 supply chains and up-front acknowledgement of the ‘linkages between nature and health’, including implications for urbanisation and health infrastructure. Policymakers and public managers within and beyond government are drawing on time-proven crisis-response measures through infrastructure. National governments, international organisations and multi-lateral bodies influencing developed and developing economies are consistent in policy rhetoric and response. Importantly, pandemic-related infrastructure policy is adopting the boundary-spanning identified as critical to effective crisis management and recovery, at least in all major instances noted here. These initiatives are responding not only to the health disasters wrought by the pandemic through supporting improved health infrastructure – and related water, sanitation and disease-limiting urban planning measures – but also to broader global challenges of climate change, globalised supply chains in geopolitically unsettled markets, and the extraordinary inequality visible in infrastructure gaps.

LESSONS FROM INFRASTRUCTURE AS STIMULUS The collective global policy focus on infrastructure as recovery stimulus is heartening. Responses are largely deploying a proven intervention which is simultaneously addressing complex challenges related to climate change, including acceleration of clean energy infrastructure, shifts towards sustainable infrastructure, and investments in public transport. Future studies may well find that the infrastructure policy measures and investments sparked by the COVID-19 pandemic were the turning point for global decarbonisation. While the current outlook seems positive, it is worthwhile also to consider known challenges for infrastructure investment before moving on to explore common approaches to policymaking and public management in times of crisis, and expected challenges. Recent World Bank research shows that not all crisis-response infrastructure investment is created equal. The selection of ‘high-quality, shovel ready projects’ was shown to be one of a small number of significant factors contributing to the success of infrastructure as economic stimulus in times of crisis (Vagliasindi and Gorgulu, 2021). Other critical factors include: interest rates (the closer to zero, the better), whether the investments are public or private (economic modelling remains mixed as to which is preferable), the degree of economic downturn or unemployment, and a nation’s absorptive capacity (usually defined as the total amount of capital, including foreign direct investment and aid, that a developing country can productively use). OECD research into green stimulus packages responding to the 2007–2008 Global Financial Crisis highlights the importance that integrated policy evaluation played in the effectiveness of those measures (Agrawala et al., 2020). It further emphasises the importance of embedding any international or transnational stimulus measures into domestic policy and of allowing necessary time to design policy properly for stimulus implementation, a major challenge when the urgency of crisis bears down. Studies such as these delineate the criteria for successful use of infrastructure as a policy response measure and can be complemented by broader infrastructure investment literature which focuses on ‘critical success factors’, especially for public–private partnerships. This body of research, which is substantial (Wang et al., 2022), impresses the importance of stable macroeconomic environments, strong regulatory guidance, good policy measures and complementary public management, community acceptance and appropriate financing (see, for example, Chileshe et al., 2022, Chan et al., 2010, Wibowo and Alfen, 2015) as ‘critical success

232  Research handbook on public management and COVID-19 factors’ for infrastructure investments. These critical success factors are important when considering the public management of infrastructure stimulus as pandemic crisis-response because they highlight considerations that may be neglected or undervalued in accelerated project environments common to crisis policy measures.

MAKING AND MANAGING POLICY DURING CRISES: CRISIS RESPONSE AND THE INFRASTRUCTURE SECTOR In order to explore contemporary policy approaches to infrastructure as crisis-response, it is helpful first to survey common qualities of policymaking in times of crisis, regardless of policy area or crisis type. The crisis management through public policy literature reinforces the difficult balance between rapid response to meet uncertain and changing situations while also delivering sound policy (see, Boin and ‘t Hart, this volume). For public administration, swift, assured leadership, combined with a clear rationale and efforts to reassert certainty is paramount (Boin, 2014). Policy design and implementation preparedness are also fundamental to successful crisis response (Capano, 2020; Boin and Lagadec, 2000), as are efforts to avoid known pitfalls, including waiting for others to step in and solve the crisis (Boin and Lagadec, 2000). Administrative structures and processes poorly equipped for contemporary crises that require management of complex systems are also known obstacles to successful crisis response (Boin and Smith, 2006). Public administration and related policymaking rest at the core of successful crisis leadership and recovery, which is no easy task. For infrastructure, this balance is particularly challenging. Although it offers a proven policy measure for socio-economic stimulus to support crisis recovery, it also requires substantial long-term planning, selection, approvals and delivery processes that make it difficult to implement quickly without sacrificing elements including project design, community acceptance, environmental security and long-term sustainability. The intricacies of infrastructure delivery are complicated in the best of times. When combined with contemporary crises, astute public management is required. Historically, government-led crisis management has primarily involved public service bargaining (Lodge and Hood, 2012), reliance on emergency-focused agencies and interventions of public service leaders who centralise decisions while taking on entrepreneurial or ‘improvisational’ roles (Boin and Lodge, 2016). Leading scholars now assert, however, that administrations are overly reliant on traditional means of crisis response to such an extent that ‘the political-administrative systems in place are easily outmatched by new and unforeseen threats’ (Boin and Lodge, 2016, p. 290). To illustrate, large, contemporary crises are increasing in their complexity and interconnection. The recent proliferation of ‘mega-disasters’ is now described as the ‘new normal’ (Tierney, 2014). These transboundary crises cross physical, temporal and functional borders, while threatening diverse geographic areas without a clear beginning or end (Ansell et al., 2010). Transboundary crises, of which the COVID-19 pandemic is one, generate power vacuums where responsibility for solving the crisis is unclear and where the boundaries of the crisis itself are blurry at best. For public administrators (and the publics they serve) this emerging situation results in two important effects which are relevant to managing not only infrastructure but all major aspects of governing. First, the ‘usual’ crisis response and management regimes are principally ineffective. Public administrators must rapidly and effectively

‘Build back better’: infrastructure policy’s post-pandemic promise  233 develop innovative and entrepreneurial ways to design and implement policy, in ways that often require them to throw out the rule book. Second, the impacts of the crisis tend to perpetuate for longer periods of time. This means that policy responses and their management must be designed with a longer-term view and also that the outcomes of the interventions may be harder to predict, given the distant time horizon. Clearly these two major effects are interrelated and also reinforcing. In the most difficult instances, these effects create a complex system characterised by a feedback loop of crisis occurrence, unsuccessful response and perpetuation of negative impacts (Ansell et al., 2010). Contemporary infrastructure delivery environments are also increasingly complex. Not only are governments racing to meet the multi-trillion dollar infrastructure gap – which existed even before the pandemic – they are also prioritising new, sustainable technologies while maintaining existing infrastructure (Fay and Rozenberg, 2019). Trade and aid initiatives, including China’s Belt and Road Initiative, have introduced complex politics into the mix, raising questions about national security and sovereignty (Bice and Laudares, 2018) while simultaneously advancing public–private partnership models (World Bank, 2014). Policies and regulation to support modern infrastructure worldwide lag the current, intensive delivery environment, further complicating project approvals and delivery (Hegmann, 2021). The majority of projects, regardless of country or location, are regulated on a project-by-project basis, with approvals processes largely relying on siloed environmental and/or social impact assessments. Contemporary delivery environments, however, require attention to ‘cumulative impacts’, encapsulating both the interactions between diverse infrastructure projects and systemic interactions, including changes ‘in the environment caused by multiple interactions among human activities and natural processes that accumulate across space and time’ (Blakley, 2021, p. 5). When infrastructure meets crisis, therefore, two highly complex systems of layered, long-term impacts interact within policy and administrative systems that struggle to accommodate this complexity, separately and combined. In the case of the COVID-19 pandemic and infrastructure policy measures, a mightily complex situation emerges.

MORE THAN ASPHALT AND RAILS: INFRASTRUCTURE AS CRISIS RESPONSE AND RESILIENCE INFLUENCER Infrastructure investment as a policy response to crisis is primarily positioned in economic terms, with the meeting of material needs and buoying of public hope rounding out the rationale. This latter aim is usually achieved through the job creation generated by infrastructure investment, especially where the crisis being addressed brings an economic component. The infrastructure itself, whether improved hospitals or schools, roads, rail or better water sanitation, is also a site of optimism. Combined, these qualities of infrastructure investment stimulate community resilience, understood as a community’s capacity to absorb and respond constructively to change. The next section of the chapter explores an illustrative case of Australian policy crisis response to the COVID-19 pandemic in relation to infrastructure. The Australian case, while distinct, is also generally representative of measures taken in other, similarly developed countries. It offers a helpful touchpoint for consideration of the role of infrastructure in societal resilience to the pandemic and also for the boundary-spanning and adaptation required of public administrators working with this major sector for pandemic recovery. The case is

234  Research handbook on public management and COVID-19 obviously limited inasmuch as it is a summary of a complex and ongoing situation, and policy settings will differ not only internally within Australia but also in any comparisons between Australia and similarly developed nations. Nevertheless, the Australian case is helpful for exploring how at least one government returned to infrastructure as a policy panacea during the crisis of a generation. This illustrative Australian case draws on the following studies: a policy analysis of major planning changes produced under pandemic emergency measures; a national series of surveys, Australian Perspectives on Infrastructure, conducted with over 5,000 members of the public in 2021 during the pandemic; an annual survey, The State of Infrastructure and Engagement, conducted with infrastructure sector professionals; and research findings from the ongoing work of the Australian National University Institute for Infrastructure in Society. Ultimately, the case demonstrates a traditional policy playbook, in terms of infrastructure-as-stimulus, while highlighting the tensions between short-term policy response and the long-term nature of infrastructure delivery, with implications for public administrators’ experiences, community trust in government and resilience.

AUSTRALIA’S COVID-19 INFRASTRUCTURE STIMULUS: AN ILLUSTRATIVE CASE During the early weeks of the pandemic in Australia, government leaders moved mountains to battle COVID-19 and its flow-on health and economic damage. By the end of March 2020, government loans and spending totalled around AU$330 billion to stimulate Australia’s economy. The earliest economic packages focused on health funding, job seeker payments, business subsidies, bank lending and welfare. By June 2020, the Commonwealth Government announced an AU$1.5 billion infrastructure stimulus package, including AU$1 billion for shovel-ready projects, a status known to be critical to stimulus success. Less than a year later in May 2021, with the pandemic still raging, the Commonwealth Government announced a record-breaking AU$110 billion in projects over the next decade, boosting the nation’s then-AU$272 billion infrastructure pipeline. By the 2022 budget, the stimulus package grew to AU$120billion with the investment aiming to leverage the jobs and industry creation possible through major infrastructure delivery to stimulate socio-economic recovery from the pandemic. State and Territory Governments fast-tracked, streamlined and invested with similar enthusiasm. The Victorian Government has approved more than AU$7.5 billion in projects since March 2020 under its Recovery Taskforce (Victorian Government, 2020), with the Queensland Government committing AU$14.7 billion in its June 2021 budget (Hartmann, 2021). The level and speed of these investments is unprecedented, a situation readily noticeable in many Australian neighbourhoods. Australia’s pandemic-era investments occurred alongside the introduction of streamlined infrastructure planning and approvals processes under State Emergency Measures (Bice and O’Connell, 2020). In certain cases, these changes allowed Ministers to circumvent normal planning processes and conditions of project approval (throwing out the rule book). For example, the New South Wales Planning Minister could approve new projects via consultation only with the Health Minister and without the usually required stakeholder consultation. In Queensland, as opposed to most other states, permanent changes were made to the Planning

‘Build back better’: infrastructure policy’s post-pandemic promise  235 Act (2016), including granting the Minister the authority to authorise relief from existing development application conditions or other operating constraints via approval of a temporary licence. The Queensland measures also increased the Minister’s flexibility to suspend or extend statutory timeframes related to the planning framework. Planning changes implemented during the pandemic aimed to ensure that governments could move as quickly as possible to establish critical facilities, such as quarantine centres, while simultaneously facilitating much-needed economic activity. For the public administrators usually responsible for Australian infrastructure planning and approvals processes, however, measures spurred by emergency health concerns fostered major changes in the performance of their roles, especially in terms of engagement with community members affected by infrastructure projects. Pandemic Measures and Community Engagement in Australian Infrastructure Infrastructure is a highly technical policy area, reliant on expert planners, engineers and project managers. Yet it is also one of the most societally impactful policy areas. Research in Australia demonstrates that, while management of technical issues and access to technical expertise are well in hand, stakeholder and community pressure, regulatory and planning issues, and project funding regularly delay or cancel major projects (Sanchez et al., 2022). Stakeholder concerns rest within a sub-discipline of project management focused on community engagement. In Australia, where most major infrastructure projects are government-funded, these professionals are commonly public service representatives, or consultants commissioned by the public service, who usually operate within small teams of five or fewer members (Bice et al., 2019) on a modest budget usually totalling less than 1 per cent of their total project budget. During the pandemic, emergency regulatory changes that incorporated the infrastructure sector affected community engagement professionals’ roles, including, in instances such as those noted above, removing planning requirements for performance of their roles. Other pandemic-related measures, including rolling lockdowns, border closures, social distancing requirements and work-from-home orders, restricted their ability to perform their roles through usual, face-to-face methods. In ‘normal times’ community engagement practitioners serve as the public facing representatives of major projects; the street-level bureaucrats of public infrastructure investment. They hold town hall events, staff information booths, doorknock, facilitate public consultations and oversee participation activities. Where their work was still required during the pandemic, many practitioners shifted to digital technologies for community engagement. Professionals surveyed during 2021 reported a sense of reduced interactions with community members, including feeling restricted in their work and their capacity to interact with community members and other community engagement-focused staff (O’Connor et al., 2022). Importantly, community engagement practitioners surveyed cautioned against intuiting that increased use of digital technologies for engagement would reduce citizens’ inequality and disadvantage in participation. While about half of respondents agreed that groups who usually face social disadvantage, especially rural and regional communities, would have more voice in major projects, respondents generally disagreed that digital technologies reduce inequality and disadvantage. Respondents also reported concerns about increasing misinformation about projects via social media. These early findings reveal both the pragmatic and quality changes to these professionals’ roles, wrought by the pandemic. They further signal an important space for future consider-

236  Research handbook on public management and COVID-19 ation. The intersections between public health measures, crisis-response policy in the form of planning changes and ‘business-as-usual’ infrastructure delivery reveal the complex interconnections between public service roles and administrative fields. Even in the rather straightforward example of community engagement approaches during the pandemic, challenges to professionals’ usual roles, quality of service delivery and capacity to perform are evident. In the Australian case, much of the control over the quality and style of their work was removed from their discretion, necessitating trade-offs and compromises which community engagement experts seem concerned to prevent from bleeding into post-pandemic practice (long-term effects). A potential shift in accepted practice presents another important area for future consideration, at least for Australia. Here, community engagement practitioners have demonstrated capability to perform their roles in new and different ways, yet many also assert that these new ways are not the best ways. As broader fiscal challenges continue, economic policymakers will likely focus attention on cost-cutting measures. For community engagement in infrastructure, digital engagement offers an economical option, but practitioners caution it may be a less inclusive and legitimate one. Balancing Infrastructure Stimulus and Cumulative Effects on Communities This chapter’s discussion makes clear that there is an enormous, global infrastructure gap, that intensive infrastructure delivery environments abound, and that regulatory and planning processes are generally ill-equipped to deal with cumulative effects in non-crisis times. Australia is no exception. Prior to the pandemic, the nation was in a historically intensive period of infrastructure delivery. Pandemic-related stimulus measures and policy changes intended to streamline and fast-track projects are compounding the situation. A 2021 national survey of over 3,600 Australians found that members of the general public are willing to accept this intensity, as long as infrastructure is positioned as vital to COVID-19 recovery (Bice et al., 2022). The results, however, differ when respondents are located in those communities that are sites of intensive delivery. In these infrastructure intensive environments, contributions to COVID-19 recovery did not rate as a driver of project acceptance. Instead, affected respondents focused on whether projects are beneficial and necessary to their local area, the degree and type of negative project impacts, and the level and quality of communication with project developers. COVID-19-response measures that intensify delivery may stumble in communities with concentrated delivery environments. A 2021 survey of over 1,600 community members located in nine infrastructure intensive communities in Victoria, New South Wales and Queensland shows that where community members are experiencing four or more projects, they are more likely to report negative experiences with developers. Community members experiencing six or more projects have a lower level of agreement that, ‘There is good overall planning for the future of my community’, as compared with respondents experiencing fewer projects at once (Bice et al., 2022, p. 27). The majority of respondents in intensive infrastructure environments reported believing that ‘politics influences infrastructure spending in my community’ and were also more likely to understand how the planning process in their communities works, as compared with other members of the public (Bice et al., 2022, p. 31). For the public servants responsible for Australia’s historic infrastructure build, this means that COVID-19-related infrastructure stimulus measures will likely face community distrust and

‘Build back better’: infrastructure policy’s post-pandemic promise  237 possibly opposition at the sites of delivery. This places community engagement professionals in a difficult position of advancing government agendas that are responding to a broader crisis while also acknowledging the burden and disruption those responses are exacerbating.

PUBLIC TRUST IN INFRASTRUCTURE AND CITIZENS’ RIGHTS TO VOICE Australian research shows that perceived quality and effectiveness of regulation, judgements about procedural fairness in delivery processes, and levels of trust in government all drive public trust in infrastructure delivery (Bice et al., 2022). These findings reinforce the importance of broader regulatory effectiveness, policy settings – including crisis-response policies – and governmental behaviours, as they flow through diverse policy areas. For the public administrators responsible for overseeing and delivering Australia’s infrastructure needs as the nation emerges from the COVID-19 pandemic, general levels of public trust in government will affect the levels of stakeholder pressure and opposition they experience. Early research shows a pandemic bump in public trust in the Australian government, with one study finding a remarkable increase on earlier measures, a result that reflects similar, international studies (Goldfinch et al., 2021). At the same time, recent studies also show that infrastructure sector professionals, including public servants, have experience decreased levels of stakeholder opposition and social risk relative to the infrastructure projects on which they are currently working (Sanchez et al., 2022). The exact causes of reduced stakeholder pressures on projects remains unclear. It is possible that an overall increase in public trust in government is reducing stakeholder pressure on projects throughout Australia. A more likely scenario, however, seems that stakeholders have been fatigued and distracted by the stresses and overwhelming changes of the pandemic, diverting their attention to matters other than infrastructure or policy concerns. This likelihood is borne out by research findings demonstrating the continuing pressure on communities in intensive project delivery environments (Bice et al., 2022). Time and further research will tell, but a fair prediction is that the decline in stakeholder pressure on infrastructure is less related to increasing public trust in government and better explained by attention diverted to factors other than local infrastructure during the pandemic. A rebound in stakeholder pressure and greater attention to community voice in project selection, planning and delivery also seems likely. Australia’s COVID-19 emergency measures that had flow-on effects for the infrastructure sector were unusual in their reduction of citizens’ opportunities to participate in the planning process. Prior to the pandemic, community interest in the planning process appeared strong, as demonstrated by the large number of submissions to various planning applications received by governments and as borne out by research findings that demonstrate strong awareness of planning processes in infrastructure intensive Australian communities (Bice et al., 2022). The level of public awareness of planning processes is unsurprising; Australia has a long history of public participation in infrastructure project assessment and regulatory decision-making. Statutory requirements to consult citizens at various points in project assessment and decision-making are common. Legal rights for members of the public to challenge decisions in the courts also exist in certain cases. While project assessment and approval laws change with each new wave of reform, the COVID-19-related measures were rare in their

238  Research handbook on public management and COVID-19 potential erosion of those requirements and rights. Indeed, prior to the pandemic, certain state governments had enhanced the quality of community engagement in infrastructure assessment and decision-making processes through the introduction of new guidelines and by expanding engagement requirements to include more project phases. For public managers working with Australia’s infrastructure sector, changes to levels of public trust in government, combined with a rebound from pandemic fatigue will likely result in shifts in stakeholder engagement with major projects, and consequent opposition. Research clearly demonstrates that trust affects administrations’ capacity to deliver major projects, which affects recovery (both economic and societal), which affects resilience. Pandemic policy responses that engage Australia’s infrastructure sector raise the question of whether the need to act quickly in the interests of community and economic health were ultimately placed ahead of the community’s desire to have a say. While community members may accept limited public participation in planning as a crisis-response measure, evidence suggests that thoughtful consideration of community issues will be vital to an ongoing social licence for new projects and, by extension, better project outcomes in the long term. Just as importantly, public managers and policymakers must now determine if changes instituted during the pandemic will benefit infrastructure projects in the long run or whether they may sow the seeds of costly community opposition.

BALANCING SHORT-TERM POLICY RESPONSES AND LONG-TERM IMPLICATIONS The COVID-19 pandemic necessitated short-term policy and management responses to deliver immediate results. These initiatives spread well beyond health policy to areas as diverse as education, employment and infrastructure. At least in relation to infrastructure, many governments drew on tried and tested stimulus measures in the form of infrastructure investment. These initiatives simultaneously aim to generate improved physical environments and bolster public optimism for the future. Through its exploration of infrastructure, this chapter demonstrates the ways in which policy initiated as crisis response is potentially in tension with long-term environmental and societal interests. In the Australian case, emergency planning measures allowed for reduced scrutiny of project-approvals, decreased or prevented opportunities for community engagement and compressed project timelines through streamlined approvals processes or project fast-tracking. It remains to be seen whether these actions may have opened the door for projects that might otherwise have been rejected or delivered differently. Infrastructure-as-economic stimulus certainly politicised project selection and delivery, a circumstance which the research shows deflates public trust and levels of project acceptance. This chapter’s discussion draws out broader issues of interest to public management during times of crisis. It evidences the tensions between short-term policy measures and long-term policy impacts, especially in areas where the short-term decisions may accelerate or bypass usual processes deemed necessary for such longer-term decisions. Community members, at least those most-affected in Australia, are already expressing mistrust in government to deliver necessary infrastructure, especially where that infrastructure is used in political announcements, including stimulus measures.

‘Build back better’: infrastructure policy’s post-pandemic promise  239 Infrastructure investment remains a sound and largely accepted policy response to major crises, despite the tensions between short-term crisis-response measures and long-term policy decision-making. The examples discussed here reveal the slippages that occur in transboundary crises, like the COVID-19 pandemic, and infer impact flows between diverse public service roles and policy areas. The chapter makes clear that public managers responsible for implementing economic stimulus or crisis response need to take account of the societal aspects of major infrastructure delivery if they are to continue to use infrastructure as a mainstay response. Findings on cumulative project effects in concentrated infrastructure environments further emphasise the importance of human-centred and place-based approaches to infrastructure policy and delivery to accommodate layered effects. Intelligent policy and management responses incorporating disparate perspectives will ultimately support longer-term outcomes that are better able to support resilience, recovery and preparedness for the next crisis to come.

NOTE 1.

The work of the ANU Institute for Infrastructure in Society (I2S) is made possible by funding from the Deputy Vice-Chancellor Research Strategic Research Fund and through the support of our industry partners. This chapter is indebted to the work of the I2S Research Team, especially the research assistance of Ms Yuen Yi Chang. Sections concerning changes to Australian planning regulations are informed by work with Mrs Kirsty O’Connell, I2S Industry Director. All errors remain the author’s own.

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19. Ubuntu philosophy in times of crises: COVID-19 pandemic period and beyond Xolile Carol Thani

INTRODUCTION African states faced numerous challenges in meeting the needs of citizens during the pandemic. Some of the challenges were associated with corruption, poor leadership and governance of limited resources. As has been the case in many parts of the world, the pandemic created a wider gap between the rich and the poor and many are still reeling from its effects. This chapter reflects on Ubuntu philosophy in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic and the power it provides to encourage citizens to work in solidarity to address socio-economic challenges and create benefits for everyone regardless of background and social status. To frame this discussion, the philosophy of Ubuntu is conceptualised, including setting out the defining attributes and antecedents of Ubuntu, which are applied to public management. The chapter also provides some reflections on the current state of public management in Africa. This entails unpacking the challenges or gaps during the COVID-19 pandemic period and making some connections to how Ubuntu philosophy could provide an approach to dealing with the challenges of the pandemic and promoting the welfare of citizens. The consequences of entrenching Ubuntu philosophy are explored in this chapter.

UBUNTU PHILOSOPHY – PRINCIPLES AND PRACTICE Simply put, Ubuntu is defined as “umuntu ngumuntu ngabantu”, “a person is a person through other people” (Chigangaidze et al. 2021, p. 322). This concept is associated with what it means to be a human being (Akinola and Uzodike 2018, p. 94), and to collectively share (Akamonye 2019, p. 183). Interestingly, Nkondo (2007) views Ubuntu as a way of life. It cannot be Ubuntu today and not tomorrow, but rather these are principles that are inculcated in humans and nurtured as a way of life. A key principle of Ubuntu is that a person needs to consider other people before they consider their own needs. A person is always viewed in relation to others, and what belongs to one belongs to the entire community and should be shared fairly and equitably. Idoniboye-Obu and Whetho (2013, p. 229) argue that Ubuntu is somehow “expected indebtedness of persons to the community”. Within the context of Ubuntu, public management practitioners are expected to serve the needs of the public. It is in this context that they become indebted to the community. The community becomes indebted to each other because they need to share and advance as a collective. Much more than a set of principles or values, the community can also use Ubuntu as a measuring tool to assess a government’s performance regarding service delivery. This has been evidenced during the pandemic because governments had to be innovative and agile in providing services to the people. In this way, communities were able to assess whether the 243

244  Research handbook on public management and COVID-19 government met their expectations or not. The pandemic was disruptive and public officials had to manage the crisis. For example, in South Africa, people could apply for the vaccine online and obtain digital vaccination certificates. Some of the services were improved such as applications for identity documents and travel documents. The South African government introduced an e-home affairs portal where citizens could apply for their documents online. This was an excellent initiative in urban areas where connectivity is advanced. However, rural areas are battling with connectivity, which hinders the use of e-services in accessing public services. Aliye (2020, p. 727) explains that “Ubuntu is a South African culture-based leadership philosophy”. Ubuntu is also viewed as a contributor to peace in African countries, being one of the origins of the development of a human rights culture in South Africa and the rest of the African continent (Mabovula 2011, p. 40). Moreover, Akinola and Uzodike (2018, p. 93) assert that “the overriding goal of Ubuntu is to strengthen societies’ capacity to promote positive peace for social solidarity”. This is related to social responsibility, which is explored in detail in the following section. The Ubuntu philosophy is important in public administration and management because it involves understanding an individual citizen in relation to others, and because it places demands and expectations on public servants.

DEFINING ATTRIBUTES OF UBUNTU PHILOSOPHY Ubuntu promotes humanistic values (see Table 19.1). These values include respect, care, consideration, humanness, sharing and sensitivity to other people’s needs, consensus, social responsibility, justice, fairness, and compassion (Fox 2010, p. 124). Respect for all members of the community is promoted and encouraged in Ubuntu philosophy. Similarly, Mnyaka and Motlhabi (2005, p. 218) stress the need for respect for others and “the importance of community, personhood and morality”. The respect is two-fold; respect for persons and, as Arko-Achemfuor (2016, p. 48) notes, respect for human life. Moreover, Ubuntu “promotes cooperation between individuals, cultures and nations” (Nzimakwe 2014, p. 30). This in turn can promote a positive spirit of shared opportunities, assigned responsibilities and community challenges, implying that those who are strong in the community will support the weak and together they will promote the wellbeing of each other. Individualism is anti-Ubuntu and not tolerated in a community that embraces this philosophy. Respect is also associated with care for others and consideration. In addition, promoting humanistic values is seen to influence positive social conduct in communities. For example, respect and consideration for others may move communities, public officials and political appointees to work jointly in dealing with the post-pandemic period. A key principle of Ubuntu is that members of the community become responsible for each other. Key attributes of Ubuntu philosophy are manifested in various forms in other cultures (Gianan 2011, p. 64). These attributes (or similar ones) are not limited to the African community and are adopted by communities and cultures around the world. The common principle is that people work as a collective in promoting the welfare of each other (Asamoah and Yeboah-Assiamah 2019, p. 307). A typical example could be poverty alleviation programs. The adoption of Ubuntu principles drives a more collective and equitable resource allocation approach because the allocation of resources goes beyond promoting efficiency to include a series of values. It has been argued that public organisations in Africa suffer owing to

Ubuntu philosophy in times of crises: COVID-19 pandemic period and beyond  245 Table 19.1

Attributes of Ubuntu philosophy derived from the reviewed literature

Attributes

Descriptions

Humanistic values

Respect, care, consideration humanness, sharing and sensitivity to other people’s needs, consensus, social responsibility, justice, fairness, compassion

Human quality

Communal responsibility, community building

State of being

Humaneness, humanity, willingness, sense of belonging

Interconnectedness

Beings and things, community, social solidarity, collaborative

institutional failures and in turn this leads to the incapacity of states in promoting public good (Akinola and Uzodike 2018, p. 93). Asamoah and Yeboah-Assiamah (2019, p. 307) contend that it is an expectation that African leaders should manage resources and promote the “greater good of the people”. This is aligned to the survival mode in Ubuntu. African states cannot survive in isolation, rather they need to pull resources together to share and care for each other. Such principles are seen when peace is threatened in one state and other states intervene to offer practical humanitarian aid. Stability in one state leads to stability in the African and global community. In line with Ubuntu, a public official appointed in a leadership position is expected to be “a kind person, being generous, living in harmony, being friendly, being modest, being helpful, being humble…” (Asamoah and Yeboah-Assiamah 2019, p. 310). These attributes are considered key in serving diverse groups. All human beings are valuable. In essence, Ubuntu promotes basic human rights. Justice and fairness need to be always exercised when dealing with citizens. This in turn will connect, link and bind communities together (Nzimakwe 2014, p. 32). Appointed public officials and political heads demonstrate compassion by knowing the citizens that they serve when they embrace Ubuntu. The best way to know them is through a dialogue which can be facilitated during public hearings where communities can raise their concerns. This is, as Nzimakwe (2014, p. 33) argues, a way in which ordinary members of the community will be involved in decision-making. In this way, a community can reach a consensus on critical matters that affect them. Given that many communities are affected by poor socio-economic conditions such as high unemployment rates and poverty, which have been exacerbated by COVID-19, a more collective effort is needed to address them and implement sustainable programs. Consulting the public in matters that affect their communities can better foster community growth (Dumisa and Amao 2015). In essence, the attributes of Ubuntu promote social solidarity and humanity.

ANTECEDENTS FOR INCORPORATING UBUNTU PHILOSOPHY IN DEVELOPING IDEAL PUBLIC SERVANTS In the context of this chapter, antecedents refer to what conditions need to be in place for developing ideal public servants while embracing Ubuntu philosophy. When reviewing the literature, it became evident that to develop ideal public servants, we need to recognise individuals that are served as a “person”. Second, we need to consider the community that will benefit from the public services provided. The explicit acknowledgement and recognition of both a person and a community promote interdependences and social responsibility.

246  Research handbook on public management and COVID-19 Recognising Each Person An important antecedent is to recognise that the individuals that public servants serve are people. A person is defined as a human/individual (Merriam-Webster Dictionary 2022, online). I like the description because this shows the value and dignity attached to it. In Ubuntu philosophy, “a person is accepted, valued and respected for their sake” (Mnyaka and Motlhabi 2005, p. 219). The person is recognised no matter their background or social class, and personhood can include anyone regardless of whether they are permanent citizens or foreigners. Any threat to a person is not accommodated in Ubuntu and it is regarded as inhumane. In the context of public administration and management, a person refers to individuals that are entitled to receive basic services from the government. These individuals belong to a community whereby a threat to one is a threat to all. This attribute was evident during the pandemic whereby people had to wear their face masks to protect others. Apart from this fact, people who tested positive isolated themselves while other community members provided for their necessities. This isolation practice barred the social interactions which are so highly encouraged in African communities (Ufearoh 2020, p. 98). The isolation of individuals needed to be enforced by the authority to ensure that the public was protected, a practice which is in line with Ubuntu principles. An important antecedent of Ubuntu in public administration practice would be for public servants and political appointees to acknowledge the persons and treat them with respect, dignity and fairness. Where this is not done, conflict can arise. For example, the community may resort to public protests to express their discontentment. When these public protests occur, public officials retaliate using law enforcement officials. In some cases, the brutality of police while enforcing curfew times during the pandemic deprived some people the right to human dignity. Shale (2020, p. 469) argues that in Lesotho, for instance, the “deployment of the army to enforce the lockdown regulations led to their use of excessive force against members of the public which in turn violates the right to freedom from torture and other cruel, inhuman and degrading treatment and punishment”. As much as the right to life and human dignity are enshrined in various Constitutions of African countries and globally, degrading of individuals is still prevalent. Community As mentioned in the previous section, a person belongs to a community. Within an Ubuntu perspective, this sense of belonging means that a person shares and participates in and out of the community (Asike 2016, p. 7). This in turn creates a bond within the community. MacQueen et al. (2001, p. 1930) define a community as a “group of people with diverse characteristics who are linked by social ties, share common perspectives and engage in joint action in geographical locations or settings”. In the context of public administration practice, an important common interest of communities is to receive adequate public services from the government. Poor service delivery often results in protests in which communities collectively fight for their rights. In African settings where Ubuntu principles are more embedded in practice, when community problems emerge, a consultation meeting will be initiated to find solutions. By so doing, “a culture of peace, tolerance, peaceful co-existence, and mutual development” will be promoted (Asike 2016, p.7). In line with Ubuntu philosophy, regardless of the diversity of

Ubuntu philosophy in times of crises: COVID-19 pandemic period and beyond  247 communities, their common interest is to work in solidarity to promote each other’s wellbeing. The current pandemic required that communities find solutions together. Usman et al. (2022, p. 30297) argue that solidarity is a necessary condition to deal with the pandemic because it entails helping each other. During the pandemic and imposed lockdowns, however, it was not possible for communities to meet and discuss matters that affect them, therefore undermining their ability to work collectively. In Ubuntu, communities are inclusive, and they share common humanity. This also calls for tolerance on the part of the community members and the appointed public officials and political heads. The tolerance will be enhanced by the sense of belonging and sharing common interests. It is an African culture to “befriend such persons (those who do not seem to have relatives) and give them an African or clan names in order to ensure that they are part of the community” (Mnyaka and Motlhabi 2005, p. 222). A person cannot function in isolation; they need other people; they need to be part of a community. The community assigns roles to persons who are members of it, including voting them into positions of power to lead the community. These appointed persons remain accountable to the communities, and the community has a right to vote them out of power if they do not meet their expectations. This relates to the first definition of a community in that the members of the community share the same interests. They will decide as a community what needs to be done to improve the well-being of community members. Building connection between the members of the community and government will promote shared solidarity. If leaders’ qualities are desirable to the citizens and their collective will is promoted, they will be more likely to follow such leaders (Fagbadebo and Dorasamy 2021, p. 31). Public managers and political actors are expected to acknowledge that they are not their own representatives, rather they represent the community that appointed them. This was an especially important attribute of public servants during the pandemic period and beyond. Acknowledgement of the community helps to win public trust and deliver quality basic services to the public. During the COVID-19 pandemic, this also involved the way public managers communicated with the communities about the pandemic and initiatives put in place to mitigate it. Social Responsibility In the context of Ubuntu, social responsibility means protecting others from harm while advancing their well-being. This was evident during the pandemic because senior public officials had to take drastic measures to protect the community. This kind of protection also entails self-sacrificing care without expecting any rewards. This is mutual care wherein the giver and the receiver care for each other. From an Ubuntu perspective, this is an ideal characteristic of a committed public servant. The “twisted value system” that exists in various communities can be transformed by the Ubuntu philosophy. As was alluded to in the previous section, most African states are viewed as failing to deliver basic public services to the public. This failure led to non-compliance with the pandemic restrictions because people needed to protect their livelihoods not necessarily lives. This was contrary to the Ubuntu philosophy where the safety of others comes first. Chigangaidze et al. (2021, p. 323) argue that Ubuntu is about “safeguarding humanity”. In the African context, this further entails protecting a village or a group of citizens residing at the same location. Elitism is disregarded by Ubuntu, and people orientation is promoted

248  Research handbook on public management and COVID-19 (Akinola and Uzodike 2018, p. 95). Ubuntu further promotes individual and collective rights of citizens (Aliye 2020, p. 735). From an Ubuntu perspective, African leaders should adopt more participatory leadership styles, wherein citizens are afforded an opportunity to engage in public debate and promote the wellbeing of others. This is in line with Ubuntu because it is a way to serve humanity, while providing increased potential for positive changes and social improvement. Moreover, from this perspective, citizens would be involved in decision-making rather than being treated as recipients of services. The sense of belonging in a greater extent will increase the sense of responsibility in protecting and sharing the public services. This is underscored by Theletsane (2012, p. 265) who states, “Ubuntu is seen as humanness, a pervasive spirit of caring and community, harmony and hospitality, respect and responsive that individuals and groups display for each other”. In this social responsibility endeavour, value-based leaders are nurtured and multiplied. These leaders promote among their society a culture of: equal participation in decision making, support of risk taking, confronting change, developing a sense of community amongst team members, conveying passion and strong emotional conviction and instilling values which generate a sense of belonging and belief in the goals amongst team members. (Nzimakwe 2014, p. 38)

From an Ubuntu perspective, the sense of belonging and working together as communities would result in improved well-being of citizens. As was discussed previously, some people acted in more self-interested ways during the pandemic, and they used the crisis to enrich themselves. As explored further below, even government officials illegally benefited from the relief funds that were raised for the needy. The sense of care for the other was not prioritised and this contradicts Ubuntu philosophy. Interdependence Public officials depend on the citizens to perform services as much as citizens expect to be acknowledged for their contributions. Ncube (2021, p. 131) views this as a mutual interdependence between ‘I’ and the ‘other’, and a communal spirit where the one recognises the other. During the pandemic, the public sector had to work with the private sector to thrive during the challenging period. This required a level of cooperation and participation from both parties. Mabovula (2011, p. 39) contends that in the African setting, people still gather to discuss and solve problems and they share ideas and find solutions as a community. By doing so peacefully, key aspects of Ubuntu such as love, respect and togetherness are promoted. These discussions are not only limited to the public sector and private sector but also include citizens. This can be illustrated using an African concept ‘isibaya’ translated as the ‘kraal’. It is used as a platform for consultation and dialogues with all members of the community. Members of the community debate issues and decide on the best measures to promote their wellbeing. If people are part of the decision-making process, they are likely to be more willing to implement the suggested changes/improvements. Moreover, they will understand that people cannot function in isolation rather they are members of a wider society. This is underscored by Ncube (2021, p. 136) who argues that dialogues facilitate the demonstration of empathy and solidarity. From an Ubuntu perspective, communities work together to promote their wellbeing. Moreover, freedom and the wellbeing of others are promoted through Ubuntu (Agbedahin 2021, p. 83). During the various lockdowns across nations, people needed to work together to

Ubuntu philosophy in times of crises: COVID-19 pandemic period and beyond  249 support each other, demonstrating that individuals could promote their wellbeing while recognising the wellbeing of others. In contrast, in other African states, the pandemic period was used to loot relief funds that were supposed to benefit citizens. For example, in South Africa several cases of corruption were reported. Agbedahin (2021, p. 83) contends that people were determined to profit from a national state of disaster through “covid-preneurship or covidprofiteering”. This implies that the richest still made huge profits and the ordinary citizens suffered the most. It is for this reason that this chapter advocates for the Ubuntu philosophy to address such inequities in the community. From a philosophical sense, if people acknowledge the dignity and value of the other person, they may be more likely to refrain from corrupt practices. Before a person can loot a relief fund, they may consider the citizens in the rural communities who are struggling to make ends meet. A public official who is truly humane will consider the use of the ‘kraal’ not only to advance their interests but to work with communities to find solutions to problems. This also implies protecting the democratic rights of citizens resulting in transparency and accountability. Tambulasi and Kayuni (2005, p. 153) argue that accountability and transparency are key values of democracy and good governance, pointing to strong connections with Ubuntu principles.

PUBLIC MANAGEMENT IN AFRICA: STATE OF PLAY African countries are rich in natural resources and while it is understood that a more equitable share of the natural resources can promote the wellbeing of people, doing so has been a challenge in many African nations. Regardless of this, under normal conditions, various states in Africa have demonstrated weaknesses when administering public funds, with such funds often being either misdirected for personal benefit or misappropriated (Ngumbi 2020). Recent evidence suggests that this was worsened during the pandemic. The Afrobarometer survey undertaken prior to the pandemic (Pring and Vrushi 2019) revealed that in half of the cities in the 35 countries included in their study, corruption was prevalent and getting worse owing to government inaction. Evidence shows that corruption hinders economic growth, good governance, and quality of life, impacting the poorest in Africa the hardest. The People and Corruption: Africa Survey (2015) revealed that “nearly 75 million people in sub-Saharan Africa are estimated to have paid a bribe in the past year”. Moreover, unfair elections and ‘shady’ contracts (Africa Research Bulletin 2014) are also prevalent in Africa, with evidence that this has intensified through the pandemic period. When reflecting on corrupt practices that prevailed during the pandemic, Usman et al. (2022, p. 30297) argue that corruption is moral wrongdoing because people can do favours for others while suppressing the rights of other people. In South Africa, public officials are legally prohibited from being in business with government, but recent experience has shown that public officials were involved in business deals from which they benefited during the pandemic. The procurement regulations were disregarded, and businesses were looting money that was budgeted for the relief fund (Corruption Watch 2020). For example, it is a legal requirement in South Africa that businesses that tender with the government must be registered in the Central Database System. However, there was evidence that unregistered businesses were also awarded health tenders during the pandemic (Mantzaris and Ngcamu 2020, p. 461). In one instance, personal protective equipment was

250  Research handbook on public management and COVID-19 bought at a price that is more than four times the normal price (Africa News 2022). Such examples point to corrupt practices and a lack of accountability. Media reports point to incidents across various African countries where COVID-19 relief funds were misused. In Nigeria during 2020, COVID-19 relief funds were also abused, and tenders were awarded to people who did not possess any experience with medical tenders. In 2020, it was shown that the government in Nigeria spent money on fake masks. In Uganda, public officials were arrested because of an accusation related to inflating COVID-19 relief food prices. Similarly, in Zimbabwe, it has been shown that the state was defrauded at the expense of taxpayers through corrupt practice. In summing up COVID-19 corruption, Williams-Elegbe (2020) blames the lack of oversight by public officials, which has resulted in “uncompetitive purchases, contract awards to anonymous and incompetent contractors, increased spending due to price gouging of personal protective equipment (PPE) and other health items and the squeezing out of small and medium sized businesses (SMEs) from the procurement system”. Such examples show how COVID-19 has exacerbated existing challenges and enabled some to exploit these weaknesses. Krönke et al. (2022, p. 2) note the absence of states in the lives of citizens ultimately leads to frustrated citizens. The absence also includes among other things, political leadership, commitment, political will, and guidance. The inability of various states to respond to the crises of the COVID-19 pandemic created numerous problems. One notable exception was Lesotho. The government of Lesotho acted proactively and declared a state of disaster before confirmation of any COVID-19 case (Shale 2020, p. 465) while, in South Africa, citizens were left frustrated during the first six months of the lockdown owing to incompetent and corrupt officials who poorly managed the crisis (Naude and Cameron 2021). For example, PPE contracts were awarded to corrupt networks, prices were highly inflated, and less PPE was supplied to the front-line health workers than was paid for (Vaughn 2021, p. 5). Such corrupt practices have long-term consequences and affect all citizens. In Zimbabwe, the health sector was already compromised before the pandemic owing to a “lack of human capital, financial capital, service and limited management operations capacity” (Muzvidziwa-Chilunjika et al. 2020, p. 99). During the pandemic, inadequate PPE was provided to health care workers and there was a shortage of medical supplies. This resulted in a strike by health care workers, with devastating effects for an overwhelmed Zimbabwe. Mantzaris and Ngcamu (2020, p. 461) argue that individual and group greed was the motivating factor for corruption in local government in South Africa during the pandemic, not necessarily a lack of knowledge of procurement processes. Citizens lost trust in government, evidenced most clearly by the service delivery protests. This had a huge negative impact on the South African economy which was still in a recovery mode. Moreover, corruption associated with relief grants was witnessed in South Africa and some businesses made huge profits out of the pandemic. Political leaders were enriching themselves and involved in various scandals during the pandemic which Agbedahin (2021, p. 83) has described as a form of social ill. Such actions reflected injustice, fraud and abuse of political power. Similarly, Lancaster and Mulaudzi (2020) argue that the protests that were experienced in South Africa during the pandemic exposed the “socio-economic weaknesses resulting from poor implementation and a fundamental failure of political leadership”. Amidst these challenges, the health sector in some African states, such as South Africa, Botswana, Zambia and Nigeria, thrived during the lockdown and many lives were saved. Emergency care was provided in hospital to people who were infected by the virus. However, it is important to note that where we have seen frustrated

Ubuntu philosophy in times of crises: COVID-19 pandemic period and beyond  251 citizens, this has led to frustrated leaders and the poorest have suffered the most (Usman et al. 2022, p. 30297). These types of challenges affected several countries in Africa. For example, in Cameroon, citizens had to decide whether they will protect their lives or livelihoods during the lockdown. Ngala Ndi et al. (2021) argue that the evaluation of the effect of the pandemic on African states has been focused on economic growth and increased unemployment. It, however, neglected the situation of the informal sector, which is the main source of employment in Africa. For example, most African countries are still experiencing challenges in accessing adequate clean water for consumption. According to the United Nations (2019), “only 24% have access to safe drinking water” in sub-Saharan Africa. During the pandemic, citizens involved in the informal sector such as street vendors had to provide water for frequent hand washing. This became an expensive exercise because those citizens could not afford to buy water either for themselves or their customers. This meant that if they cannot comply with the COVID-19 protocols, they had to remain closed to the public to contain the virus. This resulted in depriving informal business an opportunity to make a profit and sustain their wellbeing. This was and remains a threat to people’s livelihoods. At the same time, such decisions presented as a moral issue where public officials needed to decide whether to preserve lives or livelihoods. The right to life is a fundamental right that people are entitled to and, in other instances, it becomes a challenge when public officials have to make decisions that interfere with this right. Ultimately, there was resistance to complying with the lockdown restrictions in Cameroon because the citizens saw it fit to continue with their informal businesses. People realised that compliance will not sustain them, and this was a difficult situation because those businesses are still trying to recover now. In this case, the government failed to provide the lockdown support initiatives that would allow for the protection of livelihoods. A similar scenario occurred in Sudan where most citizens live below the poverty line (Kodiaga and Elawad 2022, p. 1). Kodiaga and Elawad (2022) argue that the citizens were concerned about government performance in managing the pandemic. If citizens live beyond the poverty line, it becomes a norm to survive through the informal sector and if this is prohibited, they will resort to extreme measures so that they can pursue their livelihoods. Similarly, Ethiopian small businesses also suffered during the hard lockdown and their survival was threatened (Engidaw 2022, p. 2). This also contributed to other factors such as high unemployment, high inflation, and social unrest. Many businesses were ill-equipped to deal with the pandemic situation. Most of the informal businesses are not agile to use online platforms to continue with trading. For example, most of the citizens are street vendors who sell fruits and vegetables and such businesses suffered economically during the lockdown. The complete shutdown in Ethiopia meant that they experienced a financial loss, and in most instances, the government was unable to compensate the people. In other countries, such as South Africa, a relief grant was provided to the people. For example, unemployed citizens were able to apply for a grant of R350 monthly. However, some of the public officials wrongfully benefited by applying for the same grant that was supposed to be given to the people who needed it the most. As already alluded to, most economies in Africa generate income through the informal sector. Therefore, people’s livelihoods were negatively affected during the lockdown (Dzinamarira et al. 2020, p. 2466). In addition to the informal economies, informal settlements still dominate in Africa, with many instances of overcrowding. African states, therefore, must deal with multiple challenges simultaneously, such as human settlements and establishing

252  Research handbook on public management and COVID-19 Table 19.2

Poverty in Africa (derived from World Poverty Clock 2022)

Country

Number of people living in extreme poverty Percentage of population living in extreme

South Africa

16,094,176

26.7

Angola

18,385.355

53.8

Zimbabwe

7,833,518

43

Democratic Republic of Congo

67,060,612

71.7

South Sudan

12,507,422

84.5

Nigeria

83,005,482

38.7

Chad

7,646,023

44.6

Namibia

670,697

24.0

Zambia

11,737,971

58.9

United Republic of Tanzania

30,827,028

46.5

Botswana

411,376

16.5

Somalia

9,506,820

55.5

Malawi

15,149,579

69.7

Niger

8,051,381

31.4

Mali

7,723,721

36.3

Ivory Coast

5,463,269

20.1

Uganda

17,439,377

34.4

Kenya

8,947,071

17.4

Mozambique

19,965,904

59.8

poverty (%)

economic recovery methods. Some writers have made the argument that leadership and governance are problematic in Africa because leaders are performing poorly and fail to promote the welfare of citizens (Asamoah and Yeboah-Assiamah 2019, p. 307). Similarly, Aliye (2020, p. 727) argues that there is “no evidence of leadership effectiveness in Africa”. This is evidenced by continuous corruption, poor governance, accountability shortcomings and entrenched poverty to mention a few. Asamoah and Yeboah-Assiamah (2019, p. 307) classify these shortcomings as “anti-cultural, anti-human, anti-ethical and anti-African” and describe this as a form of leadership paralysis. Poor leadership has a direct impact on the resilience of African states because of the “poor allocation of scarce resources and rampant poverty” (Ngala Ndi et al. 2021, p. 361). If poverty was rampant before the pandemic, the situation was further worsened during the pandemic. Table 19.2 depicts the intensity of poverty in Africa. Fagbadebo and Dorasamy (2021, p. 30) argue that public resources are still mismanaged in most African countries. These include state capture, looting of public funds and inflation of state contracts. They further note that in Africa “one in every three Africans live below the global poverty line”. The World Poverty Clock (2022) shows that most countries in Africa are experiencing a rise in poverty as depicted in Table 19.2. There are countries that are off-track for Sustainable Developmental Goals. These include South Sudan (84.9 per cent), Algeria (>3 per cent), Malawi (69.7 per cent) and Mozambique (59.8 per cent). People live in extreme poverty (World Poverty Clock 2022). The pandemic situation has compelled countries to embrace and utilise technological resources to promote effective delivery of services. This is underscored by Ngcaweni (2020, p. 609) who argues that digital platforms ensure service continuity during the pandemic. In poverty-stricken countries, it was impossible to afford the digital technologies and platforms required to adapt. Therefore, citizens remain frustrated owing to poor service delivery.

Ubuntu philosophy in times of crises: COVID-19 pandemic period and beyond  253 Given the range of challenges discussed above, African governments were forced to adapt and adjust to save the lives of citizens during the pandemic. Unfortunately, time was very limited to consider the impact of decisions such as the hard lockdown that was enforced in many African countries. The results are still evidenced today, especially by the poor, while the rich remain privileged. The dynamics seen during COVID-19 across Africa provide a foundation for reflecting on the power of Ubuntu philosophy within government and to guide public management practice. In essence, the strength of public management is to ensure effective and efficient delivery of basic services and, combined with the Ubuntu principle of putting the needs of people first, it is suggested that advances can be made. This can be achieved by skilling and upskilling public officials on technological expertise, but also the adoption of Ubuntu principles will assist public officials to navigate the new normal while putting the needs of the people first. It is unselfish to benefit all citizens regardless of their background and economic standing. During the pandemic, an erosion of trust among community members has led to further deterioration of public values. Greed and selfishness are unconsciously promoted and deemed acceptable, while a growing sense of “us” and “them” in some African nations is cause for concern. The prevalence of xenophobic attacks in South Africa is a clear indication of the degradation of Ubuntu principles and the application of this philosophy. The concept of “Africa for all” has been neglected.

CONSEQUENCES FOR ENTRENCHING UBUNTU PHILOSOPHY Embedding key aspects of Ubuntu could be part of the solution to service delivery and other societal challenges in Africa. The focus on collective unity can guide approaches to solving African as well as global problems. The positive impact of Ubuntu has been demonstrated during the COVID-19 pandemic as countries needed each other in dealing with the state of disaster. Citizens will work with the government to promote the common good where these attributes are embedded and where they can see that these principles are upheld by officials. Leaders that subscribe to Ubuntu will better understand and embrace the interdependence and interconnectedness in the African community and this will enable them to be more willing to work together and support each other toward collective success. Such ideas are supported by Theletsane (2012, p. 267) who argues “the sensitive business leader would focus on the people that make up the team. He or she understands that a leader is merely a facilitator or relationships and processes”. Adopting principles of Ubuntu promotes good governance. One measure of good governance is when people are satisfied about public services delivered to them (Matshabaphala 2015, p. 497). People’s satisfaction motivates them to participate in decision-making and share resources and opportunities. If communities remain united and work as a group, cases of corruption could be minimised. Any threat to citizens’ social security, dignity and rights could be addressed through more collective approaches that are guided by the principles of Ubuntu. More ethical public managers will be sensitive to the needs and challenges of the citizens. Adopting Ubuntu principles will mean that public officials define their character by introspecting their behaviour towards the community they serve. The attributes of Ubuntu philosophy as discussed above will be displayed by committed public officials and managers. In the context of public management, this implies that the character and competence of public officials and managers are developed and monitored for continuous improvement. Matshabaphala

254  Research handbook on public management and COVID-19 (2015, p. 500) suggests that “cultural virtues such as care, respect, humility, sympathy and considerateness can be built into the character development in the public service”. These cultural virtues influence public officials as they interact with the public. If the public sense that they are not cared for and their needs are not attended to, they can behave in ways that make governance more challenging, for example through ongoing protests. In times of crises, public managers who adopt Ubuntu philosophy may be better placed in dealing with difficult decisions that need to be taken to preserve lives. This philosophy can assist in maintaining and balancing priorities. Sambala et al. (2020, p. 4) allude to the fact that people are less likely to cooperate if they deem current systems to be unfair and limited. This may be attributed to the lack of moral competence and critical evaluation of interventions introduced by government officials. Moreover, the interventions might be fair and promote the general welfare of citizens. This links to the earlier argument that public officials need to introspect their behaviour to determine whether they are morally competent to make decisions for the public. Such moral competence is often measured by the citizens who provide feedback during consultation meetings with public officials and political appointees. This demonstrates that improving the well-being of citizens is not an individual effort, rather it is achieved through interactions with others, and collective action. Public officials who adopt Ubuntu principles will understand that their success in managing a public office is because of the interdependencies between the citizens and other stakeholders. In congruence to this, Sambala et al. (2020, p. 4) argue that Ubuntu “promotes a sense of common responsibility and reciprocity and through this obligation, enriches social and individual norms of preventing ethical dilemmas”.

CONCLUSION This chapter focused on Ubuntu philosophy as crucial in times of crises such as the COVID-19 pandemic. This philosophy is useful in dealing with the challenges the African states faced during the pandemic and beyond. If Ubuntu is embraced, people can have a shared responsibility to care for and protect each other’s wellbeing. The key principles of the Ubuntu philosophy link neatly to big ideas in public management such as community engagement, justice, fairness, compassion, empathy, collaboration, and care. This is a philosophy that can be infused into public administration and management training and development to ensure that future public managers possess these attributes.

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20. Small island states, COVID-19, and public policies: a thematic analysis Kim Moloney

This chapter shares the outputs of an exploratory deductive thematic analysis of published scholarship on COVID-19 in 19 Caribbean and Pacific small island states. Its analytical framework arises from a combination of three literatures: policy design, the literature specific to small island state political, economic, and social challenges, and the broader policy– administrative literature on COVID-19. This framework was applied to each of the 65 studies included within the review. In combination with article descriptive statistics (country cases, comparative or not, method), this chapter engages studies of small island states, pandemics, and their policy-administrative outputs. After reviewing this chapter’s analytical framework, the methods which underpin the analysis are discussed. This is followed by an application of the chapter’s analytical framework to the included articles. The conclusion highlights the importance of removing disciplinary silos, reading outside the social sciences, and specific to the superior COVID-related performance of the 19 small island states in their COVID-19 responses (when compared with their near neighbors of Australia and the United States), reminds readers that a continued overlooking of small island state lessons learned may hamper future pandemic responses.

ANALYTICAL FRAMEWORK, COVID-19, AND SMALL ISLAND STATES Small states with populations of fewer than 1.5 million are often overlooked by policy and administrative scholars. This is despite nearly 20 percent of the world’s states being classified as small states. Small states raise important questions about politics, the policy–administrative nexus, and challenges of sovereignty in a global era (e.g., Veenendaal and Corbett 2015). Small states are often at the forefront of responding to global challenges such as climate change since many small island states are often the first impacted (e.g., Kelman and West 2009; Robinson 2018) by crisis. The COVID-19 pandemic has provided another opportunity to showcase small island state importance. However, there is no single best way to categorize and evaluate dozens of articles on COVID-19 and small island states. In an attempt to create a multilevel analysis across the policy, administrative, and political science disciplines, three literatures were earmarked and then combined into a single analytical framework: policy design, small states literature, and the policy–administrative–political literature on COVID-19. The first component of the analytical framework is the most specific: policy design tools and instruments used by governments (Dolowitz and Marsh 1996, 2000; Salamon 2002). While policy design studies are frequently published on larger states (e.g., Howlett and Mukherjee 2018; Mukherjee et al. 2021; Peters 2018), there has been limited utilization of 257

258  Research handbook on public management and COVID-19 policy design within the small island state literature (for exceptions, see Moloney and Neil 2020; Ruddle 1998). Policy design tools are typically divided into three categories: legal and regulatory tools, fiscal and economic tools, and information tools. Legal and regulatory tools may include laws, regulatory commissions, voluntary and non-voluntary regulations, market creation, and public consultation, among others. Fiscal and economic tools may include fiscal policies, direct or indirect transfers, preferential treatment, vouchers, and financial instruments. Information tools include moral suasion, information campaign, judicial inquiries, statistical agencies, and polling, among others. The second component draws from the topics frequently studied within the small island state literature. Given small island state vulnerabilities, one part of this literature explores the impact of exogenous events on vulnerable economies. This includes financial crises, climate change, and weather-related calamities (e.g., Bishop 2012; Cabezon et al. 2015; Favaro et al 2010; Le Dé et al. 2018; Marto et al. 2018; Verdun 2013). Until COVID-19, there had been limited research on the intersection of human health pandemics and small island states (e.g., Guittard and Moloney 2021). When compared with larger states, exogenous shocks often have greater impacts on the fiscal and economic health of small island states. Important features include a country’s trade profile, diversification, debt management, fiscal policies, among others (Baldacchino 2006; Baldacchino and Bertram 2009; Easterly and Kraay 2000; International Monetary Fund 2013; Moloney 2018; Utoikamanu 2010). Two other topics are also common to the small island state literature. The first are reflections upon political system choices, executive and bureaucratic structures, and managerial styles (Baldacchino and Hepburn 2012; Corbett and Connell 2020; Corbett et al. 2020; Veenendaal and Corbett 2015). The second, sociocultural challenges, are related to economic and political challenges. Topics include higher costs of sovereignty, remittance reliance, and how migration impacts local capacity (Amuedo-Dorantes et al. 2010; Connell 2020; Negin 2009; Prasad et al. 2012). The economic, political, and sociocultural aspects of small island states are combined to create the second set of literature utilized in this chapter’s analytical framework. The third component of the analytical framework arises from the intersection of COVID-19 literature and the disciplines of public policy, public administration, and political science (Knox et al. 2022). This component consists of five categories: institutional trust, organizational inequity, group-based inequity, COVID health measures, and intergovernmental administration. This framework arose from the author’s literature review of published COVID-19 survey scholarship in the public administration, policy, and political science literatures.1 This framework becomes the third component of this chapter’s analytical framework. With this framework in mind, the next section discusses chapter methods, country case selection, and any limitations.

METHOD This section is divided into four parts. The first part shares the analysis models for creating and utilizing this chapter’s analytical framework. The second discusses country case selection along with key socioeconomic data for each country. The third part explains how academic articles were chosen and discusses when and why certain articles were excluded. The final part notes any limitations arising from such methodological choices.

Small island states, COVID-19, and public policies: a thematic analysis  259 Analysis Methods This chapter conducts a thematic analysis (Fereday and Muir-Cochrane 2006) of academic articles published on COVID-19 and one or more of 19 small islands between March 2020 and May 2022. Thematic analysis may be deductive, inductive, or a combination. Given that this chapter also partially undertook a rapid review assessment (Garritty et al. 2020), its analysis relied exclusively upon a deductive approach. One consequence is that the thematic analysis shared methodological similarities to framework synthesis models (Booth et al. 2022) and directed content analyses (Hsieh and Shannon 2005). Both framework synthesis models and directed content analyses rely on an existing background literature to create an initial analytical framework. For this chapter, the initial literature review arose from the small island state literature. Given that this chapter is focused upon small island state policy-administrative environments in response to COVID-19, additional insights were added from the policy design literature and an evolving policy, administration, and political science literature on COVID-19. Since directed content analyses also seek to “validate or extend conceptually a theoretical framework or theory” (Hsieh and Shannon 2005, p. 1281), conceptual extension is unlikely without additional inductive analyses. The conclusion will highlight how researchers may wish to use this chapter’s exploratory analysis for future work. Country Selection and Key Indicators To obtain articles on COVID-19 and small island states, several steps were followed. The first was to identify the population of small island states. Using the World Bank’s Small State criteria, 42 countries are identified as small states with a population of fewer than 1.5 million. Thirty-one of the small states are island states. This chapter is focused upon the 19 small island states located in the Caribbean or South Pacific regions. Seven of the 19 are in the Caribbean (Bahamas, Barbados, Dominica, Grenada, St. Kitts and Nevis, St. Lucia, Trinidad and Tobago) while 12 are in the South Pacific (Fiji, Kiribati, Marshall Islands, Micronesia, Nauru, Palau, Samoa, Solomon Islands, Timor-Leste, Tonga, Tuvalu, Vanuatu). Table 20.1 shares key socioeconomic and health data for the selected states. Among the selected countries, GDP per capita ranges from US$1,583 in Timor-Leste to US$33,799 in the Bahamas (World Bank 2022). The average GDP per capita among the seven small island Caribbean states is more than three times higher than the average for the 12 South Pacific states. While Caribbean states tend to be slightly more populous than Pacific states, each of the 19 is defined as a small island state (World Bank 2022). Where population size may matter more is that, with the exclusion of the Bahamas, Caribbean states typically do not administer dozens of islands across vast ocean expanses. This lowers the sovereign administrative cost for Caribbean states when compared with their Pacific counterparts (Brown 2008, 2010). Using New York Times (2022) calculations, Caribbean states generally had more COVID-19 cases and more COVID-19 deaths per 100,000 than Pacific states. While Fiji deaths per 100,000 were higher (97) than St. Kitts and Nevis (81) and Dominica (91), cases per 100,000 were higher in Palau (28,004) than Caribbean or Pacific states. On average, Pacific small island states outperformed Caribbean small island states since Pacific case rates were, on

260  Research handbook on public management and COVID-19 average, one-third of the Caribbean while Pacific deaths attributable to COVID-19 were 1/10 of the Caribbean. Despite relatively low scores on the Global Health Security Index (average of 123 out of 195 for the seven Caribbean states; 168 out of 195 for the 12 Pacific states) and far less health expenditures per capita (Global Health Security Index 2021; World Bank 2022), most of the 19 small island states outperformed their near neighbors of Australia2 and the United States.3 This is despite an Index award of 2 out of 195 for Australia and 1 out of 195 for the United States (Global Health Security Index 2021). In short, health expenditures per capita and health security are unlikely the only predictors of COVID response success. As noted in an analysis not particular to small island states (Mahajan 2021), public policies, political will, trust, and sociocultural environments also influence COVID-19 outcomes. The potential for similar findings for small island states is noted in the conclusion. Article Selection Articles were selected via a keyword search of abstracts within the Scopus database. The keyword search was simple: the word “COVID-19” and the name of each small island state, e.g., COVID-19 and Fiji, or COVID-19 and Dominica. There was one search per included small island state. Included abstracts required a peer-reviewed academic journal publication (or in press) date between February 2020 and May 2022. Conference papers, conference proceedings, letters, and errata were excluded. Given expectations of limited scholarly analyses of small island states, there was no exclusion of academic articles published outside of the social sciences. This chapter’s thematic review was assisted by Covidence software. The above steps led to 143 articles imported into Covidence for initial screening. With 43 duplicates removed by Covidence and subsequently confirmed by the author as duplicates, 100 articles remained. The next step involved finding and uploading full article texts of each of the 100 articles. With six articles having no available full text either online for via the databases of two universities, this left 94 articles for review. After reviewing the abstracts of the 94 articles and, where necessary, the full article text, another 29 studies were excluded. Reasons for exclusion included two publications which were study protocols, one Letter, and one Introduction to a Special Issue. Four articles were not about COVID, seven did not focus on one or more included small island states, and 17 articles had COVID-19 in the abstract but, upon reading the article, COVID-19 was not a primary concern. Articles in this latter category often appeared to have studies arranged before the pandemic and thus, COVID-19 was only briefly mentioned. The final population of articles was 65. In line with deductive thematic analysis techniques (Fereday and Muir-Cochrane 2006), the topic categories from three literatures created an analytical framework. To create a descriptive understanding of the included studies, four additional categories were analyzed: (a) a count of which small island states are mentioned by authors, (b) whether studies were single or comparative case studies, (c) methods (qualitative, quantitative, mixed, no clear method), and (d) which policy sector(s) was discussed. The “study tags” feature of Covidence software helped “tag” each descriptive trait as well as the three components of the analytical framework.

Small island states, COVID-19, and public policies: a thematic analysis  261 Table 20.1

Selected small island state data

Country name

Socioeconomic categories

Health categories Global Health

Caribbean

COVID-19 COVID

South Pacific

International Health

capita

tourism

Population

(current

(receipts, % of expenditures

Security

cases per

deaths per Index

100,000,

100,000,

ranking,

all time, as all time, as out of 195

(thousands,

US$,

total exports,

per capita

of 31 May of 31 May countries

 

2019)

2019)

2019)

(US$, 2019)

2022

2022

for 2021

Bahamas

389.5

33799.4

80.4

2005

8913

208

135

Barbados

287

18149

45

1143

27985

155

98

Dominica

72

8516

71

440

19753

91

160

Grenada

112

10827

88

534

15769

202

157

St. Kitts and Nevis

53

22047

61

1088

10824

81

122

St. Lucia

183

11591

89

502

14001

203

100

Trinidad and Tobago

1395

16637

5

11689

11573

281

88

Caribbean Average

356

17367

63

983

15545

174

123

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Fiji

890

6176

51

236

7305

97

169

Kiribati

118

1602

18

172

2634

11

163

Marshall Islands

59

4073

16

664

29

0

176

Micronesia

114

3585

--

415

26

0

150

Nauru

11

11030

5

1049

0

0

190

Palau

18

15233

86

2356

28004

33

170

Samoa

197

4323

61

272

6849

13

145

Solomon Islands

670

2344

14

120

2713

22

180

Timor-Leste

1293

1584

64

93

1772

10

154

Tonga

105

4903

51

242

11143

11

160

Tuvalu

12

4056

42

973

0

0

188

Vanuatu

300

3116

77

104

3016

5

168

South Pacific Average

315.4

5168.7

44.0

558

5291

17

168

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Australia

25366

 54875

14.0

5427.5

28689

34

1

United States

328330

65280

9.5

10921.0

25305

302

2

   

     

GDP per

Sources: Global Health Security Index; World Bank Data for Health Expenditures, International Tourism, Population, and Income Category; The New York Times for COVID Case and Death Rates.

Limitations This chapter’s analysis may be categorized as a rapid evidence assessment with methods inspired by the interim guidance of the Cochrane Rapid Review Methods Group (Garritty et al. 2020). However, for reasons noted below, not all interim guidance was followed. The first reason is that because this chapter is a social science study with no medical implications, there was no need to register a study protocol with the Cochrane Group before undertaking the study. Second, this chapter has one author. In a Rapid Review, a second co-author checks extracted data, reviews excluded articles, rates risk of bias, and jointly reviews at least 20 percent (at least 13 of 65 articles) of the abstracts. However, unlike medical research on COVID-19 and/or other medical ailments, the small island state literature is neither extensive

262  Research handbook on public management and COVID-19 nor deep. The hundreds of studies which might be included within a medical Rapid Review study are impossible for a study of this chapter’s limited topic and country scope. This does not negate the importance of a second author but instead, creates a limitation which reiterates this study’s exploratory nature. Third, given the author’s use of only one database (Scopus), not all scholarly outputs on COVID-19 and small island states were discoverable. Future researchers may wish to add additional databases. As such, any chapter findings cannot be considered conclusive but, instead, an early indication of the topics, methods, and cases currently being discussed.

FINDINGS The Findings section is divided into two parts. The first part shares descriptive details of the included 65 articles. The second discusses whether the included articles reflected the three components of the analytical framework: policy design, small state literature, and the policy-administrative literature on COVID-19. With the exception of a few external citations in the second sub-section, this section relies exclusively upon the 65 articles for its analysis. Descriptive Features of the Articles The descriptive traits of the included 65 articles are divided into two categories: the frequency of country coverage among the included articles and the methods utilized. Of the final 65 studies, 48 were focused on a single small island state, four studies were focused on a region, e.g., Pacific (3) and Latin America/Caribbean (1), and the remainder were comparative studies. Excluding the four studies focused on a region, the number of countries compared in a study ranged from two to 11with approximately half of such comparative studies exclusively comparing small island states. To assess whether certain countries were studied with greater frequency than others, a simple example highlights the method. For example, if a paper covered three countries, one of which is Fiji but the two comparator countries are not small island states, one-third of the case studies within that paper focused on a small island state. If this method is extended to the 61 papers,4 then both Fiji and Trinidad and Tobago each comprised 14.5 case-mentions5 across the 61 papers. This was followed by Vanuatu (5.05) and Timor-Leste (4.59). Three small island states received no mention: Dominica, Kiribati, and Nauru. Micronesia, Palau, Tonga, and the Marshall Islands each had case counts greater than 0.5 but less than 1. Given that Fiji hosts the main campus of the University of the South Pacific and that Trinidad and Tobago hosts one of the main campuses within the University of the West Indies system, it unsurprising to find a combined 29 case-mentions of each country across 61 papers. In addition, that both countries, along with Timor-Leste, comprise 57 percent of the combined population of the 19 small island states (see Table 20.1). As such, this case emphasis is not unexpected. On a sector basis, 21 articles fully or partially focused on the health sector, ten articles discussed agriculture and/or food security, ten focused on the education sector, and ten had a social sector angle. Given the reliance of small island states on tourism, eight studies had a tourism focus. The environmental sector as well as the humanitarian/foreign aid sector had four studies each. Two studies focused upon the security sector. One study had an infrastructure focus while two focused on passenger transport.

Small island states, COVID-19, and public policies: a thematic analysis  263 Multiple methods were utilized. Qualitative methods were used in 11 papers, 27 papers used quantitative methods, five papers used mixed methods, and the remainder (16) had no identifiable method. Among the latter group, several appeared to be desktop literature reviews of a country or of a COVID-19 impact but with no discernible review method. Qualitative methods included document and thematic analyses of housing reconstruction constraints during COVID-19 (Ahmed and McDonnell 2020), cultural geography analyses of rural islands within Tuvalu (Farbotko 2021), interviews of Chinese migrants in Timor-Leste (Fernandes et al. 2022), interviews of deaf students in Trinidad and Tobago (Mohammed 2021), among others. In addition, one qualitative study also used indigenous methods. The authors used tokstori6 to understand how online learning was interpreted and understood in Solomon Islands (Dorovolomo et al. 2021). Employed quantitative methods varied from counts of personal protective equipment waste left on Suva streets (Chand et al. 2021) to online surveys of teachers (Chand et al. 2022), university students (Dorovolomo et al 2021), and citizens (De Freitas et al. 2021). Others married air transport arrivals with a global health security index to predict Pacific island-state readiness (Craig et al. 2020), visually surveyed discarded Queen Conch shells in the Bahamas (Higgs 2021), counted whether funeral attendees socially distanced in Fiji (Vave 2021), explored whether St. Kitts residents wore masks, which type of mask, and if they were worn properly (Kungurova et al. 2020), and measured ship sound levels in the ocean before the pandemic and during the pandemic (Dunn et al. 2021), among others. Multiple papers used modeling techniques. These include endogenous growth models to measure tourism loss (Kumar and Patel 2022), structural equation modeling to analyze panic buying behaviors (Singh et al. 2021), stepwise regression models to suggest rates of depression, anxiety, and stress among healthcare workers (Nayak et al. 2021), and simulations on whether Samoa’s 2019 measles outbreak might influence COVID-19 rates (MacIntyre et al. 2020). Analytical Framework – Policy Design Specific to the policy design component of the analytical framework, multiple authors analyzed government policies. Twenty-four of the 65 articles mentioned a policy design tool even if the words “policy design” or “tool” or “instrument” or its accompanying literature were unmentioned. This included 14 of the 24 articles with a partial or substantial interest in pandemic-related legal and/or regulatory reforms. Examples include, but are not limited to, investigating stay-at-home orders and how the public viewed policing in Trinidad and Tobago (Affonso 2020; Wallace et al. 2022), discussing government support for citizens abroad (McDermid et al. 2022), analyzing the interaction between ships and nearby islands on COVID-19 containment (Palafox et al. 2021), understanding health surveillance in Vanuatu (Williams et al. 2021), and questioning whether “islandness” created “immunity” to COVID-19 in Grenada (Telesford 2021). Six articles referenced fiscal or economic tools. This includes health financing in the Pacific (Tandon et al. 2020), Fiji’s social security regimes during COVID-19 (Gounder 2022), or discussion of small landholder needs in government social protection policies (Davila et al. 2021). Information tools were found in four articles. The information tools were outputs of government-created pandemic committees, public health messaging, and information about school closures (Blackman 2021; Davila et al. 2021; Williams et al. 2021). This included an

264  Research handbook on public management and COVID-19 article which explored the implications of a government-issued advice within Tuvalu “to relocate to the islets off the capital or to the outer islands if they could” (Farbotko 2021, p. 184). Analytical Framework – Small Island State Literature Just as those articles covering policy design tools infrequently mentioned its conceptual literature, the small island state literature was also not always noted. This may reflect divides between the social science literature from which small state discussions arise and the hard sciences in which science-specific specialties drive research question analysis. For example, some of the 65 articles were published in the American Journal of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene, Annals of Medicine and Surgery, BMC Infectious Diseases, BMJ Open, Epidemiology and Infection, The Lancet Regional Health, Microbiology Australia, and Vaccines (Chand et al. 2021; Craig et al. 2020; De Freitas et al. 2021; Gopaul et al. 2022; Hunte et al. 2020; MacIntyre et al. 2022; McDermid et al. 2022; Nayak et al. 2021; Reading and Strugnell 2021; Singh et al. 2022) as well as Agricultural Systems, Frontiers in Marine Science, Marine Policy, and Sugar Tech (Davila et al. 2021; Dunn et al. 2021; Ferguson et al. 2022; Iese et al. 2021; Sachan and Krishna 2021). Yet, despite not utilizing the small state literature, their scholarly contributions led to their inclusion in other parts of this chapter’s analytical framework. So, while small state literature may not define or influence science scholarship, their COVID-19 papers did speak to policy tools and other policy-administrative impacts. Specific to the economic challenges of small states, several papers discussed the macroeconomic (Gounder 2020; Gunn 2021; Kumar and Patel 2022; Kumar and Stauvermann 2021; Post et al. 2021) and microeconomic impacts of COVID-19 (Fernandes et al. 2022; Tandon et al. 2020). Several also focused specifically upon the tourism industry (Davila et al. 2021; Gounder 2020; Singh et al. 2022). Two tourism studies were comparative. The first studied tourism in three Pacific countries, its interaction with limited employment markets, and family reliance on remittances from abroad (Connell 2021). The second compared five Pacific countries, future foreign direct investment, and service sector dependencies (Kumar and Stauvermann 2021). Others noted the rise of barter economies in Fiji after border closure (Finau and Scobie 2022; Gounder 2022) and the importance of IT and communication links during the pandemic (Mohammed 2021; Wahyuningrum et al. 2021). Already-present capacity constraints within small island states also impacted COVID response and recovery (Ahmed and McDonnell 2020; Craig et al. 2020; Pooransingh et al. 2022). However, in contrast to typical small island state worries about citizens who migrate for improved economic opportunities in larger states and thus, create capacity constraints at home, one article had a different focus. This article noted that highly skilled migrant workers brought in to help small island state capacities before the pandemic either chose to, or were required to, leave because of the pandemic (Maekawa et al. 2022). This created another form of brain drain at crucial crisis moments. The economic literature is infrequently divorced from the susceptibility of Caribbean and Pacific small island states to natural disaster (cyclones, earthquakes), financial disaster (global financial crisis, pandemic-related downturns), and to human health disasters (COVID-19). Not only does small island state recovery cost more as a percentage of GDP than other states but when a second disaster occurs before full recovery from the prior crises, recovery takes even longer. As such, interaction of COVID-19 with climate change did not go unnoticed (Foley et

Small island states, COVID-19, and public policies: a thematic analysis  265 al. 2022). Small island states are often the first to be negatively impacted. Scholars observed a double impact from COVID-19 and climate-specific conversations on food and agriculture (Davila et al. 2021; Ferguson et al. 2022) along with fisheries and ocean governance (Mangubhai et al. 2021; McHarg et al. 2022; Steenbergen et al. 2020). In April 2020, Cyclone Harold, a Category 5 storm, travelled across four Pacific small island states. Just as the global threat posed by COVID-19 was becoming clear, Vanuatu lost more than 60 percent of its crops due to this storm (Relief Web 2020). Houses were destroyed, livelihoods were interrupted, the national budget faced strain, and international aid was needed. When such a disaster is paired with border closures, disrupted trade, questions of transmissibility, and health systems negatively impacted by a cyclone, small islands suffer (Holland 2020; Williams et al. 2021). While Vanuatu had not yet recorded a COVID case, border closures meant that “humanitarian workers have simply not been allowed to enter” (Du Parc 2020, n.p.). This led to two scholars discussing housing reconstruction and its governance in light of the pandemic (Ahmed and McDonnell 2020). Small island states are an infrequent refugee destination. But in the southern Caribbean, Trinidad and Tobago’s relative wealth and short boat distance of just 6.2 km between itself and a disintegrating Venezuela has meant 40,000 refugee arrivals (Herbert 2021). This double disaster required the government not only to respond to the pandemic but also to the needs of those who continued to seek refuge in the dual island state both before and during the COVID-19 pandemic (Bolivar Duerto 2021). There were only four articles with a sustained focus on political systems. Given extensive discussions of small island political systems, this low number of articles is surprising. Two articles noted ongoing political shifts in Timor-Leste during the pandemic (Feijó 2020; Gunn 2021), a third discussed political-legal arrangements in Trinidad and Tobago around government restrictions (Affonso 2020), and the fourth observed the relationship between political leadership and the cruise tourism industry of Barbados (Pounder 2021). Within sociocultural spaces, articles emphasized cultural traditions in online education (Dorovolomo et al. 2021), questioned whether online education would influence how cultural dances were expressed and taught (Westby 2022), and observed funeral rites during COVID-19 (Vave 2021). In addition, multiple studies focused upon mental health (Ali et al. 2021; Connell 2021; Gounder 2022; Lagi 2020; Nayak et al. 2021) as well as state-provided social services (Gounder 2020). More generally, one study asked whether “boundedness, smallness, isolation” and for archipelagos, fragmentation too, influenced COVID-19 responses (Telesford 2021, p. 311). The answer varied. Island geography made the boundedness of quarantine and isolation easier to implement. But this contrasted with a need for connection “especially as it relates to economic growth and development” (Telesford 2021, p. 317) and for islands with high population densities, a realization that geography may encourage greater transmissibility. Analytical Framework – COVID-19 in the Policy-Administration Literature In an analytical framework developed for a survey of public administration faculty, students, and governmental officials, five categories of survey literature on COVID-19 could be identified (Knox et al. 2023). This included intergovernmental administration and organizational inequities along with institutional trust, COVID-19 health measures, and group-based inequities. Given that small island states rely heavily upon their central governments with limited or no local government autonomy, it is unsurprising that no article referenced intergovernmental

266  Research handbook on public management and COVID-19 administration. In addition, discussions of organizational inequity – between or across administrative bodies – was also not present. The latter may reflect a prior observation earlier in this paper of limited political systems studies within the 65 articles. In contrast, three categories were discoverable within the 65 articles. The institutional trust topic was found in four articles. Three of the four articles were focused upon Trinidad and Tobago. This included an ethical analysis of border closures (Budrie and Narinesingh 2022), the relationship among public trust, information, and vaccine willingness (De Freitas et al. 2021), and an evaluation of public trust toward police during the pandemic (Wallace et al. 2022). The fourth article linked political tensions with COVID-19 in Timor-Leste (Feijó 2020). Given earlier policy design discussions, it is unsurprising that 25 articles noted COVID-19 health measures. Topics of quarantine, border closures, stay-at-home orders, and public health mandates were noted (Affonso 2020; De Freitas et al. 2021; Farbotko 2021; Krishnamurthy et al. 2021; Palafox et al. 2021; Pooransingh et al. 2022; Telesford 2021). Others focused on the outputs of such orders such as lowered economic growth prospects (Tandon et al. 2020), new government support measures (McDermid et al. 2022), questions about health system resilience (Hunte et al. 2020), modeling of COVID-19 spread (Singh et al. 2022), new diagnostic capabilities arising from testing and vaccination mandates (Reading and Strugnell 2021), and interactions of political leadership with cruise port closures and re-openings (Pounder 2021). In the group-based inequity category, 13 articles observed such inequities either due to COVID-19 and/or as a result of government policies. Of the 13, eight emphasized inequities arising within the education sector and/or the benefits of suddenly online educational experiences. This glass half full and glass half empty analysis specific to the educational sector matched the education-focused findings within the ASPA survey article (Knox et al. 2023). Authors found that online learning highlighted student inequities of access. This included questions of how to increase resilience among students, faculty, and universities (Raghunathan et al. 2022), the importance of teacher training (Kalloo et al. 2020), and in one study of Tuvalu students at the University of the South Pacific, the necessity of flexible deadlines, increased non-internet communication between a university and its students, and the importance of financial assistance (Lagi 2020). Equity access issues, such whether deaf students are fully served via online learning (Mohammed 2021), how professors can translate subjects with physical emphases such as dance to online environments (Westby 2022), and the gender and technological barriers to online educational success (Blackman 2021) were discussed. This also included the benefits of online education specific to Solomon Island students at the University of the South Pacific (Dorovolomo et al. 2021) as well as more generally (Chand et al. 2022). Others with group-based inequity foci observed unequal policy emphases between citizens and Venezuelan refugees in Trinidad and Tobago (Bolivar Duerto 2021) and different government assistance to persons employed within the tourism sector along with questions of post-COVID financial sustainability (Connell 2021). Others observed the differing impacts of tourism loss, remittances, where unemployment is occurring, how food systems are being affected, and the environmental impacts (Davila et al. 2021), engaged analyses of small-scale fisheries within a double crisis environment of COVID-19 and Cyclone Harold (Mangubhai et al. 2021), and, in the opposite direction, an early perception of police equity in enforcing new public health regulations (Wallace et al. 2022).

Small island states, COVID-19, and public policies: a thematic analysis  267

CONCLUSION AND IMPLICATIONS FOR FUTURE RESEARCH This chapter shared the outputs of an exploratory thematic analysis of COVID-19 literature on 19 small island states in the Caribbean and in the Pacific. The reviewed 65 academic articles were not specific to the social sciences. Instead, any article with a mention of COVID-19 and one of the included small island states was documented and reviewed. The multilevel analytical framework used to analyze the 65 articles for their content arose from three literatures: policy design, small states, and policy-administrative literatures. Despite just one of 65 articles being published in a disciplinary journal typically associated with public policy and/or public administration, there was remarkable agreement among authors that the policy-administrative environments of small island states matter. Given that 64 of 65 articles were published in science-based or science-adjacent journals, it is unsurprising such articles did not cite the policy design, small state, or emergent COVID-19 literatures common to policy-administrative scholarship. Such an observation has greater impact than just being a comment upon disciplinary silos. If we recall a chapter observation that the majority of small island states (all of the Pacific small island states and a majority of Caribbean small island states) outperformed their near neighbors of Australia and the United States, then we must not assume the larger and wealthier states which dominate our discipline (in particular, an America-driven intellectual hegemony, Moloney et al. 2022) are the only states capable of providing important analyses. If we allow our discipline to continue succumbing to American intellectual hegemonies, then insights such those raised in this chapter will continue to be overlooked. We must also remember that policy-administrative studies (whether on small island states or not) are unlikely to provide the full explanation for the remarkable divergence in public sector performance during COVID-19 between the 19 small island states and their larger neighbors. It is certainly true that being a small state is often associated with increased vulnerability. This did not go away with COVID-19, and yet typical global indicators of economic or health success did not predict COVID response success. The literature on how and why small island states often out-performed their large neighbors remains nascent. Whether the output differential is explained by geographic isolation, the timing and duration of lockdown or quarantine policies, broader interactions among public trust and sociocultural cohesion, or other factors, remains unknown. Given that positive lessons learned from small island state responses to COVID-19 might save lives on a global scale, there is a high cost for both studies outside our typical disciplinary window as well as studies on small island states. In conclusion, the observation that small island states help answer important questions about states and their interactions (Veenendall and Corbett 2015) remains true for their COVID-19 responses. This chapter offered an analytical framework for cross-disciplinary discussions between the hard sciences and the social sciences in relation to this topic. The interaction of scholars with academic research outside typical disciplinary silos offers opportunities to solve important questions of our time. Given multiple regional and global human health pandemics since the late 1990s, we cannot ignore pandemic response success stories. The Pacific, the Caribbean, and other small island states offer potential paths forward.

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NOTES 1. This study was undertaken by four of the nine members of the COVID-19 Ad Hoc Committee of the American Society of Public Administration (ASPA). The survey was implemented by the ASPA office via multiple online email waves of ASPA members in October and November 2021. Five hundred and sixty ASPA members completed the survey. To analyze responses to seven open-ended questions, the authors reviewed literature in which COVID-19 surveys were undertaken and subsequently published in journals included within the Political Science Database and Public Administration Abstracts database. Given no COVID-specific analytical framework common to either political science or public administration, their review led to four research themes: institutional trust, organizational inequity, group-based inequity, and COVID health measures. Based on the authors’ later coding, additional themes of intergovernmental administration and academic life were added. Given the latter theme is not a chapter focus, only the first five themes are included in this chapter’s analytical framework. 2. On cases per 100,000, all but two states (Barbados, Palau) outperformed Australia. In deaths per 100,000, 11 of 12 Pacific small island states outperformed Australia (exception is Fiji). 3. In cases per 100,000, all but one (Barbados) outperformed the United States. All 19 small islands states had fewer deaths per 100,000 than the United States. 4. Four papers cover a region but do not mention specific small island states. This led to their exclusion from specific case-mention calculations. 5. This is calculated in the following manner. If Fiji was the only case study in a paper, it received a case count of 1. If it was one-third of cases in the paper, it received a case count of 0.33. The sum of the case counts created the case-mention statistic. 6. Tokstori “is a process, cultural normal and relational in nature” which is not time bound and may contain metaphorical language (Dorovolomo et al. 2021, p. 92). The tokstori is “linked to the wantok system, which is a network of relationships” (Dorovolomo et al. 2021, p. 92).

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21. Death management in public administration: lessons from the front lines Staci M. Zavattaro

I grew up in Florida in the United States. My family moved to Florida from New York when I was only 2 years old, so I claim the state as my own. This is quite the assertion, given stories of the state’s oddities – all one has to do is search online for “Florida Man” to know this is true. Despite its eccentricities, Florida is my home. Which is why I still bristle to think the state is home to two of the United States’ worst mass shootings. On June 12, 2016, a gunman burst into the Pulse nightclub in Orlando (where I live as I write this chapter) and murdered 49 innocent people simply trying to dance the night away. Then two years later, on February 14, 2018, a student opened fire at Marjory Stoneman Douglas High School in Parkland, killing 17 people and injuring more. I grew up in Coral Springs, which shares a border with Parkland. I did not attend Douglas for high school but had many friends who did. When I visit my parents, we often drive by the high school, and it is an eerie sight to see the makeshift memorial standing outside, and the building where most of the murders happened is still standing – yet fenced off – pending an investigation. Each mass shooting, as well as those that have come before and since, leave behind grieving families, broken communities, shattered lives. Nobody wants to think about burying a child. Where does one even begin when you cannot plan for death and its aftermath? This chapter focuses on one answer: public servants. The bureaucracy of death is complex, and someone needs to be there to walk families through these trying times. Yet when it comes to thinking about death management as a core public service function, our knowledge is lacking. Indeed, scholarship in emergency management from a public administration perspective is largely silent on death management, focusing on mass fatality planning best practices (Alexander, 2003). While this is clearly necessary, the purpose of the research I am now engaging in focuses squarely on the public servants handling professional death management (Zavattaro, 2021, for example). This chapter highlights some patterns I found across interviews with 35 US municipal cemetery managers and 17 medical examiners and coroners. Each public servant deals with an aspect of deathcare, either in the medicolegal investigation aspect or the long-term burial care. Death management is vital to understand, not only because these public servants are often invisible – at least until they are needed – but because death is part of our daily lives. I mean this in the most concrete sense, of course, but also when it comes to better understanding how death affects our interaction with public spaces (McClymont, 2016). The chapter proceeds with a brief overview of death management, before offering some common themes related to death management when analyzing data across the interviews. I conclude with questions for future research in this growing area of relevance.

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Death management in public administration: lessons from the front lines  275

BACKGROUND: DEATH MANAGEMENT IN PUBLIC SERVICE Typically in emergency management, we think about mass fatality or mass casualty management when it comes to dealing with and understanding death. Mass casualty incidents focus on attending to living victims, while mass fatality management means handling the deceased in a respectful manner. Carroll et al. (2017) note that failing to adequately plan for a mass fatality incident could leave local resources stretched to capacity. For some jurisdictions, mass fatality or mass casualty events might not mean large-scale decedents of victims; it could mean, for instance, three or four people would overwhelm local hospitals and morgues (Carroll et al., 2017). Given this, mass fatality incidents are wicked problems requiring multi-jurisdictional response, collaboration, and cooperation – key tenets of emergency management planning (Kapucu, 2008). Typically, when it comes to mass fatality planning, preparations focus on large-scale, usually one-time events such as a plane crash, hurricane, mass shooting, tornado, etc. (Stanley, 2010). Pandemics are different, however, in that they are not punctuations in time but rather sustained with clear public health spillover implications (Stanley, 2010). When mass fatality incidents in the US occur, there might be a thought that local medical examiners and coroners will handle the deceased, but proper infrastructure and planning are needed given resource constraints (Carroll et al., 2017). Cemeteries and funeral homes also become involved and also need capacity to handle victim surges. During the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, the relationship with burial and mourning changed. As Lowe et al. (2020) report, people in the US and abroad could not quickly bury loved ones, cemeteries in metropolitan areas ran out of space, cremation needs increased and strained those providers, normal body preparation practices could not be carried out, and people then turned to other mourning spaces such as roadside memorials or online presences. People globally faced this problem of burial constraints and concerns. In Malaysia, for example, COVID-19 protocols prevented loved ones from opening a coffin or touching the deceased, and religious practices could only be performed over a closed body bag (Khoo et al., 2020). Omonisi (2020) details how people in many African countries had to forego elaborate mourning rituals because of the virus. The essay details changes to mortuary practices, with bodies piling up because decedents could not be readily released to families (Omonisi, 2020). Moreover, the celebration of life parties were curtailed, and families were unable to touch and kiss bodies in morgues, breaking a pre-pandemic tradition (Omonisi, 2020). In Italy, public health measures prevented large funeral gatherings and encouraged cremation instead (Ussai et al., 2020). Because the dead were unable to be buried in personal clothes, priests were allowed to place family clothing on top of coffins (Ussai et al., 2020). Countless other examples from countries globally showcase how mourning practices changed and evolved during COVID-19. The pandemic brought about loss in many ways: death of a loved one, social distancing and isolation, economic loss, loss of physical and emotional connections, lack of safety and perceived danger (Wallace et al., 2020). For many patients who died in a hospital setting, this meant families could not be with them, so medical professionals sometimes resorted to FaceTime or other digital technologies to connect a dying patient with loved ones for a final time. Funerals could not take place rapidly, thus delaying mourning practices. The ongoing pandemic brought many people face to face with grief and loss in many forms (Wallace et al., 2020). This chapter touches on lessons we can learn from those public serv-

276  Research handbook on public management and COVID-19 ants dealing with death each day. The hope is lessons from these street-level bureaucrats can inform more robust citizen–state encounters.1

THEMES FOR DEATH MANAGEMENT Findings in this section come from an analysis across two datasets – interviews with 35 US cemetery managers, and interviews with 17 medical examiners and coroners throughout the United States. In the US, medical examiners are trained physicians with expertise in medicolegal death investigation and forensic autopsies (Hanzlick and Combs, 1998). Medical examiners can work for counties, districts, or the state and are appointed/hired. Coroners, on the other hand, are often not trained medical professionals and are elected to their positions (Hanzlick and Combs, 1998). Given the complex governing structure in the US, this means there are more than 2,500 death investigation systems in place (Hanzlick and Combs, 1998). For both projects, interviews lasted approximately one hour each and followed Institutional Review Board (IRB) guidelines. Purposive sampling was used to find participants (had to fall into those categories working for a public agency), then snowball sampling was done (asking each participant if they could recommend a colleague to whom I could speak). All interviews were recorded, along with taking extensive notes. Some patterns emerged quite clearly, such as the need for emotional intelligence and demands on mental health. The other two I discerned by a closer reading of the data. Data analysis was modeled after Mastracci’s (2015) use of the Gioia method (Gioia and Pitre, 1990). The method is interpretivist in nature and data are gathered to build theory and learn lessons. For this project, the method was appropriate given the exploratory nature and the reliance on people as experts and knowledgeable agents (Gioia et al., 2012). The “Gioia method” allows the researcher to create first-order concepts, understood as the bigger story in the data. Second-order coding refines those initial patterns into aggregate dimensions (Gioia et al., 2012). Finally, aggregate dimensions further define the themes, and those are presented in this chapter. Finding 1: Mental Health Needs More Attention You thinking you’re not going to get exposed to trauma in our field is like saying you’re going to go swimming and not get wet. So, do we teach you to swim in a healthy way, or do we use the old “you can either do it or you can’t”?

A chief medical examiner in a large Arizona county said this as he was explaining how the COVID-19 pandemic might in some ways be a small silver lining to shed light on the importance of mental health for deathcare professionals. For coroners and medical examiners, their jobs inherently expose them – and death investigators – to human bodies, decomposition, and other potential pathogens. During the ongoing global pandemic (still raging as of this writing), the risks increased because medical examiners doing autopsies had to take extra precautions to remain safe. Especially during the beginning stages of the pandemic when less was known about how the virus was transmitted, more precautions needed to be taken when conducting examinations. Even as science better understood how the virus that causes COVID-19 was transmitted, the medical examiners were still at risk when doing procedures sending potentially virus-laden particles into the air (O’Keefe, 2020).

Death management in public administration: lessons from the front lines  277 O’Keefe (2020) further outlines risks medical examiners and coroners face during the pandemic including: site investigation, body transport, body preparation for funerals or cremations, contact with other deathcare professionals and family members. These were coupled with shortages of proper personal protection equipment (PPE), medical examiner shortages throughout the US, and storage space limitations in many morgues and hospital facilities (O’Keefe, 2020). Social distancing measures often meant families could not come to an autopsy suite or morgue to say final goodbyes to a loved one, so pathology staff needed to adapt to help families during a challenging time (Myers and Mulder, 2020). Returning to the chief medical examiner from Arizona, he explained his role as a manager is to ensure his staff are supporting their mental health. His swimming analogy alludes to the old way of thinking about mental health for deathcare professionals: suck it up. This way of thinking still exists, as evidenced by my interview data, but some leaders are trying to find a more humane balance. He said in his office, he integrates the importance of mental health on an equal footing as workplace safety and preventing accidents. It’s a gift, the people who sign up to do this, the people who sign up to help the public this way. There’s a lot of denial and anger [from families], and a lot of times we’re the sort of meeting the end of that, just as people are processing things. It’s really challenging work. It’s great to have those people, and we want to protect them and make them resilient.

In another example, a medical examiner in a Washington county near the City of Seattle explained his office contracts with a psychologist specializing in first responder trauma. “A psychologist certified in first responder trauma is almost unheard of in a county our size,” he said, noting there are about 280,000 people in his county compared with the larger King County (where Seattle is located) three miles away. He found the psychologist one day when he and his team were called in to assist King County with a critical incident involving some staff. The police commander in King County pooled the staff to find the name of this specialist, and now the county where the medical examiner works has her on retainer. He himself is also a certified peer counselor, which means he makes himself available to his staff should they need his help. It’s a mentally challenging job. We’re dealing with things here every day that most people may experience once in their lives, maybe twice. And the folks that work here are dealing with it four and five times a day. So, I keep a pretty close eye on them, and they all keep a petty close eye on each other.

My data indicate attention to mental health among deathcare public servants falls into the two camps the Arizona medical examiner mentioned: suck it up, or meaningfully address it. By way of the former, some stories illustrate this difference. One chief medical examiner in a large Florida county noted he tried to implement a group counseling session, but he received pushback. I think some of it’s the older guard resented the idea. I was going to make everyone sit with a counselor for a day and get a turn to vent – no one singled out or stigmatized. I got a lot of pushback from the old guard who were like, “this is stupid. I don’t have a problem. I don’t want to talk to anyone.” My employment lawyer didn’t love the idea of me making people go to a counselor either.

One cemetery manager in Alaska said he copes with the stresses of his job by playing hockey weekly. “There’s some aggression, and everybody is padded, so that’s always good. I can

278  Research handbook on public management and COVID-19 take a hit, and I’ll give a hit.” A cemetery manager in Massachusetts who I asked about their self-care replied: “I don’t. Maybe prayer.” In sum, the COVID-19 pandemic brought about changes in deathcare, especially concerning the mental health and wellbeing of these last responders. For some medical examiners and coroners, the change was not too burdensome because medical and medicolegal death investigation practices already required PPE and caution. For others, the amount of excess deaths overwhelmed people and systems. As first and last responders continue to handle excess deaths, more attention to wellbeing is needed. Finding 2: Efficiency and Effectiveness Always Need Balance The tensions between efficiency and effectiveness is a classic conundrum in public administration, so it is not surprising this theme would emerge during data analysis. For death managers, they need to know rules and laws, while also balancing empathy and understanding. This tension manifested in the following ways: COVID-19 slowed down medical examiner/coroner processes; burials take a lot of work and coordination; and empathy needs to balance with efficiency. First, COVID-19 and the associated unknowns changed how some of these front-line public servants handled the deceased. Specifically, medical examiners and coroners were unsure during the pandemic’s early stages of just how a deceased person could transmit – or not – the virus. In my data, some medical examiners and coroners made changes to office policies regarding autopsies and personnel, while for others fewer changes were needed. One chief medical examiner from the State of Connecticut noted his main concern – echoed by colleagues across the US – was securing enough personal protective equipment (PPE). For some medical examiners and coroners, they had to borrow from hospitals or get creative with purchasing equipment online. This was easier to do, for instance, with medical examiners at offices working on a contractual basis rather than for a county directly because they were not bound by similar purchasing requirements as their counterparts working directly for a county entity. Regarding autopsy protocols, again some medical examiners and coroners in the sample noted changes to procedures while for others there was no major change. Said the medical examiner from Connecticut: With an autopsy, we treat every body as infectious. That’s just general universal precautions for an infection. We may get a death with tuberculosis, and we don’t know it’s TB until we do the autopsy. You have to treat every body already as potentially infected. So, from that point of view it didn’t change much.

What worried some medical examiners and coroners more was the potential to be overrun with excess deaths. In some jurisdictions, this is a relatively small number – say four or five deaths. For larger jurisdictions, the capacity is much higher simply because the office serves a larger geographical region. It is here where efficiency versus effectiveness came into play for these particular deathcare public servants. The balance medical examiners and coroners had to strike during COVID-19 is familiar to any street-level bureaucrat interacting with the public – balancing rules and regulations with discretion (Maynard-Moody and Musheno, 2003). Medical examiners’ and coroners’ offices might have closed public-facing lobbies or buildings, but their workloads did not decrease.

Death management in public administration: lessons from the front lines  279 Excess deaths from the virus itself, increases in suicides and overdose deaths, and the normal caseload meant many already-taxed offices were overburdened (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, 2022). What happened in Florida perhaps best exemplifies this tension. When the governor declared a state of emergency during the pandemic’s early months, it triggered a part of the law requiring the state’s medical examiners to certify all emergency-related deaths (White, 2020). This meant all COVID-19 deaths in the state, including those of people already under physician care, were kicked to medical examiners. This increase in caseload – mainly paperwork associated with having to certify a death certificate – hamstrung some offices, meaning families had to wait to carry out burial and mourning practices (White, 2020). One chief medical examiner serving a large State of Florida county said during the pandemic’s onset in early 2020, “we didn’t realize how big it would get. Quickly we realized medical examiners were overrun.” Once the state of emergency provision kicked in, he said his office went from one or two COVID-19 cases per week to about 60. Over time, his office processed paperwork for more than 600 pandemic-related deaths. “It wasn’t really the spirit of the law anymore.” He explained virus-related deaths are natural deaths, so not technically a medical examiner case by the statutes. But the state of emergency meant that the medical examiners had to request the decedent’s records, examine those records, then confirm what the clinician already knew. In August 2020, he said, the medical examiners got together to explain this paperwork problem was backing up the entire burial process for families. “The funeral homes were getting backed up. Families [were] mad. The whole system was getting backed up,” he said. “We were all so busy, so we didn’t talk to each other [to say] we were all getting killed, no pun intended.” In sum, medical examiners and coroners are duty bound to carry out death investigations in a scientific manner. When deathcare systems became overwhelmed, sometimes there was a trade-off between efficiency and effectiveness – a not uncommon problem in government operations generally. A big lesson learned from these examples is that, in the US, there needs to be better communication among government and private agencies in charge of aspects of deathcare. Records were not easily accessed, causing problems for accurate death investigation and epidemic tracing. Finding 3: Knowledge of Rules and Laws is Crucial – And Sometimes When to Bend Them Closely related to Finding 2 is knowing rules and laws – and when to bend them. The medical examiners from the State of Florida in the example above got together to say this statutory provision was hampering their offices from investigating deaths requiring their attention, along with preventing families from mourning and burial. This was also an example of knowing the rules and when to challenge them. Lessons from the medical examiners and coroners and cemetery managers can apply to other public servants as well. What they experience aligns well with scholarship on street-level bureaucratic discretion (Maynard-Moody and Musheno, 2003). Cemetery managers, for instance, often interact with people on their worst days so must know how to best help families. For municipal cemeteries, local ordinances guide their abilities, along with industry standards for burial and cremation. They must know what plots are open, how to properly sell

280  Research handbook on public management and COVID-19 and record deeds for burial rights, and how to best maintain the cemetery as both a place for reflection and public park. Similarly, medical examiners and coroners are bound by county and state law, along with scientific standards related to medicolegal investigations. A story from a cemetery manager in Florida best shows what it means to know the rules and when to bend them. The cemetery manager retired after more than 30 years of public service to his city. When he left, his successor was much more rule-bound at the cemetery. Municipal ordinances, for example, guide what can be left on a gravestone and for how long. The new team began enforcing the rules “to the letter,” as he described it, causing them to find themselves in the middle of a lawsuit. “I told one of the people running [the cemetery], I said, ‘Do you know his background?’ They said no. I’m like well that’s your problem.” The person suing was a man who lost his daughter in a tragic car accident more than two decades before. The daughter was 17 at the time, and she was killed while leaving her place of work. The last conversation the father had with her was him yelling because she was unable to take time off work to come to her brother’s wedding in New York. “The guilt is unbelievable,” explained the retired cemetery manager, “so he might have an extra stuffed animal, but it gets him through the day. The guy is almost 70, he lost his daughter, you know, 20-something years ago… I said that’s what you need to learn about. There’s a story behind every death.” The new cemetery crew cleared everything off the daughter’s grave, causing the man to become incredibly angry. Now he’s lost his wife to cancer. Give the man a [expletive deleted] stuffed animal. It doesn’t hurt a thing … If you treat a cemetery like a business, which it is, but if you don’t know the backstory behind that person you will never succeed. You never will.

In sum, this finding shows the importance of administrative discretion when it comes to creating a fulfilling citizen–state encounter. Being able to read the situation and act accordingly is a key tenet of street-level bureaucracy, especially when done with empathy and understanding. Deathcare workers deal each day with a person’s most difficult time – mourning and burying a loved one. This takes an almost hyper awareness of empathy and discretion. Finding 4: Emotional Intelligence is Necessary The final finding from my deathcare research worth noting and that can cross boundaries into other arenas of public management is the need for emotional intelligence. Emotional intelligence allows those dealing with death each day to read situations and help families cope. Emotional intelligence is multifaceted, and according to Salovey and Grewal (2005) has four different dimensions. When combined, emotions and intelligence means emotions can be a useful guide for honing one’s intelligence (Salovey and Grewal, 2005). According to the authors, this manifests in four ways: perceiving, using, understanding, and managing. Perceiving relates to one’s ability to detect emotions in others and themselves. Using refers to how someone can use emotions to aid in problem solving and other cognitive abilities. Understanding emotions, for Salovey and Grewal (2005), means recognizing differences between emotions and how those emotions can change through time. Finally, managing emotions means one’s ability to regulate emotions. In public administration, some scholars understand the latter as emotional labor (Guy et al., 2014), as it takes work to regulate emotions. We

Death management in public administration: lessons from the front lines  281 can learn lessons from deathcare managers, who have to do this nearly daily, especially those who interface directly with grieving families. These interactions exemplify the citizen–state encounter (Bartels, 2013; Goodsell 1981; Humphrey, 2021), which can shape how people perceive government’s effectiveness. Guy (2022) notes there is an emotional component critical to an effective citizen–state encounter, so we can learn some lessons from deathcare public servants that fall in line with Salovey and Grewal’s (2005) four components. From the stories I share here, it becomes clear the four components are not mutually exclusive. This is not surprising, as emotions and emotional intelligence are complex. Regarding perceiving emotions, deathcare workers directly helping families need to learn quickly how to read a room – then use that information to make decisions. Sometimes one’s own life experiences help them better connect with people, tying into managing emotions. A cemetery manager in a small Commonwealth of Kentucky town told me that she lost two grandparents and a parent during her tenure so far at the cemetery. That experience, coupled with her self-described ability to “cry at the drop of a hat,” lets her use emotions to make decisions. “That’s just my personality. If you come in and you’ve got tears in your eyes, I’m going to grab you and hug you.” When it comes to using emotions, deathcare managers need to be adept at reading the situation to help families navigate the bureaucracy of death. One medical examiner from the State of Connecticut said his role as a forensic pathologist is as a family bereavement physician. “In a hospital death, the family will talk to the doctor, and that’s usually it. But families will have questions later on.” He explained families might call him months or even years later to learn more details after an autopsy or death investigation. “It takes time for them to be able to get to a place where they can hear it and understand it.” Similarly, a cemetery manager in the State of Indiana explained using emotions helped her better understand grief. She started working at the cemetery when she was younger, working first in a part-time role and eventually moving up to the director position. When she was younger, she explained, she thought all people grieved similarly. You know, this funeral service was the same as that one, and all families grieved the same way. Working out here you find that’s not true … I thought it odd at first, then I thought you know maybe it’s not the way that I think people should grieve but it’s best for them. Some families will be very solemn, and you know that from the minute they walk in the door, and you do your best to help them.

Next, regarding understanding emotions and how they change through time, deathcare workers directly see how people navigate grief and the complexities of death. A story from a State of Idaho coroner reflects this, especially when it comes to grief. He shared with me that his son committed suicide about 15 years ago. When my predecessor came out, we made it out to the scene before he did, he looked at me and I was his deputy at the time. I said [former coroner] it’s our son. He held us. He cried with us. The mortuary that came out, he held us and cried with us. I thought, I want to pay it forward… You have to follow the rules, and you have to follow the people, too.

The story describes the coroner’s own grief at losing his son, along with a desire to make sure he carries that grief with him to help others. The lesson there is to rely on empathy and understanding when helping people navigate often-complex bureaucratic processes.

282  Research handbook on public management and COVID-19 Finally, managing emotions most closely resembles emotional labor (Guy et al., 2014). Guy and Lee (2015) explain how emotional intelligence mediates emotional labor, noting that emotional intelligence is an ability to react to emotions and use them to regulate situations, whereas emotional labor is “emotive behavior performed for a wage” (Guy and Lee, 2015, p. 264). The distinction Guy and Lee (2015) make is emotional intelligence applies to the person in all facets of life, whereas emotional labor is performed in the work setting and part of someone’s work tasks. Given the citizen–state encounter relies on emotions for success (Guy, 2022), deathcare workers can teach us some lessons. For instance, one cemetery manager in a small State of Georgia city said he feels the pressure of the cemetery when helping families make burial decisions. A lot of times, we’re meeting with families that just lost a loved one. We’re looking at buying cemetery lots, and it’s one of those decisions where it’s a decision that you have to make right now because the funeral’s tomorrow, but it’s a decision you’ve got to live with from now on. Once we put somebody in the ground, they’re there. It’s not like buying a house and five years from now you say hey I want to move over there.

The lessons learned are to read the situation, be patient, guide people through complex process, and help them make the best decision possible given the constraints. In another example, a cemetery director in a State of Maine town said, “you’ve got to be part psychologist and very able to work with people.” He described situations where people came to burials with emotions running high, and those sometimes spilled over into fights between the guests. You have people there who are looking for somebody to step in and stop this. It’s not the funeral director’s job to stop it. The more the family goes at it, it escalates. Sometimes you’ve got to tell people you’re being kicked out of the cemetery.

The story illustrates emotional intelligence – reading the situation as it escalates – and emotional labor – regulating any emotions and performing your job duties. In sum, my findings in this section indicate the critical role emotional intelligence and emotional labor play when it comes to understanding the needs of both public servants and government service users. These findings align closely with an ability to use discretion to be helpful when some rules and regulations can be bent. Deathcare managers need to have a keen ability to read the room so they know how to engage with mourning families. They also need in-depth knowledge of rules and regulations related to burials and death investigations to best give answers to families. Final Thoughts: Deathcare Professionals and the COVID-19 Effect The findings in this section come from two studies I have done related to the public service aspects of deathcare and death management. In public administration, we pay necessary attention to first responders such as police officers and fire fighters, as they play a pivotal role in keeping us safe. This chapter showed that we as scholars also need to pay attention to last responders working with the dead – also with the goal to keep the living safe.

Death management in public administration: lessons from the front lines  283 Medical examiners and coroners in the US, for instance, are key actors in the public health space, especially when it comes to epidemiological research and fact finding (Hanzlick, 2006). But medical examiners and coroners also can find patterns related to, for example, traffic and pedestrian safety, drug overdoses and abuse, food safety, and product safety (Hanzlick, 2006). Those findings are then used to make improvements to policies aimed at keeping people safe. Cemetery managers also are key public servants not only helping families during difficult times but also as curators of history and public spaces. For example, local governments in the US are “the gatekeepers of the zoning process, the public power that most directly influences the location of burial facilities” (Basmajian and Coutts, 2010, p. 308). Not only is there an important legal aspect of burial, but there is also a crucial human aspect. The COVID-19 pandemic changed burial and mourning practices given restraints on large gatherings and other safety measures to prevent the virus’s spread. Going forward, there should be increased study of the human side of death management to focus on efficiency and effectiveness (Entress et al., 2020).

CONCLUSION The purpose of this chapter was to shed light on public servants who often go unseen until needed: deathcare professionals. Based on findings from two studies, lessons learned from these public servants can cut across organizations and institutions. As the COVID-19 pandemic continues (as of this writing), increased empathy for bureaucrats and the public is needed. Agencies also need to be paying attention to increased workloads with fewer resources, leading to burnout and exit. My other hope with the chapter is to show scholars of public administration there is a world of public service knowledge going untapped. As Guy (2022) notes, emotions and connections are at the heart of the citizen–state encounter, and a sole focus on improving methodological approaches might miss some of this core. It might seem trite to some, but to me the excitement of public service is asking people whose job might seem weird, or strange, or often invisible how and why they do what they do. Sharing their stories is a way to get at tacit knowledge that can aid other public servants and scholars in their journeys.

NOTE 1.

Citizen here is meant to denote residents of a jurisdiction, regardless of legal status.

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284  Research handbook on public management and COVID-19 Carroll, E., Johnson, A., DePaolo, F, Adams, B.J., Mazone, D., and Sampson, B. (2017). Trends in United States mass fatality incidents and recommendations for medical examiners and coroners. Academic Forensic Pathology, 7(3), 318–329. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. (2022). Excess deaths associated with COVID-19. Retrieved from: https://​www​.cdc​.gov/​nchs/​nvss/​vsrr/​covid19/​excess​_deaths​.htm Entress, R.M., Tyler, J., Zavattaro, S.M., and Sadiq, A. (2020). The need for innovation in deathcare leadership. International Journal of Public Leadership, 17(1), 54–64. Gioia, D.A. and Pitre, E. (1990). Multiparadigm perspectives on theory building. Academy of Management Review, 15(4), 584–602. Gioia, D.A., Corley, K.G. and Hamilton, A.L. (2012). Seeking qualitative rigor in inductive research: Notes on the Gioia methodology. Organizational Research Methods, 16(1), 15–31. Goodsell, C. (1981). The public encounter and its study. In C. Goodsell (ed.), The Public Encounter: Where State and Citizen Meet, pp. 3–22. Indiana University Press. Guy, M.E. (2022). Harnessing human capital for peak performance: How emotion work strengthens the citizen-state encounter. In M. Holzer and A. Ballard (eds), Public Productivity and Performance Handbook, 3rd edition, pp. 387–399. New York, NY: Routledge. Guy, M.E. and Lee, H.J. (2015). How emotional intelligence mediates emotional labor. Review of Public Personnel Administration, 35(3), 261–277. Guy, M.E., Newman, M.A. and Mastracci, S. (2014). Emotional Labor: Putting the Service in Public Service. Taylor & Francis. Hanzlick, R. (2006). Medical examiners, coroners, and public health: A review and update. Archives of Pathology and Lab Medicine, 130, 1274–1283. Hanzlick, R. and Combs, D. (1998). Medical examiner and coroner systems: History and trends. JAMA, 279(11), 870–874. Humphrey, N. (2021). Emotional labor and professionalism: Finding balance at the local level. State and Local Government Review, 53(3), 260–270. Kapucu, N. (2008). Collaborative emergency management: Better community organizing, better public preparedness and response. Disasters, 32(2), 239–262. Khoo, L.S., Hasmi, A.H., Ibrahim, M.A., and Mahmood, M.S. (2020). Management of the dead during COVID-19 outbreak in Malaysia. Forensic Science, Medicine and Pathology, 16, 463–470. Lowe, J., Rumbold, B. and Aoun, S.M. (2020). Memorialization during COVID-19: Implications for the bereaved, service providers, and policy makers. Palliative Care & Social Practice, 14, 1–9. Mastracci, S. (2015). Human resource management practices to support emotional labor in emergency response. Homeland Security and Emergency Management, 12(4), 875–889. Maynard-Moody, S. and Musheno, M. (2003). Cops, Teachers, Counselors: Narratives of Street-level Judgments. Ann Arbor, MI: University of Michigan Press. McClymont, K. (2016). That eccentric use of land at the top of the hill: Cemeteries and stories of the city. Mortality, 21(4), 378–396. Myers, J.L. and Mulder, L. (2020). Frontline workers in the back rooms of COVID-19: Caring for the living and the dead. American Journal of Clinical Pathology, 154, 286–292. O’Keefe, J. (2020). Death care during the COVID-19 pandemic: Understanding the public health risks. Environmental Health Review, 63(2), 40–47. Omonisi, A.E. (2020). How COVID-19 pandemic is changing Africa’s elaborate burial rites, mourning, and grieving. Pan African Medical Journal, 35(S2), 1–3. Salovey, P. and Grewal, D. (2005). The science of emotional intelligence. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 14(6), 281–285. Stanley, S.A.R. (2010). Building mass fatality management at the regional level for pandemic and catastrophic response. Journal of Homeland Security and Emergency Management, 7(1), https://​doi​.org/​ 10​.2202/​1547​-7355​.1682 Ussai, S., Armocida, B., Formenti, B., Palestra, F., Calvi, M., and Missoni, E. (2020). Hazard prevention, death and dignity during COVID-19 pandemic in Italy. Frontiers in Public Health, 8, article 509. Wallace, CL., Wladkowski, S.P., Gibson, A., and White, P. (2020). Grief during the COVID-19 pandemic: Considerations for palliative care providers. Journal of Pain and Symptom Management, 60(1) pp. e70–76.

Death management in public administration: lessons from the front lines  285 White, G. (2020). Florida medical examiners give up role in COVID-19 deaths. Retrieved from: https://​www​.theledger​.com/​story/​news/​coronavirus/​2020/​08/​27/​medical​-examiners​-relinquish​-role​ -determining​-covid​-related​-deaths/​5647111002/​ Zavattaro, S.M. (2021). City Sextons: Tales from Municipal Leaders. Routledge.

22. The rise of robots in the COVID-19 pandemic: implications for public management Helen Dickinson and Catherine Smith

INTRODUCTION Robots and other automation technologies have existed for a significant length of time, but recent developments in computing power and the reduced costs of these technologies are starting to make these technologies more accessible (Dickinson and Yates, 2021). As a result, we are starting to see the more widespread application of these technologies in a range of public service sectors, many of which are struggling with attracting and retaining sufficient workforces. For example, many countries are presently experiencing significant changes in relation to care services (Carey et al., 2018) – groups receiving these services are increasing in numbers, becoming older, have greater levels of disability and chronic illness, and higher expectations about quality (Glasby and Dickinson, 2014). At the same time, care service providers are finding it increasingly difficult to recruit an appropriate workforce (Australian Government Productivity Commission, 2017; Beech et al., 2019; Lien Foundation, 2018). The current low levels of unemployment being experienced in a number of countries will likely further exacerbate these challenges Against this background there is a significant degree of ‘techno-optimism’ that technologies such as robotics may be able to solve at least some of this crisis (Lember et al., 2019). The COVID-19 pandemic intensified calls for robotic technologies to be used more widely. Robots cannot contract COVID-19 and become sick and nor can they transmit COVID-19 to humans (Shen et al., 2021). The use of robots can also substantially reduce the need for person-to-person contact. In this way, robots may be able to help in tackling some more longstanding challenges around the workforce, but also those issues raised by the COVID-19 pandemic. Yet the use of robotics is not without challenges and raises several potential practical and ethical challenges (Sharkey and Sharkey, 2012; Sparrow, 2015). Robotics do not feature extensively in the public management literature (for exceptions see Jeffares, 2021; Whitford et al., 2020). Robotics research has traditionally been funded by defence organizations (Sparrow and Sparrow 2006), with only comparatively recent forays into health and care fields. There were, however, a number of new uses of robots in these spaces during phases of the COVID-19 pandemic that were specific to managing the health and care crisis that emerged. While there are many papers dealing with robotics in manufacturing and engineering (e.g. Michalos et al., 2015; Polygerinos et al., 2017), law (e.g. Calo, 2015; Richards and Smart, 2016), ethics (e.g. Coeckelbergh and Stahl, 2016; Sparrow and Sparrow, 2006) and medicine (e.g. Broadbent et al., 2016; Moyle et al., 2017), the field of public management lags. We argue that if robotic technologies are to play a role in public services, they merit substantial consideration within the public management field. In this chapter, we explore the uses of robots in managing the pandemic, and the potential and future applications of robotic technologies in terms of the challenges that they may 286

The rise of robots in the COVID-19 pandemic  287 raise for public management and public managers. We focus on three areas, policy capacity, workforce implications and ethics. In doing so, we argue that there are many issues that are currently under-explored and under-examined within public management and the public management literature and these require urgent attention if these technologies are to operate as anticipated and not to have adverse or unanticipated consequences.

WHAT ARE ROBOTS AND HOW ARE THEY USED IN PUBLIC SERVICES? One of the challenges in unpacking the use of robots in public services is that so many different things are referred to as robots in everyday language. Indeed, van Wynsberghe (2015, p. 39) argues that “robots may be one of the most difficult technological innovations to define”. For the purposes of this chapter, robots include computer coded software that performs repetitive rules-based tasks. Robots may, but do not have to, appear to have human-like qualities in the form of performance of physical tasks through mechanized movement. Robots could plausibly fulfil several roles in public services, but these do not come without risks and potentially negative societal impacts. Robots have a number of applications, such as assisting in care activities, providing social interaction, cleaning, diagnosis and screening, logistics and manufacturing, and policing compliance with regulations amongst other applications (Shen et al., 2021). Implementing robotic technologies could require significant changes to how public services operate. The literature on technology implementation demonstrates that it should not be assumed robots can simply be slotted into services; work must be undertaken to ensure they fit with the prevailing model of services (Aarons et al., 2010; Cook et al., 2012). Without thoughtful and consultative alignment within systems of work, they have less chance of successful implementation (Greenhalgh, 2018). The use of robotics also has implications for how services are regulated and the types of capabilities and capacities that public servants are required to possess. There is a great degree of hope in terms of the potential that robot technologies might play in resolving some of the longstanding workforce issues in the public service, and also in potentially making services more efficient. A study from Deloitte (2016) suggests that approximately a quarter of UK public service workers undertake jobs that have a high chance of automation, potentially reducing 2030 labour costs by £17 billion when compared with 2015. Not all these reductions would be delivered by robotics, but there are suggestions that these kinds of technologies might have the potential to reduce spending on labour expenses. As Lember et al. (2019) argue, the public management literature is suffused with a high degree of techno-optimism relating to the positive impacts that new technologies such as robotics might be capable of delivering. But this often comes without sufficient consideration of potential unanticipated impacts that they may also bring. This is potentially problematic because as the Australian Human Rights Commission (2018, p. 7) notes, “like any tool, technology can be used for good or ill … modern technology carries unprecedented potential on an individual and global scale. New technologies are already radically disrupting our social, governmental and economic systems.” New technologies are therefore disjunctive: offering significant advantages alongside the potential for misuse, including unintended consequences that need careful consideration to ensure such developments do not negatively impact particular groups. History shows that disruptive technologies require careful policy, legal and administrative scrutiny

288  Research handbook on public management and COVID-19 during their implementation (Busuioc, 2021). We argue that these issues need to be considered to mitigate some of the potential negative impacts or system changes that may be required. It seems highly likely that one of the longer-term impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic will be greater investment in robot technologies and perhaps greater willingness to use these in public service settings than we would otherwise have seen in the shorter term. We now turn to some of the ways that robotic technologies have been deployed during the COVID-19 pandemic.

COVID-19 AND THE RISE OF ROBOTIC TECHNOLOGIES The COVID-19 pandemic has accelerated development and implementation of the technologies and applications outlined in the previous section. US and European governments have announced significant funding for manufacturers developing devices that can help combat COVID-19 (Lomas, 2020; Newmarker, 2020). The pandemic has essentially helped to make the case for the expansion of these technologies, despite their expense and potential risks, on the basis that we have significant workforce shortages or there are risks in humans being in close proximity to one another. Robots cannot contract COVID-19 or become sick; this is clearly an advantage over humans who may not be able to work because they are ill or worry they have the virus and may infect others. This is even more important where care is required among individuals who may be immunocompromised and at greater risk of becoming seriously unwell if they contract COVID-19. Table 22.1 provides examples of some of the ways that robots have been used in public services during the pandemic. This is not an exhaustive list but provides an overview of some of the applications across a range of service areas. As outlined above, many of these applications are not novel to the pandemic, but their adoption was expediated and enhanced during this time. As seen in Table 22.1, some of the technologies used through the pandemic have in effect replaced human effort. For example, one obvious application for robotics relates to disinfecting spaces with light or sprays, on the basis that robots do not get tired or risk being infected (Wired.com, 2020). Drones were repurposed from other duties into such a role in a variety of places (Franco, 2020). Robots have also been used to deliver food and equipment in quarantine hotels and to keep shop shelves stocked so people are able to access supplies (Annunziata, 2020; Cuthbertson, 2020). Robots can even be used to take the temperatures of individuals or to detect people with high fevers in social spaces (Marr, 2020) and have also been developed to perform tests and take swabs from people who are suspected of being infected (Pollard, 2020). Robots are also being used to help police and regulate individuals in other ways. In China, drones were used to track individuals who are supposed to be in quarantine (Doffman, 2020) and in Singapore robots were used in parks to remind people to socially distance (Stankiewicz, 2020). Many of the applications suggested so far are in essence relatively transactional in the sense that they fulfil one particular activity or another. But robots also have applications in social contexts. Social isolation has moved from being a fringe issue impacting a few more marginalized groups, to something many of us have had to deal with. This has been even more pronounced in aged care settings, where we have seen many of these closed to visitors for fear of spreading infection amongst a vulnerable population. Social robots are programmed

The rise of robots in the COVID-19 pandemic  289 Table 22.1

Robot applications in public services

Service area

Activity

Medical and healthcare

Sanitization and infection Robots have been used for sanitization and disinfection, particularly

robotics

Description in healthcare facilities. These autonomous robots utilize UVC light to disinfect surfaces effectively, achieving a high level of sterilization. UVD Robots from Blue Ocean (UVD Robots, 2022) for example, were registered by the Canadian Ministry of Health during the pandemic.

Surgery

Robots have been trialled in survey for some time, most notably the Da Vinci surgical systems by Intuitive Surgical. It is argued that these are highly precise technologies allowing for minimally invasive surgery that improve patient safety and surgical outcomes (Grespan et al., 2019).

Food and medicine

Robots can help with a number of manual tasks in healthcare settings such

delivery

as delivering foods and medicines. They can also assist with the handling and analysis of medical samples, reducing the risk of contamination for healthcare workers (Berdot et al., 2016).

Reception and monitoring Robots are being used to make pre-diagnosis, assessing patient symptoms through questionnaires and thermal screenings (Aymeric-Franch and Ferrer, 2022). Rehabilitation and aged

Screening and monitoring A range of robots have been developed that aid in tasks such as visitor

care robotics

screening, health monitoring and disinfecting surfaces. Examples include Pepper, Temi and Misty (Li et al., 2020; Zhao et al., 2020). Therapeutic work

Robots have applications in therapy in a pandemic context where they reduce the need for close contact and applications have been developed in cognitive and physical exercise support, music therapy and communication facilitation (Haque et al., 2023).

Companionship and

Several robots have been developed to be companions to people in aged

cognitive stimulation

care and some have additional applications around cognitive training. These can be used to alleviate feelings of stress and isolation, particularly among individuals with dementia (Robinson et al., 2016).

Robotics in supply chain,

Warehouses

delivery, and logistics

Robots are being used in warehouses for sorting and packaging goods, thereby limiting human-to-human contact.

Deliveries

Autonomous delivery robots and drones helped ensure continuity of supply chains by delivering goods and food to people’s homes, especially during lockdowns. This might include delivering things such as medication, linens, meals and medical supplies to individuals who are quarantined due to infection or suspected infection where these robots are capable of opening and closing doors, storing medical waste and disinfecting themselves (Aymeric-Franch and Ferrer, 2022).

Public monitoring and

Surveillance and civic

Robots and drones have been used for monitoring public areas to

surveillance

compliance

ensure compliance with social distancing guidelines and curfews. Other applications are thermal screening in public places to detect individuals with elevated body temperatures (Sathyamoorthy et al., 2021).

Education

Schools and other

Robots were used to help with remote learning. They served as a platform

education institutions

for video calls and virtual interactions, to help students and teachers stay connected. In fields where hands-on training was restricted, robots had additional uses for simulations and connection (Abuatiq et al., 2022).

to do things such as remind people to take medications, engage people in doing exercises and entertain through dances and other movements (Hulspas, 2020). Some robots are also used to connect individuals to their families, having a camera, microphone and screen and enabling

290  Research handbook on public management and COVID-19 them to see their loved ones through this process. There has also been a reported substantial increase in the purchase of sex (companion) robots during lockdown (Cookney, 2020). Some commentators have argued the COVID-19 moment might be just what the robotics industry needs to take hold in a more significant way. Hanson Robotics, for example, had plans to mass produce their artificial intelligence-powered humanoid robot Sophia during 2021, despite criticism from other roboticists that the technology is not ready to do what will be expected of a human-sized, human-appearing personal care robot (Fearon, 2021). Many of these robotic technologies have not been created purely for the pandemic, but their potential application has been made clearer due to the limitations imposed by restrictions associated with COVID-19. While many organizations are thinking carefully about where to cut money in budgets, only 15 per cent of companies are planning to cut investments for automation, artificial intelligence and industrial internet-of-things (Trevedei, 2020). At the beginning of the pandemic Howard and Borenstein (2020) suggested that having been forced to adopt robots in the COVID-19 emergency, employers and consumers may get used to them and they may become a new normal if and when life returned to some normality. Prior to the pandemic there were a number of concerns expressed about automation of particular functions as these might lead to loss of jobs, but this emergency may have overcome what would have otherwise been a more significant debate about the introduction of these technologies.

CHALLENGES FOR PUBLIC MANAGEMENT A more expansive role for robots across a range of different areas of public life raises a series of potential challenges for public management. In this chapter, we focus on three particular areas: policy capacity, workforce implications and ethical considerations. Policy Capacity As Wellstead and Stedman (2010, p. 894) argue, “Ensuring strong policy capacity based within a public service is a critical factor in avoiding policy failure”. If robots are to be successfully implemented into public service contexts it is therefore important that there is clarity over the types of policy capacity required to oversee these technologies. Yet there is something of a gap within the literature in setting out what types of policy capacity and associated skills and capabilities are needed to oversee robot technologies. In a study of care robots in Australia and New Zealand, Dickinson et al. (2022) draw on the policy capacity literature (e.g. Wellstead and Stedman, 2010; Wu et al., 2015) to identify the types of skills, capabilities and knowledges that are required to effectively oversee the introduction of robotic technologies. These are set out across the individual, organizational and systemic levels relating to analytic, managerial and political capabilities (Table 22.2). In doing so these authors argue that although robots are a technological intervention, in terms of the skills, capabilities, and knowledge required to oversee them, there are actually relatively few “technical” skills outlined. Far more of the capabilities outlined in this research are arguably more generic skills. What was more important in this study is how public servants could effectively collaborate with a host of different stakeholders to understand these technologies and their potential implications across public service systems. These findings echo those of Pasquale (2020, pp. 15–16) who argues it is important to “warn policymakers away from framing con-

The rise of robots in the COVID-19 pandemic  291 Table 22.2

Policy capacity requirements to oversee robotics Individual

Analytic

Managerial

Organizational

Systemic

Ability to differentiate between Specialist technological insight Horizon scanning and foresight. different types of technologies. and understanding of robots

Ability to understand and

Ability to understand and assess and associated technologies.

analyse different evidence

different types of impacts in

Understanding of different

sources and communicate to

complex systems.

models of care. Understanding

partners. Ability to understand

of appropriate regulatory

complex systems and the

arrangements and ability to

impacts that robotics might

develop these.

create across a broad range of

Strategic management.

Ability to effectively

fields. Understand the market and the

Communication skills. Ability

collaborate with a range of

different mechanisms available

to negotiate amongst diverse

stakeholders. Ability to analyse to steer this. Adequate fiscal

stakeholder groups.

and disseminate evidence to

system to fund innovations and

a range of stakeholders. Ability stimulate market in underserved to develop and communicate

areas. Understanding of issues

required care standards.

relating to privacy and data sharing and mechanisms involved to shape this. Ensure availability of infrastructure (e.g., broadband, mobile phone and data networks).

Political

Understand needs and positions Access to key stakeholders of different stakeholders. Communication skills.

across a range of partners.

Strategic leadership across the system. Ability to understand implications of developments for the workforce and to work with partners to plan for this. Level of trust from the broad community to lead conversation about where and for what purposes robots should and should not be used.

troversies in AI and robotics as part of a blandly general ‘technology policy’, and toward deep engagement with domain experts charged with protecting important values in well-established fields”. The findings from the study show that the use of robotic technologies is less of a case of straightforward technology adoption and more of an intervention in a complex system and as such this called for a different set of skills. While arguing for the importance of strengthening policy capacity with respect to these technologies and complex systems, Dickinson et al. (2022) go on to note the range of studies over the past four decades that have found a general decline in policy capacity (Wellstead, 2019). In Australia, for example, we have seen successive reviews of the Australian Public Service, including the most recent Independent Review (Commonwealth of Australia, 2019), that have identified policy capacity as being a significant area of concern which has not improved despite these reviews and programmes to enhance it. Commentators feel there have been only small gains in some areas and even a decrease in policy capacity in some areas of the Australian Public Services (Head and O’Flynn, 2015). Rather than developing areas that will

292  Research handbook on public management and COVID-19 be important to oversee these sorts of technological developments, we have seen reductions associated with a more general “hollowing out” of the public service (Milward and Provan, 2003; Skelcher, 2000) as policy capacity is reduced in the public service and is replaced through the use of consultants and other third-party agents. What is clear from this research is that if governments are to effectively oversee robotic technologies, policy capacity is an area that will require significant investment. Relying on outside agents to deliver these aspects of policy capacity will create a number of system impacts that may be detrimental. Moreover, developing the types of capacity to oversee these technologies should more broadly bolster the ability of public services to manage complex systems. Although we have seen an expansion in the use of robotics as COVID emerged and took hold, we have not seen the same sort of development of policy capacity to oversee these technologies over this period. If robots are to play more expansive roles in the delivery of a range of services, it is crucial that this capacity is enhanced. Without this there is the potential for a number of risks to emerge and the full systems impacts of these technologies may not be well understood. Workforce Implications As we have outlined, one of the potential selling points for robots is that they might replace some or all of human labour in a service delivery context. There is great debate in the literature about the potential for automation of different occupations, with one study suggesting that up to 47 per cent of US workers have a high probability of seeing their jobs automated over the next 20 years (Frey and Osborne, 2017). Not all of this automation will be driven by robotics, but by broader automation technologies associated with artificial intelligence and machine learning. Training programmes will be needed for employees to operate and work alongside these technologies. Understanding the impact on jobs is crucial, as the workforce may need to be re-skilled or up-skilled to adapt to these changes. But what is clear is that there will be a role for public managers in driving the programmes that seek to re-train and re-direct workers who may be at risk of losing their jobs if they are replaced by a robot or other automation technology. The impact of automating roles will not be felt equally across all parts of the workforce. It is often argued that those roles that will be automated first are those that are dull, dirty and repetitive. These are roles that are not enjoyable to undertake and arguably robots and other technologies are better placed to undertake these kinds of tasks. This means that there will likely be a disproportionate impact on lower wage earners where roles require fewer skills. The expansion of the use of robots in these areas may also have a more significant impact on women, for example social care services are highly feminized (Macdonald, 2021). In some areas though, robots may not replace workers completely but augment human work in some way. Humans will be required to enable technologies through training and supporting these to deliver their roles. Similarly, technologies might augment the work of humans through undertaking elements of roles related to data process or manual lifting. This may lead to some significant changes in terms of the boundaries and interactions between individuals and robotic technologies that need careful consideration and support. In a study of automation using AI in different public servant contexts, Giest and Klievink (2022) found that where organizations do not change their structures and practices so that these systems can work alongside humans in complementary ways, a range of errors and inefficiencies can be created.

The rise of robots in the COVID-19 pandemic  293 Yet, in the rush to adopt new technologies within the context of the COVID pandemic we did not always see significant thought given to how these would be adopted within organizational structures and the implications for the workforce beyond filling an immediate crisis-driven need. While this may have fixed a short-term issue, there are questions about the longer-term sustainability of these approaches and without attention these may create inefficiencies and challenges for organizations. Ethical Considerations Smith et al. (2021) argue that the use of robotic technologies in public service contexts raises a series of issues relating to ethics. For example, the use of robots raises questions such as the boundaries between human and machines, what good service delivery looks like and who owns the responsibility for these outcomes. One major ethical consideration relates to issues of privacy, surveillance and data security (Körtner, 2016). Robot technologies may have the potential to collect a large amount of data as they are involved in activities of service delivery. But there is often a lack of clarity over who owns the data, who it is shared with and what the implications are if the data moves across international boundaries. While the concerns over these types of data collection processes may not seem immediate, they can have very real impacts for individuals. Those who are most vulnerable or disadvantaged may find that technologies developed for one purpose have data harvested and applied in other ways that they did not foresee. In the context of mental health services where we have seen an expansion in the use of digital technologies there have been reports of “hacking of psychotherapeutic records and the extortion of victims, algorithmic hiring programmes that discriminate against people with histories of mental healthcare, and criminal justice and border agencies weaponizing data concerning mental health against individuals” (Bossewitch et al., 2022, p. 8). There are particular concerns that many robotic and automation technologies are created by for-profit enterprises, and it may be unclear what data are being collected and how they are being shared, and whether the enterprises are profiting from selling data (Zuboff, 2019). Implementing robust cybersecurity measures would help protect systems from hacking or unauthorized access, ensuring the safety of both the user and the robots themselves. While some ethical frameworks have been developed around the use of robotics, these have often been led by the robotics industry itself and arguably do not go far enough in identifying the full range of risks that the use of robotics might bring. What is needed is a set of robust legal and regulatory frameworks that acknowledge the risks that these technologies might bring, and to prohibit those systems that might cause unacceptable individual and social harms. To do this, public sector accountability structures need to be strengthened and enhanced to guard against the misuse of data collected by robots and automation technologies. Ethical guidelines and standards, sometimes called roboethics, need to be established to guide the design, implementation, and use of robots, particularly socially assistive robots. These standards must address a range of issues, from the potential deception of users by robots mimicking human-like capabilities to the wider societal implications of their deployment. Given the potential disproportionate impact on vulnerable or disadvantaged populations, investing in capacity-building of representative organizations would be a helpful way to monitor the impact of these technologies on affected individuals and groups. Beyond policy changes, efforts must also be made to increase public awareness about the benefits and limitations of

294  Research handbook on public management and COVID-19 robots. This may involve accessible educational campaigns or public consultations, ensuring broader societal acceptance and understanding of rapidly evolving technologies. As noted above in the discussion of policy capacity, none of these activities can be undertaken by public servants alone and require collaboration across institutions and sectors and with civil society. During the initial crisis phase of the COVID-pandemic, public organizations may have been more willing to put aside some of these ethical issues in the short term to meet particular demands. However, these ethical issues remain and if these technologies are to have more long-term use, the issues will require resolution to guard against the potential negatives that might be created.

CONCLUSION Robots are not new technologies, but the COVID-19 pandemic has arguably sped up calls for a more widespread adoption of these technologies in a context where human labour may be problematic and serve to spread infection through contact between people. Over the pandemic period, we have seen significant investments in these technologies as a way to replace or augment the work that humans do. While there are a number of potential positives that these types of technologies bring, they are not without potential implications and the field of public management needs to carefully consider these, so that these technologies do not have detrimental or unanticipated impacts. In the initial crisis context of the pandemic, we may have encountered a greater willingness to put aside some of the concerns around these technologies to meet the immediate demand that public services faced. Ordinarily, we may have seen a greater level of scrutiny over these technologies, the types of skills and capabilities needed to oversee these, the impact on workforce and organizational structures and the ethical implications of these technologies. Some of these concerns may have been overlooked given the unprecedented times that public services faced, but it does not mean that these issues are not present. If robotics and automation technologies are to become a more present feature of our public service organizational landscapes, then these issues need careful scrutiny so that potential challenges for both the design and management of public organizations and the impact of these technologies in practice do not have damaging impacts. As yet, these types of technologies have lacked sufficient attention within the public management literature. This is problematic as they have the potential to deliver profound changes in terms of how public services are delivered and the impact this will have for the public service workforce, public sector managers and citizens. Closer scrutiny of these technologies and their impacts and requirements is required if such technologies are to be effective and also to guard against any potential detrimental impacts. The changes required should involve a multidisciplinary approach, involving stakeholders from various sectors, including healthcare, technology, privacy, ethics, and public policy. While the challenges may be complex, the potential benefits of a well-integrated, responsibly implemented robotic ecosystem are substantial.

The rise of robots in the COVID-19 pandemic  295

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PART IV REVEALING AND ADDRESSING SYSTEMIC PROBLEMS

23. “Stay home”: queer(y)-ing the heteronormative assumptions of COVID policy responses Peter Matthews and Daniel Edmiston

INTRODUCTION Prior to the COVID-19 pandemic, the National Health Service (NHS) in England had developed an LGBT+1 inclusion programme for staff. This trained staff who identify as LGBT+ and their allies to be aware of how to deliver inclusive care for this minority population. When staff had completed the training they were given an NHS badge with a rainbow background. In line with many other diversity initiatives, this was meant to be a signal to LGBT+ service-users that they could trust that this person would deliver sensitive and inclusive care. As the first wave of the COVID pandemic swept through the country, the UK Health Secretary at the time – Matt Hancock – was seen numerous times on the news wearing the rainbow NHS badge. Suddenly the rainbow became a symbol for health and social care services, aligned with the government public health message “stay home, save lives, protect the NHS”. Buses and trains that had been covered in the rainbow flag for LGBT+ pride, became “for our brave doctors and nurses”. Inadvertently the rainbow symbol, which had been a symbol of LGBT+ pride for 40 years, was embraced by heterosexual society as a symbol of the fight against COVID. For many people who identify as LGBT+, this felt like erasure (Conway, 2020). In this chapter, we will argue that this process of erasure, or an ignorance of the fact that LGBT+ people might have had a different experience of the COVID pandemic, and that public management failed to account for this, was widespread. This is the case, even though very early on in the pandemic, inequalities in its impacts were noted. Higher death rates among people of colour were noted within months of the start of the pandemic (Platt, 2021), and as the pandemic dragged on over years, the higher infection rates and death rates among lower paid people in jobs where it was impossible to work from home, became a marked feature (see, for example, Trasberg and Cheshire, 2023). It was not just the novel virus itself that had unequal impact, as Moore et al. (2021, p. 587) highlight: Just as outcomes of SARS-CoV-2 viral infections have resulted in disproportionate deaths of marginalized populations, many public health responses to the pandemic (e.g. physical distancing, “lock down” periods, working from home, video conferencing) have not impacted all groups equally.

As we will explore in this chapter, this was very much the case for LGBT+ people who were navigating public health measures that presumed and promoted a normative ideal centred on heterosexuality during the pandemic. A persistent and widely recognised challenge in researching sexual and gender minorities is access to data. People who have historically had their identities criminalised and been subject to harassment and violence may not be forthcoming in revealing their identities (Guyan, 2022). The categories of heterosexual society imposed onto queer lives may not allow LGBT+ people to report their identity in survey instruments (Browne, 2010; Matthews and 300

The heteronormative assumptions of COVID policy responses  301 Poyner, 2020). When we do have population-level surveys that include a question on sexual identity, the small n (most countries report around 3–5 per cent of their population as being non-heterosexual) can make meaningful analysis difficult. A common way around this is to either use self-completion, self-referral surveys, or use LGBT+ support and activist organisations as gatekeepers. These are known to exhibit response bias, and LGBT+ organisations, in particular, are more likely to recruit people with particularly complex individual needs as these are individuals who would seek support from these organisations (Renn, 2010). These organisations can also use data selectively for campaigning purposes (McCormack, 2020). Such challenges in knowing the diversity of populations are often cited in public management as a justification for not being able to effectively support marginalised groups; or for presuming that the needs of a marginalised group are the same as the majority population. In turn, the distinctive needs and interests of such groups are made invisible. In this chapter, we argue that this heteronormative erasure was threaded through the administrative measures that were imposed in response to COVID-19, particularly lockdown measures and assumptions around “home”, but also the design of economic and social support to households as economic activity was disrupted. Finally, taking our queer-y-ing of heteronormativity in public management further, we consider the ways that public policy reached into the most intimate parts of our lives through COVID measures – limiting who we could meet up with and how, and defining what sexual and romantic relationships were and how they could be conducted. While this was novel for heterosexuals, and led to moralistic sniggering and commentary, we highlight how it was a return to the criminalisation of sexual activity for many LGBT+ people.

GOING HOME? In early 2020, as the then novel coronavirus spread across the world, public policy entered into people’s public and private lives in new and unfamiliar ways for the vast majority of the population. Most immediate were the nationwide “lockdowns”, or shelter-in-place orders, that were imposed across many countries. With high levels of COVID-19 transmission leading to alarming levels of hospitalisations in Wuhan and then northern Italy and Spain, these measures were designed to prevent healthcare systems being overwhelmed, reflected in the aforementioned British public health message: “stay home, save lives, protect the NHS”. These lockdown orders made a number of assumptions which quickly became apparent. The most basic was that people had some sort of shelter. Many governments rushed through measures to help people who were rough-sleeping and move them into accommodation where they could self-isolate. The intractable policy problem of homelessness became solvable. In the UK context, the “Everyone In” policy essentially solved the crisis of rough sleeping by moving people into empty hotel rooms and providing support for them to overcome the multiple challenges in their lives and move into settled housing (Fitzpatrick et al., 2020). Bans on evictions temporarily halted the flow of new homeless households into the housing system. The policy also assumed that the homes people were sheltering in were of sufficient quality (wind and water-tight) and damp-free. Other public health guidance suggested people infected with COVID should self-isolate within a bedroom in their home, using a separate bathroom from the rest of the household, or cleaning the bathroom after use. As health inequalities pre-existing prior to the pandemic began to be reflected in the spread of the disease, the classed assumptions of such guidance became apparent as infection spread through lower-income

302  Research handbook on public management and COVID-19 families and households in overcrowded accommodation, particularly in ethnic minority communities with extended, multi-generational families in one home. This contrasts to those with multiple homes, who could flee cities, or even nations, to escape infection or the restrictions of infection control measures. Finally, these policy measures also assumed that a family home was a safe place to be. Domestic abuse activists immediately highlighted this fallacy (Carrington et al., 2021). For victims/survivors of physical and psychological domestic abuse, lockdowns put them at greater risk. Further, evidence from the UK and Australia suggests that, while more people were contacting domestic abuse helplines during the first lockdown in 2020, fewer incidents were reported to the police because victims/survivors could not escape the domestic environment because of lockdowns (Office for National Statistics, 2020, Moslehi et al., 2021). Akin to the public policy assumptions that underpinned the founding of contemporary welfare states, safe, stable, and often heteronormative homes, were assumed to be available to provide physical and psychological security for all during pandemic lockdowns. For many in contemporary societies, even a cursory assessment of statistics shows this not to be the case. Within the UK in 2020, there were just under an estimated 28 million households, and of these 28.4 per cent were single-person; 2.9 million were single-parent households (Office for National Statistics, 2021). Many of these households suffered with social isolation, loneliness and depression after successive lockdowns dragged on for months, and further restrictions on socialising were imposed (see, for example, Fancourt et al., 2020).

WHAT WAS THE IMPACT ON LGBT+ PEOPLE? Turning our focus to LGBT+ people specifically, there is a wide range of evidence that LGBT+ people were impacted negatively by the COVID-19 pandemic and associated public health measures, particularly lockdowns. For many LGBT+ people, moving away from their biological family had allowed them to be who they truly were. Moving “home” could mean a return to living with oppression or even violence. As one LGBT+ person was quoted as explaining in UK research: my dad has been talking loudly to people on the phone when I’m nearby to say that COVID-19 is the fault of LGBT people … I constantly walk on eggshells … I can’t talk about queerness on the phone for fear of discovery. (Hudson et al., 2021, p. 25)

Research on LGBT+ people across six nations highlighted how people in South America reported they felt more “suffocated” because they could not express their LGBTQ+ identity with their family, more so than survey respondents in Europe (Gato et al., 2021). As highlighted by Statistics Canada, LGBTQ2+ Canadians were twice as likely to experience some form of homelessness in trying to escape such situations, putting them at greater risk during the pandemic (Prokopenko and Kevins, 2020). Such a risk of homelessness, particularly among trans people, was identified in the UK (Hudson et al., 2021). Because of this experience of exclusion or alienation from the family home, many LGBT+ people rely on “families of choice” (Donovan et al., 2004) or “logical families” (Maupin, 2017) for the psycho-social support offered by a biological family. One participant in research in the UK described how:

The heteronormative assumptions of COVID policy responses  303 as a queer person, I rely on close friendships and non-traditional forms of kinship… [lockdown] is so much easier for people who live in conventional relationships or family bonds. (Hudson et al., 2021, p. 13)

The heteronormative assumptions implicit within lockdown policies – that people would have a nuclear family to provide a safe and secure “home” – alienated this minority group, and many other young people, from the wider social support they routinely rely on. Moving beyond experiences of specific discrimination and exclusion, it has long been recognised that people who identify as LGBT+ experience broader minority stress, which leads to lower health and wellbeing than in the heterosexual and cisgender population (Mann et al., 2019; Meyer, 2003). As a result, LGBT+ people experienced markedly poorer mental health during the early months of the pandemic. A systematic review of research in the UK found evidence of poorer mental health among LGBT+ people (McGowan et al., 2021) and a major UK-wide survey found the negative impacts were worse for trans and gender diverse people (Kneale and Bécares, 2021). A study of LGBT+ people across six nations found that: quarantine situations have been associated with increased rates of mental health symptoms, amplified by quarantine duration, fear of infection, frustration, boredom, inadequate information, financial loss, and stigma. (Gato et al., 2021, pp. 612–613)

Poor mental health outcomes were particularly marked among transgender and gender-diverse people (noting they were worse before 2020 (Faye, 2021)), with British research during the pandemic finding more than double the percentages of trans young people with a variety of mental health difficulties compared with cisgender respondents. These included having mental health as a significant obstacle, feeling more lonely or isolated, and needing more support from a variety of service providers. (McGowan et al., 2021, p. 2)

Such problems were compounded by reduced access to mental health services and hospital services for gender affirming treatment, which particularly impacted trans people. In the UK, 41 per cent of trans people reported not being able to access medication, compared with 15 per cent of cis people during the pandemic (Hudson et al., 2021). This overview of the existing research suggests that LGBT+ people did experience the COVID pandemic differently. The response of lockdown measures had a different effect on LGBT+ people that was not commonly discussed in public discourse on responses to the pandemic. In particular, LGBT+ people did not fit into heteronormative assumptions of the “home” or the “household”, so they were especially affected by measures seeking to keep people within the home.

THE (NORMATIVE) HOUSEHOLD AS AN ADMINISTRATIVE UNIT One specific way in which the design of public policy around heterosexual nuclear families is also clear is the design of welfare systems in economies in the Global North. As highlighted by feminist scholars for many decades (Lister, 1997), the assumption when such systems were designed in the 1930s–1950s was that welfare support was to be provided for nuclear families,

304  Research handbook on public management and COVID-19 with a male breadwinner in work and a woman providing care in the home (Powell, 2022). Although demographic changes to family structure, particularly lone-parent families, led to changes in welfare systems, the long-term effect of these early policy design decisions is that a considerable amount of financial support provided through the welfare system is focused on households with children. In the UK, the principal focus of this chapter, this privileging of the (working) nuclear family has been reinforced over the last 30 years in two ways. First, through a policy focus on tackling child poverty since 1997; and second, after 2013, with the introduction of the new benefit Universal Credit with its payments being calculated at the household level. When the COVID lockdowns in 2020 began, the “automatic stabilisers” of welfare kicked in across nations to soften the sudden disruption to economic activity. Within the UK, there were three main sources of support. First, for those who remained employed, but could not work, employers could claim 80 per cent of an employee’s salary, up to £2,500 per month, under the Coronavirus Job Retention Scheme (colloquially known as “the furlough scheme”). Second, people who were self-employed could apply for less regular payments based on their previous earnings. Finally, people experiencing job or income loss were encouraged to apply for Universal Credit – a form of social security designed to support incomes of people not in work, or in low-paid work. Detailing the problems with the implementation of Universal Credit would be a book chapter in itself, but after its introduction in 2013, this means-tested benefit has still not been fully implemented and has presented considerable challenges for those seeking adequate public social assistance (National Audit Office, 2018; House of Lords, 2020). Whilst a digital-by-default system facilitated a record number of 1.8 million new claims in the five weeks spanning from the end of March during the first national lockdown in the UK, a series of administrative obstacles remained (Summers et al., 2021). Many claimants could not complete the process of proving identity and citizenship through uploading photos of passports, and the telephone support line experienced lengthy delays. Further, built into the system was a five-week delay to processing the first monthly household payment. A decade of austerity and welfare reform, which had undermined the value of working-age benefits, also meant Universal Credit payments were meagre. The UK is one of the worst performing countries in the OECD in terms of its replacement rate for social assistance and housing benefit (Edmiston et al., 2023). In the UK, on average, such payments cover 34 per cent of pre-unemployment income, compared with an OECD average of 58 per cent, lower even than the US (OECD, 2022). The political backlash provoked by the problems with the Universal Credit online platform, which struggled to cope with the amount of web traffic it received, and the impending poverty for hundreds of thousands of households, led the UK Government to temporarily increase household Universal Credit payments by £20 (Proctor, 2020). Using data from a nationally representative survey conducted by Welfare at a (Social) Distance2 we can explore the impact of these interventions on LGB claimants compared with heterosexual claimants (Baumberg Geiger et al., 2023).3 First, one might assume that the £20 household uplift to Universal Credit would relatively advantage LGB claimants as they are more likely to be in single-person households – this £20 would be going to a single person, rather than being stretched across a family with children. Despite this, these data show that LGB claimants experienced financial distress in distinctive ways quite early on in the pandemic when they had begun to claim social security (Table 23.1). While heterosexual claimants were more likely to have fallen behind on rent or mortgage payments, or other bills and debts, on

The heteronormative assumptions of COVID policy responses  305 Table 23.1

Signs of financial distress amongst claimants between May and June 2020 in the UK

Signs of financial distress

Heterosexuals (%)

Lesbian, gay or bisexual (%)

Fell behind on rent/mortgage payments

10.9

7.7

Fell behind on other bills/debts

23.2

20.9

Skipped meals

18.6

23.3

Borrowing from credit card, overdraft, or bank

16.9

21.4

Borrowing from friends and/or family Gifts from friends and/or family

20

23.9

10.3

15.6

Used food bank

6.4

6.3

Received emergency help from the council or a charity

2.7

4.4

Used savings

17.8

23

Table 23.2

Reasons for starting a new claim in May–June 2020 in the UK

Reason for starting a new social security claim in 2020

Heterosexual (%)

Lesbian, gay or bisexual (%)

Made redundant due to coronavirus

20.5

27.8

Reduced pay/hours

45.7

46.6

Lost job not due to coronavirus

15.4

21.0

Other

40.6

37.1

all other measures of financial distress LGB claimants were more likely to report having experienced these. Skipping meals (23.3 per cent of LGB claimants had done this compared with 18.6 per cent heterosexual claimants) is immediately distressing, but borrowing money (21.4 per cent of LGB claimants) or using savings (23 per cent of LGB claimants) will have longer-term impacts, reducing people’s resilience to any future financial shocks. This evidence of financial distress was also identified by other UK-wide research on the experiences of LGBT+ people more generally in the pandemic (Hudson et al., 2021). This financial distress would have been compounded, particularly for younger LGBT+ people, by welfare reforms since 2010 that maintained certain child-related top-ups within the benefits system but reduced coverage and generosity for younger single and childless households (Brewer et al., 2022). Looking at data on job losses at the start of the pandemic does give some indication as to why LGB claimants were more likely to experience such forms of financial distress. Table 23.2 suggests that LGB claimants were more likely to be claiming benefits than their heterosexual counterparts because they had been made redundant in the first weeks of the pandemic. As these are descriptive statistics, we cannot infer that claimants were made redundant because of their sexual identity. Amongst other things, it is likely to be a product of the sorts of industries LGB people tend to be employed in (particularly gay men): the arts and culture; retail; leisure – all of which were disproportionately affected by national lockdowns in the UK (Tilcsik et al., 2015). The LGB claimant population, as recorded in surveys, is also younger than the heterosexual population, and younger people were also more badly affected by the economic disruptions associated with COVID-19 lockdowns. The data thus suggest that the COVID-associated economic disruption did have a differential impact on LGB claimants. These findings were also noted by Statistics Canada (Prokopenko and Kevins, 2020), suggesting this may have been a trend across economies in the Global North.

306  Research handbook on public management and COVID-19 From a public policy perspective, we might have presumed the administrative response to the pandemic was neutral between heterosexuals and non-heterosexuals in terms of supporting incomes. However, the £20 uplift to Universal Credit per household disproportionately benefited non-heterosexuals as they were more likely to be in single-person families. Despite this, LGB claimants still experienced greater financial distress during the early stages of the pandemic. Owing to the higher rates of redundancy among non-heterosexuals claiming benefits and their disproportionate exposure to labour market disruption, the UK government’s furlough scheme may have indirectly benefited heterosexuals as they were more likely to keep their job and thus have their salary (partially) paid. While the furlough scheme was, largely, a success at maintaining incomes and ensuring there were jobs to return to after the lockdowns ended, this differential impact of the scheme has largely not been identified. At least in the UK, LGBT+ people had a different experience of the pandemic to heterosexual and cisgender people in terms of employment and household incomes, yet this was largely ignored in policy discussions. Such policies were not explicitly designed on the basis of sexual or gender identity, but because LGBT+ people were invisible in policy design and implementation, the distinctive needs of this minority group were not as effectively met. Ironically, this was the case even though policy was policing sexuality in a more widespread way than had been the case in previous decades.

PUBLIC MANAGEMENT IN THE BEDROOM The previously discussed administrative assumptions of what is a “household”, were not only imbued with heteronormative assumptions on household structure, but also moral judgements on behaviour. With the definition of a household comes moral judgement on sexuality, specifically who can legitimately live with whom, and who can have sex with whom, and where. In May 2020, a UK Government advisor, Professor Neil Ferguson, was forced to resign after it became public that he had broken the strict lockdown rules by spending nights at the house of a woman he was having an affair with. Such moral judgements on behaviour demonstrate how public management was suddenly reaching into private lives in a way that was alien to the vast majority of heterosexual citizens. The moral ambiguities surrounding this incursion became more apparent as lockdown restrictions were “flexed” later in the pandemic, or in the coverage of pandemic control measures such as contact tracing. Reports from South Korea of people having their secret love affairs made public by the very public processes of contact-tracing led to privacy concerns elsewhere – how dare the state know about such behaviour (Zastrow, 2020)? Such moral judgements on sex lives codified in law were nothing new for LGBT+ people, and particularly men-who-have-sex-with-men (MSM). Laws criminalising sexual behaviour have a long history for this group. While in many states, such laws criminalising sexual activity have been repealed (although it should be noted how recently this occurred in many states; and at least 57 countries have seen recent legal restrictions passed against homosexuals and transgender people (Flores, 2021)) such policing of sexual activity occurred in living memory in most states. Similarly, the privacy concerns of contact tracing were nothing new for MSM, who are encouraged to go for regular sexual health screening and associated contact-tracing if they have an infection or are a close contact.

The heteronormative assumptions of COVID policy responses  307 This complex overlapping of sexual behaviour and public health was particularly apparent when COVID overlapped with HIV/AIDS. Early in the pandemic, LGBT+ people who lived through the horrors of the HIV/AIDS pandemic, and continue to do so, were quick to correct the assertion that COVID was the first global pandemic people had faced (García-Iglesias and Nagington, 2020). However, lockdown-related restrictions on contact also led some to suggest that seeking to end COVID through lockdowns could also end HIV infections. This became a public campaign by the major UK HIV/AIDS charity the Terrence Higgins Trust. As Ledin and Weil (2021) argue though, this view was akin to early public health messages to prevent HIV through promoting sexual abstinence and monogamy. This was naively ignorant of the reality of people’s sex lives. This reality was, as one sexual health service in central London reported, that 76 per cent of HIV negative MSM were sexually active during the pandemic lockdown. More broadly, an opportunity was missed in the design of public health policy and associated measures to learn from the earlier HIV/AIDS pandemic. When imposing measures such as lockdowns or mask mandates, many states relied upon social shame and stigma as part of their efficacy (Braksmajer and London, 2021). If you did not follow the measures, you were letting down wider society and putting others at risk by your selfishness. Ergo, if you were infected with COVID it was your fault for not following the public health guidance. Decades of campaigning and research on HIV/AIDS, led by the LGBT+ community, highlighted how the use of shame and stigma in such a way was self-defeating. It led to people avoiding getting tested and not changing their behaviour when required to do so. Normalising testing and treatment is recognised as the most effective way to control the spread of disease. Stigmatising infection, and blaming individuals for not following good public health behaviours (such as through administrative fines), can cause people to avoid testing, hastening the spread of infection.

ADMINISTERING A QUEER COVID In presenting the collated evidence in this chapter, we have sought to use queer lives to reflect on what was considered ‘normal’ in public management during the COVID-19 pandemic. Like Lee et al. (2008), we are using queer as a verb and challenging the heteronormativity of public policy measures brought in to suppress the virus. While in many countries the impact of the pandemic is waning as vaccinations offer protection from severe illness, we can learn from the pandemic to make public policy more inclusive, and deliver the social justice goals that should be at the heart of public services (Oldfield et al., 2006). The first lesson is we cannot allow LGBT+ people to become invisible within public policy and management, both in our practice and our research. Many of the studies reviewed for this chapter highlighted the paucity of any research on LGBT+ lives. As one systematic review concluded: “There has been alarmingly little research into the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on the UK LGBT+ population, despite known pre-existing health inequities” (Kneale and Bécares, 2021, p. 6). Of the 3,343 research projects focused on COVID, funded by the UK government competitive research awards to universities, only two explicitly mentioned LGBT+ people. One explanation for this lack of focus on LGBT+ lives, and how the COVID response might impact them, might be that public management, in terms of elected and non-elected officials,

308  Research handbook on public management and COVID-19 lacks effective LGBT+ representation. However, for a democracy in the Global North this is not necessarily the case. For example, parliaments across the UK have a substantial number of out, LGB parliamentarians across the political spectrum (see, for example: https://​mps​.whoare​ .lgbt/​; trans representation is still poorer). The lack of alignment between politicians’ and bureaucrats’ interests, and those of the general public who were impacted by specific COVID interventions, has been suggested as a reason why specific restrictions (such as limits on walking in rural areas) were imposed (Greene and Luhiste, 2021). However, if we have a high proportion of out LGB politicians and public managers, this might suggest they could have spoken out on these issues. Without interview data from such people, we cannot definitively say whether these parliamentarians spoke out, or if they chose not to, their reasons for this. This would be a question for further empirical enquiry. That said, there is evidence that those at the centre of power and decision-making during the COVID-19 pandemic were not representative of the wider population they were supposed to serve. This had serious consequences for the effectiveness of pandemic responses and the extent to which these negatively affected some of the groups most exposed to the fall-out of COVID-19 (MacNamara, 2023). If we do explicitly recognise a differential impact of any aspect of public administration on LGBT+ people, a further lesson is that services need to be reformed to be more inclusive, or specialist services require specific funding to support people. As noted, LGBT+ services from the voluntary sector, particularly those supporting mental health and wellbeing, were overwhelmed during the pandemic and struggled to deliver the services people desperately needed (Hudson et al., 2021). In the UK, this came on top of over a decade of government austerity that has led to funding for such activities to be withdrawn (Colgan et al., 2014; Matthews, 2020). Across the globe, the “gender critical” transphobic attacks on LGBT+ inclusion are preventing transgender youth from getting the gender-affirming support and care they desperately need, and are also being co-opted by right-wing politicians to support new laws outlawing lesbian and gay relationships (Magni, 2022).

CONCLUSION Public management, like many disciplines, has not widely engaged with LGBT+ lives and experiences of discrimination (Lee et al., 2008; Matthews and Poyner, 2020; Smith and Lee, 2014). In this chapter we have sought to demonstrate the damage this may have caused to LGBT+ lives through the policy measures put in place to tackle the spread of COVID-19. In the face of a novel virus that has killed millions and risked overwhelming healthcare systems, the lockdowns and other policy measures were an appropriate response. Over two years on since the first national lockdowns were imposed, we are now understanding far more about their differential impact, and the difficult trade-offs between protecting public health and wider social and economic costs. In this chapter, we have used the evidence that has been gathered on LGBT+ experiences of the COVID-19 pandemic to add to this debate. By “queering” the administration of the pandemic response, we have highlighted the distinctive and negative impacts on LGBT+ people across the globe. Looking ahead to future pandemic responses, we would argue that queer lives need to feature more prominently in the policymaking process if public management is to effectively meet the diverse needs of all citizen-subjects.

The heteronormative assumptions of COVID policy responses  309

NOTES 1. There are a variety of acronyms used globally to cover the population that define themselves as non-heterosexual and non-cisgender. In this chapter we have chosen to use LGBT+; if we are quoting a source that uses a different acronym, we use that. 2. Welfare at a (Social) Distance was funded by UK Research and Innovation under their COVID rapid response funding scheme, grant number ES/V003879/1. 3. This survey was conducted between 21 May 2020 and 15 June 2020 with a nationally-representative sample of 6,431 claimants. Recruited through a YouGov panel, the survey captured a range of information including claim details, support used when claiming, employment status, experiences of financial difficulty and demographic information. A standard sexual identity question had been asked (options: heterosexual; gay/lesbian; bisexual; prefer not to answer) of all respondents.

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24. Public management challenges with the emergency response for people with disability during COVID-19 Sophie Yates and Helen Dickinson

INTRODUCTION The health, economic and social shocks of the COVID-19 pandemic exposed and exacerbated inequalities for a range of already disadvantaged or marginalised groups, such as women (particularly those with children and other caring responsibilities), people from socioeconomically disadvantaged communities, and those without secure employment (Naidoo et al., 2022; Dopazo et al., this volume). For a variety of clinical and structural reasons, people with disability are at more risk in a pandemic context than those without disability – from the communicable disease itself, from other associated health risks, and from the social and economic consequences of mitigation measures. In Australia, pandemic risks for people with disability have arguably been enhanced due to recent policy trajectories, in particular reforms to increase the personalisation of disability services via individual funding mechanisms. These reforms mean that government now has less knowledge of and control over the disability workforce, and funding scheme complexity and the involvement of many different government and non-government actors complicates quick policy responses. Due to the lack of a consistent disability identifier in health data, we do not actually know whether people with disability in Australia have died or suffered serious illness at higher rates during COVID-19. However, data from other countries indicate that this has been the case. In the United Kingdom, 60 per cent of those who died from COVID-19 in 2020 had a disability (ONS, 2021). Intellectual disability was the second highest risk factor for death from COVID-19 in the US, behind age (Gleason et al., 2021). In Australia, a range of public management challenges related to services for people with disability indicate that levels of death and illness might indeed be elevated. In this chapter, we draw on a several of our own research studies to illustrate these challenges, mainly in the Australian context. While many of these issues have been identified within the Australian context, international studies suggest that some are also present within the service systems of other high-income settings (Glendinning et al., 2011; van Toorn, 2022). In this chapter, we first explore the reasons behind why people with disability might fare worse in a pandemic than the general population and discuss how the move toward individualised funding in a market-based system has, while improving the lives of many, potentially put people with disability at further risk in a pandemic context. We then consider in detail two public management issues that have posed a challenge for meeting the needs of people with disability during COVID-19: working across boundaries, and policy capacity. We conclude

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Challenges with the emergency response for people with disability during COVID-19  313 that these perennial public management challenges require greater attention if people with disability are not to be disproportionately impacted again in future pandemics and crises.

PEOPLE WITH DISABILITY AND PANDEMICS As several chapters in this book note (Matthews and Edmiston; Dopazo et al., Durose et al.; Williams et al.), the health, economic and social shocks of the COVID-19 pandemic exposed and exacerbated inequalities for a range of already disadvantaged or marginalised groups. People with disability are one such group for a series of clinical but also structural reasons. Clinically, many people with disability are at a higher risk of contracting COVID-19 due to underlying health conditions such as diabetes, respiratory conditions, autoimmune diseases, or being on medications that dampen the immune response (World Health Organization, 2018). People with disability also tend to have poorer general health than those without disability (e.g. Trollor et al., 2017). These health factors also increase the risk of death or serious illness from contracting COVID-19. Further, people with disability often require support from others for activities of daily living and to access to the community. In an increasingly marketised disability care sector, they may receive care from multiple different support workers and service providers, who often themselves work with many different clients and sometimes across disability and aged care, increasing infection risks. When health sector resources are consumed with responding to a particular infectious disease, other healthcare needs become more difficult to meet, which disproportionately impacts people with disability. People with disability often have ongoing need for appointments with general practitioners, specialists, allied health practitioners and therapists, and are more frequent users of hospital services. In a pandemic context, they may find it more difficult to travel to appointments, to book appointments, or to receive necessary care when government limits access to particular types of appointment or procedures. People with disability also tend to be economically disadvantaged compared with those without disability, in less secure work and housing, and more socially isolated (Kavanagh et al., 2013; Krnjacki et al., 2016). This means they are at higher risk from the negative economic and social consequences of lockdowns, movement restrictions and other pandemic mitigation measures. For example, an Australian survey of the parents and carers of children and young people with disability conducted during the early weeks of the pandemic (March–April 2020) found that many children and their families – who only just managed complex care, financial and educational arrangements before the pandemic – were struggling for a variety of reasons (Dickinson and Yates, 2020). A further survey focusing on educational experiences in the context of school closures found that family members felt students with disability were more socially isolated than their peers, which is concerning considering that schools can often be the main source of social experiences for children and young people with disability (Dickinson et al., 2020). A study exploring the experience of people with intellectual disability during Melbourne’s lockdowns (some of the longest in the world at a cumulative 262 days between early 2020 and late 2021) found that pre-existing exclusion and discrimination were essential components of how study participants experienced lockdown. The ways that participants “experienced vulnerability were thus an intensification and expansion of the forms of disadvantage that they were already routinely experiencing and managing before the pandemic” (van Holstein et al., 2022, p. 23).

314  Research handbook on public management and COVID-19 Personalisation and Pandemics In Australia, pandemic risks for people with disability have arguably been enhanced due to recent policy trajectories. Disability activists in liberal democracies have argued for greater choice and control over the services they receive, which has contributed to a growing trend toward the personalisation of disability services (van Toorn, 2021). This trend, while improving the lives of many people with disabilities and their families, may also place people with disability at greater risk in a pandemic context. In Australia, personalisation has been realised for 13 per cent of people with disability in the form of an individualised funding scheme (the National Disability Insurance Scheme, NDIS). The NDIS allocates people with significant and permanent disability a budget from which to purchase services and supports from a market of non-government and private sector providers. This system has replaced the previous state-administered block-funded model (Fisher et al., 2010), which was widely considered to be under-funded, inflexible, and unsuited to the needs of most clients (Australian Government Productivity Commission, 2011). However, one implication of introducing this new market-based system is that governments do not know who disability support workers are – there is no national register of workers. This is a challenge for the dissemination of information and equipment (such as personal protective equipment (PPE)), and means governments have little ability to prompt behaviour change in the workforce or mobilise a workforce where there might be shortages (for example if a usual worker contracts COVID). As West (2022) explores, in a pandemic context these factors can converge to create significant difficulties in organising ongoing care, especially for those who rely on support from many different people for tasks of daily living. During the first Omicron wave, the Commonwealth Government provided assistance to the aged care sector in the form of emergency staffing through the armed forces (Department of Health, 2022), while the disability sector received no such assistance. West (2022) challenges, “when a workforce vanishes overnight … whose responsibility is it to provide essential services?” A significant proportion of the disability support workforce is now casualised, meaning that they lack entitlements such as paid sick leave that are afforded to more securely employed workers. Early in the pandemic there were concerns that this might incentivise workers to attend employment with COVID symptoms, although we did see some schemes developed to try to mitigate this risk. For example, the federal-level Pandemic Leave Disaster Payment was a lump sum payment to help workers who were required to isolate due to COVID-19 or were caring for those who had to isolate. State governments also introduced interventions to help casual workers stay home, such as New South Wales’ Test and Isolate support payment, which was available to those who could demonstrate they were likely to lose work while waiting for the results of a PCR test. Another implication of individualised funding is its focus on individual capacity building and support, where “providers of support tend to understand disability support as a relatively predictable and plannable service for the benefit of a single person, in which support needs are balanced against an imperative for cost-efficient service delivery” (van Holstein et al., 2022, p. 24). As van Holstein et al. (2022) argue, people with disability are embedded in networks of care, sharing their needs jointly with others. In addition, crisis situations lead to emergent forms of vulnerability, and thus unpredictable experiences of disability. Individualised funding mechanisms as currently realised struggle to take account of these factors.

Challenges with the emergency response for people with disability during COVID-19  315 The complexity of schemes such as the NDIS also poses a challenge when quick and decisive policy responses are required, because of the involvement of many different actors both inside and outside government. In the case of the NDIS, this includes National Disability Insurance Agency (NDIA) employees, NDIS planners, Local Area Coordinators, Plan Managers, Support Coordinators, service providers, individual workers, and scheme participants and their families. Further, for the NDIS to function well, it must interface with mainstream services such as health, transport, education and justice, which can lead to disagreements and delays when it is not clear which system should fund which expenses. Finally, it is important to note that as funding has been invested in the nationally administered NDIS (which is jointly funded by the states and territories and the Commonwealth), state and territory governments have withdrawn from disability services, meaning there is very little left for the majority of people with disability who are not on the NDIS (Hewett, 2022). The NDIS is now the major source of support for people with disability in Australia, which had consequences for the COVID-19 response for people with disability. As disability activist El Gibbs (2022a) notes: all other levels of government, and other federal government departments and agencies, folded their disability everything into the NDIS, which meant everything outside the Scheme disappeared into a puff of thinly disguised cuts. So when the pandemic came along, the NDIA saw no role for itself in figuring out how disabled people were going to survive COVID, and no other part of any government thought they had any role either.

Such boundary challenges have long been a key consideration within the public management literature, and we explore some of these boundary issues further below.

COLLABORATION ACROSS ORGANISATIONAL BOUNDARIES Practitioners and scholars of public administration have increasingly recognised that jurisdictions, sectors and organisations must work together if services are to be effectively delivered and policy goals realised. Therefore, most post-New Public Management (NPM) models have emphasised the necessity of traversing boundaries to achieve goals (O’Flynn, 2013). People with disability are particularly affected by boundary challenges, as they often receive payments and services from many different mainstream and specialist service systems. The NDIS, relied upon by 13 per cent of those with the highest disability support needs in Australia, can only function effectively if it coordinates well with mainstream services such as health and education (Yates et al., 2022). During the COVID-19 pandemic, it became clear that people with disability who live in congregate settings such as group homes, respite services and supported residential services or boarding houses have increased COVID infection risk. A study with residential disability support workers and managers in the state of Victoria highlighted the challenges with managing infection in such settings (McAllister et al., 2023). At the time interviews for this study were completed in September–November 2020, about 40 per cent of group homes in Victoria were mid-transition from state to not-for-profit providers as part of the roll-out of the NDIS. The other 60 per cent of supported residential services had already transitioned to be run by not-for-profit organisations. This meant residential settings – many of which shared workers – fell under varied jurisdictions. COVID-19 outbreaks in disability residential settings

316  Research handbook on public management and COVID-19 highlighted the coordination problems caused by inconsistent jurisdictional responsibility for disability and public health portfolios. Those in the transitional phase received single state government jurisdictional guidance, but those who had transitioned to not-for-profit management found that information and directives were coming from the Victorian Department of Health and Human Services, the Federal Department of Health, the National Disability Insurance Agency, and the NDIS Quality and Safeguards Commission. Guidance from different sources did not always align. Senior manager study participants reported this complexity of jurisdictional response created confusion about lines of reporting and guidance compliance. Conversely, participants in the transitional phase described better coordination and access to resources than participants in facilities that had transitioned to the not-for-profit run NDIS model. The NDIS individualised funding model also posed challenges for residential providers in accessing funding for PPE in both practical and moral senses. At the start of the pandemic, Australia’s PPE stockpile was only accessible for health providers and designated priority groups (such as services for older people). People with disability were not designated as a priority group at this stage despite their risk level, so high-risk congregate settings were forced to secure their own protective equipment. This posed a moral challenge for people with disability and workers in accessing appropriate supports and protections. In a practical sense, challenges also occurred. Under NDIS rules, providers did not receive a block amount of funding for PPE and instead had to take funding from individual clients’ budgets, causing administrative complexity. An emergency response block funding arrangement may have been more appropriate than funding taken from individual budgets, given that the PPE was to protect all residents and not specific individuals (McAllister et al., 2023; Cortis and van Toorn, 2020). This could have provided immediate financial relief and flexibility for disability residential settings to purchase the items most needed for their environment. In another example of coordination and boundary issues during COVID-19, students with disability in most states and territories were left with insufficient resources to engage with schooling during pandemic-related school closures in 2020 and 2021. A survey of students with disability and their families (Dickinson et al., 2020) found that many students who had received support from aides in the physical classroom lost access to these when schools closed due to public health restrictions. Rules also prevented these educators from being allowed to operate in domestic contexts. This meant that students who would have received intensive or even one-to-one support on school campuses now needed to be assisted by their parents or carers to access home-based schooling. Students also lost access to all school-based technology and adjustments. While the NDIS is responsible for funding support workers for personal care and community access, state-level education systems are responsible for educational expenses such as teaching aides and education-specific software and assistive technology. When homes became sites of education, many parents did not have the skills or time to provide students with anywhere near the level of support they would have received in schools. Parents (usually mothers) reported extreme difficulties with balancing paid work and educational supervision, with some having to choose between the two. There was also confusion about what supports, if anything, the NDIS would fund to facilitate educational access in the home (Yates et al., 2021). Due to relatively strict rules about which systems are responsible for which kinds of expenses, families could not simply redirect funding into home-based educational support. While some families were able to use students’ NDIS funding for support workers and technology for schooling (e.g. laptops and tablets), others did not know they could do

Challenges with the emergency response for people with disability during COVID-19  317 this. Sometimes the difference came down to having a facilitative Local Area Coordinator, or having the administrative literacy required to quickly navigate a challenging system to move money around or have new expenses approved. Such funding-related boundary challenges also played out in other ways later in Australia’s pandemic experience. There is significant evidence to suggest that good indoor ventilation is critical for protecting against COVID-19 transmission (Kavanagh et al., 2022a). As of mid-2022, most COVID-19 related public health measures (e.g., mandated mask wearing, requirement to isolate if COVID-positive) had been removed across most of Australia. The removal of these restrictions led to a significant increase in COVID-19 cases in most communities across the country. For many people with disability, this produced elevated risks of COVID-19 contraction in leaving their home or for those who require workers to come to their home. Provision of appropriate ventilation in domestic settings is one way to attempt to mitigate this risk, particularly when accompanied by mask wearing and vaccination. However, there is significant confusion over who should be responsible for paying for assessments of ventilation systems and purchasing CO2 monitors or HEPA air purifiers. There is debate over whether these fall under the jurisdiction of the NDIS, health authorities, or homeowners. Such discussions about cost-shifting feature frequently in the inter-organisational collaboration public management literature (Glasby and Dickinson, 2014). In this case, debates have delayed potential action around clinically vulnerable populations and may prove counterproductive when the costs of these activities are significantly less than costly medical interventions should individuals contract COVID-19 and require hospitalisation. In response to boundary challenges, we have seen the development of some boundary spanning roles to facilitate coordination. Boundary spanners are essentially individuals who have a role in connecting up different parts of an organisation or else coordinating activity with a range of partners beyond the organisational limits (Williams, 2012). At a local level, in Victoria we saw the development of Disability Liaison Officers (DLOs), originally implemented during the early stages of the pandemic to support people with disability to access healthcare services. Such roles recognised that people with disability face a range of additional barriers in accessing health services. DLOs conduct assessments with individuals to identify what challenges or anxieties they might have about accessing services and seek to help find a solution, for example by making adjustments within a service or seeking out another organisation that might be better placed to support someone. DLOs were cited as being integral in supporting people with disability to find an appropriate vaccination experience (Dickinson et al., 2021). Many mainstream service settings were inaccessible to some people with disability for physical or sensory reasons or did not offer sedation for those with extreme needle phobias. DLOs worked with people with disability and their families to identify settings that would be able to vaccinate them in an appropriate way. They worked to find ways to overcome challenges that people with disability might face in accessing health services by working across a range of organisations. At a more macro level, April 2020 saw the implementation of a Commonwealth-level Advisory Committee on Health Emergency Response to Coronavirus (COVID-19) for People with Disability. This committee reported to the Chief Health Officer, and was initially responsible for overseeing the development of a response plan for people with disability. It had a boundary-spanning role in that it comprised members from different backgrounds (academia, advocacy, government and Disabled Persons Organisations) and met frequently with many different agencies and organisations. The committee continued to meet as the pandemic

318  Research handbook on public management and COVID-19 developed in an attempt to address emerging issues and system integration challenges, and coordinate across levels and areas of government (Green et al., 2021).

POLICY CAPACITY The pandemic has illustrated a number of ways that policy capacity deficits can stymie effective public health responses (O’Flynn, 2021). At its most basic, policy capacity is the set of skills and resources – or competencies and capabilities – necessary to perform policy functions (Dickinson et al., 2022). Wu et al. (2015) argue there are three important components to the notion of policy capacity. Analytical capacity is the ability to access and apply technical and scientific knowledge and analytical techniques. Organisational capacity addresses the barriers and facilitators needed to implement a policy. Finally, political capacity relates to understanding the needs and positions of different stakeholders, judging the feasibility of a policy and gaining support for a policy. Brenton et al. (2022) argue that it is not enough to simply judge that policy capacity is deficient in circumstances where policies have failed to eventuate as expected. A number of failures in the Australian context demonstrate lack of policy capacity to understand and respond to the issues that people with disability face. In the initial COVID-19 response, governments failed to recognise people with disability as a priority population. Disability was not even mentioned in the Commonwealth Department of Health’s first COVID-19 emergency response plan. March 2020 guidelines for the management of outbreaks in residential care facilities did not include disability accommodation (Kavanagh et al., 2021a) suggesting a lack of analytical and political capacity. People with disability and their families reported lack of access to disability-specific information as a major issue in the early weeks of the pandemic, meaning they could not assess their level of risk and plan accordingly. Accessible resources such as social stories, easy English and sign language translation were also lacking (Yates and Dickinson, 2021; see also van Holstein et al., 2022). Congregate care facilities for people with disability were simply told to follow aged care guidance, despite the contexts being very different in practice (Kavanagh et al., 2020, 2021b). Even after the Commonwealth Government developed a disability-specific plan in April 2020, with the assistance of the Advisory Committee discussed above, there was a failure across all levels of government to implement strategies to reduce COVID-19 risk for people with disability (Royal Commission into Violence, Abuse, Neglect and Exploitation of People with Disability, 2020). While the Advisory Committee was a welcome and necessary intervention, it did not substitute for a focused and sustained policy response for people with disability. By the time vaccines were developed and implemented, governments at both state/territory and national levels understood that people with disability represented a priority population for the COVID-19 response. Given limited vaccine supply in early 2021, those who were at serious risk of poor COVID-19 outcomes and those providing services to people who were clinically vulnerable were prioritised for early vaccination. People with disability in residential care and disability support workers were named in Phase 1a, and other people with disability were in Phase 1b. The intention was for those in Phases 1a and 1b to have two vaccine doses by April 2021, but this target was not met (Kavanagh et al., 2023). In fact, disability care residents did not reach 80 per cent double vaccination until 9 November 2021, around the same time as the general adult population – despite having had access to vaccines six months earlier

Challenges with the emergency response for people with disability during COVID-19  319 (Australian National Audit Office, 2022). People with disability still lag the general population in vaccination rates: although there is no national level data for people with disability as a whole, as of December 2022 around 85 per cent of NDIS participants aged 16 and over had received two doses, while the rate was over 95 per cent for the general population (Department of Health and Aged Care, 2022). Australia’s Royal Commission into Violence, Abuse, Neglect and Exploitation of People with Disability (the DRC) conducted public hearings on the vaccine rollout to people with disability and published a report in October 2021 (DRC, 2021). It concluded that the Department of Health had failed to seek advice and guidance from people with disability and those who work in the sector at critical points during the development of the vaccine strategy and its implementation. This echoed findings from an earlier DRC report noting the deficiencies in government response in the initial stages of the pandemic, particularly the lack of consultation with and inclusion of people with disability (DRC, 2020). The DRC (2021) concluded that the Department of Health only considered disability residential settings as priority settings “to the extent that they closely resembled aged care residential settings” – in other words, there was an assumption that the settings would be very similar and that vaccines could be administered in similar ways (p. 61). In addition, the Department was unable to compile reliable data on the number of people in disability residential settings, significantly underestimating the number of disability care residents who qualified under Phase1a. Because it lacked the analytical capacity to access and understand information about the residential disability context, the public service also lacked the organisational capacity to implement vaccination policy. Finally, the DRC pointed out “a failure to provide information in an accessible form to people with disability at risk of serious consequences if they became infected with the virus”, which “contributed to many people with disability losing trust” in the government’s handling of the rollout (p. 3) – arguably a failure in political capacity to build support for vaccination policies. Research conducted in September 2021 with children and young people with disability and their families indicated further difficulties with implementation – in particular, parents reported difficulties with understanding eligibility, proving priority access, and booking and accessing vaccinations in appropriate settings (Dickinson et al., 2021). For example, the large vaccination hubs implemented in many states were not always accessible or appropriate for people with certain kinds of impairments. However, some respondents cited the usefulness of Victorian Disability Liaison Officers as discussed earlier. They worked directly with families to secure earlier appointments in accessible venues (for example with shorter queues, room for wheelchairs or access to sedation) and were reported to be more helpful and responsive than mainstream vaccination booking services. There were also issues with vaccinating disability support workers, which is crucial for protecting those with disability. Kavanagh et al. (2022b) undertook a survey of support workers to assess their understanding of COVID-19 and their vaccination intentions. This survey revealed low levels of vaccination and relatively high levels of vaccine hesitancy. Of those who had not had the vaccine, 47 per cent said they would get it as soon as it was offered; 19 per cent would not get it; 12 per cent would have it if required; 13 per cent hadn’t decided; and 8 per cent would wait until it was available for a while. Reasons for hesitancy included inadequate safety data (70 per cent delayed vaccinators, 79 per cent vaccine refusers), side effects (63 per cent delayed vaccinators, 58 per cent refusers), and distrust in the government (17 per cent delayed vaccinators, 52 per cent refusers). Only 6 per cent of those who would not have the COVID-19 vaccine reported they were against all vaccines, indicating that refusal was

320  Research handbook on public management and COVID-19 specific to the COVID-19 vaccine. Support workers had only moderate levels of confidence in the effectiveness and safety of the vaccine to reduce individual and community risk, and as the best way to stop the pandemic. Despite outbreaks in disability settings in Australia and internationally, as well as messaging around risk infection and transmission in the workforce during COVID-19, only half appeared to recognise they were at increased risk of COVID-19 infection. The level of vaccine hesitancy reported in this study is higher than reported among the general population and among similar workers internationally (Biddle et al., 2021; Lim and Nguyen, 2021; Lunsky et al., 2021). Dickinson et al. (2023) explored the reasons that disability support workers gave for vaccine hesitancy. Their findings reveal a profound mistrust in government (particularly federal government) and several issues particular to the disability context that – through the lens of the policy capacity framework – indicate a lack of political capacity. These findings are consistent with other studies that have explored marginalised groups and found mistrust of government to be a key driver of vaccine hesitancy (e.g. Freimuth et al., 2017; Jamison et al., 2019; Quinn et al., 2021). While disability support workers are not a minority group in the same sense of being an ethnic minority, there is a sense in the findings that support workers felt they and their clients were forgotten in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic. Appropriate responses were not developed or were developed late, and support workers did not have access to preventative equipment where other similar professions did (e.g., frontline health workers). Australia’s approach to developing policy in this space has been described as top-down specialized (Easton et al., 2022) and this may have meant that perspectives from disability support workers were not heard in developing this policy. While this led to comparatively quick policy development, this may have served to undermine its implementation due to a lack of appropriate management of political factors. In their study of COVID-19 vaccination willingness in the US general population, Hill et al. (2021) found where adults had a greater sense of purpose in life they were more likely to be willing to be vaccinated. While many disability support workers indicated an important purpose in the role they had in supporting clients, there was a strong theme that the terms and conditions of their employment had been eroded over successive years and COVID-19, to some extent, further worsened this. As we earlier described, the introduction of the NDIS has brought with it a number of positives for people with disability, such as greater ability to determine the services they receive in a way that is more congruent with their goals and aspirations. The NDIS is part of the Australian government’s commitment to the United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disability, which articulates an aspiration to promote, protect and ensure the full and equal enjoyment of all human rights and fundamental freedoms by all persons with disabilities. Findings from Dickinson et al. (2023) suggest many respondents were committed to such an aspiration, but in doing so they believed their own human rights should also be upheld. Several respondents seemed to indicate that, particularly in mandating a vaccination, the government would in some way be infringing their human rights. Where their work context was changing to provide greater choice and control to clients, some felt this option should further be afforded to members of staff and allow control over things such as vaccination status. In a context of a pandemic the theme of choice for all is not necessarily consistent, particularly when seeking to protect those who may be clinically vulnerable. Policymakers lacked insight into the issues facing disability support workers in their employment context and the conflicting messages that they might receive in relation to issues of choice.

Challenges with the emergency response for people with disability during COVID-19  321

DISCUSSION AND CONCLUSION Many chapters throughout this volume have explored the ways that COVID-19 has exposed and aggravated pre-existing inequalities for some groups in society. Due to clinical vulnerabilities and socioeconomic marginalisation, people with disability form one such group. When crises occur that require rapid policy responses, the complex needs and situations of disadvantaged groups are often left unaccounted for. As we found in our research with Children and Young People with Disability Australia (Dickinson and Yates, 2020), people with disability and their families tend to have in place precarious arrangements for care, work, education and finances that can only function when the world is operating as it normally does. When those arrangements are disrupted – and especially when this happens without careful attention to what might mitigate the disruption – the health and wellbeing of these families will suffer. Further, as van Holstein et al. (2022, p. 24) argue, the “market-driven and individualised characteristics” of individualised funding schemes “can fail to create just outcomes at times of emergency or crisis”. In this chapter we have explored two ways in which public management can exacerbate challenges for people with disability during times of crisis – lack of coordination across boundaries, and shortcomings in policy capacity to meet the needs of people with disability. These are some but by no means all of the relevant public management challenges. We have discussed how recent policy trajectories intended to increase choice and control for people with disability, especially those predicated on market-based interventions, can have unintended consequences when rapid and cohesive responses are required. There were some examples of positive responses and support provided for people with disability during COVID-19. These include the implementation of the Commonwealth-level Advisory Committee, which the Royal Commission into Violence, Abuse, Neglect and Exploitation of People with Disability (2020) noted was late but welcome. The provision of telehealth was welcomed by many people with disability as something they had long advocated for. Boundary spanners such as Disability Liaison Officers assisted with improved healthcare outcomes in some states. As Gibbs (2022b) notes, there were also some positives to be found in the way that the disability community came together and organised to support each other with information, practical strategies and mutual aid. However, such an extensive effort to build ‘networks of care’ was only necessary because governments had failed to provide people with disability with the information and assistance they needed to weather the pandemic. At the time of writing, in late 2022, many of the public health interventions in the Australian context had been removed and yet levels of COVID-19 infection remained some of the highest that we have seen throughout the pandemic. This means that people with disability remain a forgotten population group who are at high risk. Without significant action to address challenges associated with inter-agency collaboration and policy capacity, this situation will remain unchanged and similar factors are likely to put individuals at risk in the context of future emergencies and crises.

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25. Gender mainstreaming and collaborative public management during COVID-19: a case study of national machineries for gender equality and care infrastructure in Argentina Natalia Dopazo, Maria Daels and Hayley Henderson

INTRODUCTION This chapter describes how the Government of Argentina has sought to imbue gender perspectives in public management as part of its response to the COVID-19 pandemic. In particular, it examines “gender mainstreaming” (Paterson, 2010) and associated collaborative approaches to public management that have served to identify and evaluate entrenched gender inequalities, as well as to design and deliver economic subsidies and care infrastructure programs in the context of the global pandemic. The Argentine experience demonstrates some concrete steps taken in the context of COVID-19 to put into practice a politics of care in public management so that governance and decision-making processes recognise and respond to the unpaid reproductive tasks carried out by women and their embodied experiences as carers in facing inequitable access to housing, services and infrastructure. The Argentine response pivots from traditional economic and infrastructure stimulus towards specific spending centred on redressing gender inequality, which if left unattended would debilitate the pandemic recovery. Based on a document analysis of reports prepared by national and international organisations, recent academic literature, and interviews with key public officials who worked over the first two years of the pandemic between March 2020 and March 2022, this chapter offers a descriptive analysis of the process of gender mainstreaming through “national machineries” (Rai, 2003) in the Argentine Public Service (APS). It begins by introducing two defining background elements: it highlights the inequality experienced by women and gender-diverse people in the region, as well as the relative strength of the women’s movement as a pillar for enabling gender mainstreaming of state apparatuses. It then examines how strains of feminist theories, in particular relating to cities and infrastructure, serve to support our understanding of the transformations unfolding. Finally, the chapter provides an account of how Argentina’s national machineries created in early 2020, including the National Ministry of Women, Gender and Diversity and an inter-ministerial cabinet of care, led to the development of a gender mainstreaming strategy with the National Plan for Equality in Diversity 2021–2023 as its centrepiece, and a suite of other Gender and Diversity Public Policies (GDPP). In turn, it outlines how gender mainstreaming principles were then integrated into the design and implementation of economic subsidies and the Care Infrastructure Program. Overall, the Argentine experience represents an attempt to reposition the invisible role of women by reimagining care as a public good through strong public sector leadership and collaborative public management during the context of the global pandemic. In terms of public management, the collaborative structures implemented to mainstream gender per325

326  Research handbook on public management and COVID-19 spectives, including shared work on the definition of principles and the use of data, represent one key transformation. The lateral thinking and interdisciplinarity involved have led to the transversal, though still tentative, application of gender perspectives in response to the pandemic. Although it is too early to carry out a comprehensive evaluation of the Government of Argentina’s attempt to apply a gender lens to the apparatuses of the state concerned with economic subsidisation and infrastructure stimulus, this chapter outlines some advances and limitations of mainstreaming gender perspectives. It concludes that while inroads have been made at the national level, challenges exist in terms of widening the necessary work in collaborative networks, and there are enduring barriers to women’s leadership in the public service.

BACKGROUND: THE COVID-19 PANDEMIC AND THE FEMINIST STRUGGLE IN LATIN AMERICAN CITIES The Argentine context is in tune with wider Latin American dynamics in many ways. Almost three years after the start of the COVID-19 pandemic, this global tragedy in health, social and economic terms marks elements of necessary transformation for the public policy agenda. The pandemic further revealed the unequal conditions under which women, people with diverse identities, and those unable or less able to engage in paid work live (such as children, the elderly and people with disability). The Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean (ECLAC) reported that by December 2021, Latin America had suffered the highest percentage of deaths relative to its population from COVID-19 in the world (29.7 per cent) (CEPAL, 2022, p. 18) and this can be partly attributed to pre-existing poverty and inequality. In particular, the negative effects of both the pandemic and of the restrictions introduced to manage the public health crisis severely impacted those in poverty and in the informal economy, where women are overrepresented. This has had flow-on effects to the dependent people women care for, including children and the elderly. Contemporary dynamics of gender inequality are historically rooted in structural conditions such as the sexual division of labour and the invisibility of care roles. Factors such as the overrepresentation of women in unemployment rates and precarious work, and in households with unsatisfied basic needs such as inadequate infrastructure, left many women exposed to the worst effects of the pandemic. Data on time use prior to the pandemic show a significant gender gap in housework, with a difference of 18.1 hours in the weekly time spent by women and men in Latin America (Filgueira et al., 2020, p. 36). The temporary closure of educational establishments, which also had an impact on children’s learning and food security, increased the burden of unpaid care and domestic work within households, disproportionately affecting women and reducing their participation or reinsertion capacity into the labour market. The experience of domestic labourers further highlights the unequal impact of the pandemic in Latin America, where more than 90 per cent of workers are women (CEPAL, 2020), who are on incomes lower than the minimum wage and paid informally in cash. The pandemic revealed the activities of women in their care work as the support of society, and also underlined the “feminisation” (Montaño, 2010) of poverty in Latin America, where economic inequalities persist in order to maintain a society at the cost of the exclusion and repression of women. The unequal impact of the pandemic on women shows that, while the causes of the inequalities experienced in the Latin American region share an almost ubiquitous structural basis of patriarchal relations with the rest of the world, there are also specific local “triggers”

Gender mainstreaming and collaborative public management during COVID-19  327 and “risks” (McIlwaine, 2013, p. 65). As mentioned above, these relate to deeper divisions between men and women in terms of labour conditions and poverty, but they also relate to the living conditions of the poor and their spatial organisation in cities. This is a significant consideration for understanding the Argentine Government’s response in terms of infrastructure that spatially intervenes in cities and regions. This is especially true for the region’s informal settlements where approximately 25 per cent of the population resides (Siclari et al., 2022) and often do not have local health, affordable education or childcare options nearby. Informal settlements are typically underserviced in other ways, where the lack of potable water services, wastewater infrastructure, stormwater infrastructure, safe electrical connections and rubbish collection raise risk and reduce transmission prevention for large parts of the population. Housing in informal settlements can be precarious, with lack of ventilation, unsafe cooking methods, dampness and household overcrowding, which all increase infection rates and worsen respiratory infection outcomes in general. For many inhabitants living in underserviced areas with inadequate housing, their living conditions meant they were not able to isolate and faced increased exposure with limited access to services. From a public management perspective, urban policy and public works in the Latin American context have evidently led to the spatialisation and materialisation of inequalities, and therefore they also represent an important public policy lever for transformation. Women’s movements have led demands for redressing socio-economic inequalities, including their spatial manifestation and reproduction in poor neighbourhoods. The movement is rooted in experiences of inequality as well as the confluence of complex and multiple demands that seek to expand the rights of women, the LGTBIQ+ collective, the economically disadvantaged, Afro-Latin Americans and First Nations people. It has delivered electoral impacts and the transformation of public policy agendas, including through the constitution of diverse government teams. In a global context that often questions the power of collective movements and the role of the State, there are trends that reinforce political and institutional transformation with a gender perspective. One element of this trend in Argentina is the movement’s capacity to sustain a dialectical position “in and against the state” (Rai, 2013) which, rather than seeing social movements and the State as binary actors, considers transformation where the two are held in tension, enabling the former to penetrate the latter to mainstream gender perspectives within state apparatuses comprehensively and critically. While this chapter does not analyse these relationships in detail, it is important to recognise that many senior public servants came from and continue to form part of feminist social movements in Argentina.

UNDERSTANDING GENDER MAINSTREAMING AND COLLABORATIVE PUBLIC MANAGEMENT AS A POLITICS OF CARE There is a clear correspondence between the way cities and regions are configured, the distribution of investments and land uses, and decision-making processes in public management that reinforce a social organisation oriented towards the reproduction of exploitation as well as speculation and extractivism within capitalist economies. Feminist urbanism and economics, as plural, diverse and constantly growing bodies of thought, propose instead putting the reproduction of life at the centre of public management. In this framework, and accentuated by the pandemic, a politics of care and the notion of care tasks have risen to the top of the

328  Research handbook on public management and COVID-19 feminist agenda (e.g. Woodly et al., 2021). This notion is linked to rights-based considerations to be able to care for oneself, be cared for, and care for others. The invisibility of these tasks overburdens women, especially those in poverty, on a symbolic, economic and material level in terms of their availability of time and their economic, physical and political autonomy. The notion of care is a contribution made by feminist economists as a foundation for explaining inequalities, focusing on gender relations and their role in political and social dynamics. A group of scholars, including many with Latin American roots (Segato, 2003, 2013, 2018; Lugones, 2003; Borsani, 2015; Rivera, 2018; Galindo and Renne, 2021; Wayar, 2019), have developed a robust conceptual framework that critiques the neoclassical theory of homo economicus as an androcentric paradigm that centres the perspective of able-bodied, adult, professional, cisgender males. In this sense, feminist theory often also accounts for racist, homophobic and sexist biases in the way cities and regions operate. By shifting the discussion of the economy towards the reproduction of life over markets, feminist perspectives propose critical analysis as well as practical design of public policy based on principles of redistribution and the reduction of inequalities. For example, the sexual division of labour and the invisibility of care tasks as the founding basis of capitalism are deeply questioned (e.g., rooted in contributions such as those of Christine Delphy in the 1970s, who documented the double working shift carried out by women who are exploited both in the salaried world and in domestic labour). Beyond the micro scale of the household to the macro scale of regions, feminist economists have also brought into question economic development models based on extractivist processes in the New World. In this sense, accompanied by critical decolonial readings (e.g., Gago, 2018; Falú et al., 2002; Falú, 2009; Rolnik, 2017), they have managed to reframe the debate surrounding processes of indebtedness and dependence as well as provide a framework for collective resistance from an ecofeminist perspective. Feminist urbanism and architecture argue that the space women inhabit conditions their possibilities, often aggravating their exclusion and reducing their access to opportunities to improve their living conditions. Women in general face more complicated time–space arrangements in cities to meet their multiple needs, for example to travel between home, work and care settings, because many cities are zoned to separate land uses and the mobility system is hierarchised by trips to prioritise home to work travel (Craig and van Tienoven, 2019). Poor women face additional barriers in many urban contexts where disadvantaged populations are typically concentrated in service-poor areas, for example facing a lack of access to green space and care infrastructure such as daycare facilities (Pojani et al., 2018). Furthermore, although women in general are more exposed to gender-based violence than men, their housing conditions such as the precariousness of their home or the precarious conditions of their neighbourhood expose some women to greater risks of violence (McIlwaine, 2013). Feminist theory highlights the different strands of thinking behind the philosophy of caring that can coalesce in public management and urban public policymaking. In particular, the “caring city” (Davis, 2022) is an alternative proposal for an urban model that houses life away from the dynamics of speculation and rethinks approaches to the problems of space, including how urban planning often separates work from residential zones (Col lectiu punt 6, 2019). It further brings to the fore questions associated with poor urban conditions and segregated environments that reinforce the economic inequalities suffered especially by women and their dependents, including children and older adults. Feminist urban theorists such as Zaida Muxi Martínez (2018) encourage us to ask: is it possible to scale-up feminist urban planning so as to transform the territorial matrix of patriarchy in favour of caring cities? “Gender

Gender mainstreaming and collaborative public management during COVID-19  329 mainstreaming” state apparatuses to integrate “a gendered perspective into all policy- and decision-making” (Paterson, 2010, p. 395), including through national machineries (Rai, 2013) that coordinate policymaking across areas of government, is one pathway to scaling-up. The following case study describes an attempt to embed a politics of care across national public management processes, and in particular in urban planning and public works policymaking in response to the COVID-19 pandemic in Argentina.

THE UNEQUAL IMPACT OF COVID-19 AND THE SCOPE OF GENDER PERSPECTIVES IN ARGENTINA’S NATIONAL PANDEMIC RESPONSE The Argentine response to the pandemic was designed in the context of existing institutional frameworks as well as societal conditions, including widespread poverty and gender inequality. The pandemic itself produced differential effects across social groups, including worse outcomes for poor women. Place of residence, economic possibilities and access to basic services predisposed women to different levels of risk. Based on a study prepared by CIPPEC, poverty affected approximately 40 per cent of the population immediately prior to the pandemic between the end of 2019 and start of 2020. Those living in poverty tend to be concentrated in informal settlements, with approximately 12 per cent living in overcrowded conditions, 47 per cent without sewers and 15 per cent lacking access to potable water. These conditions meant that COVID-19 was more transmissible in poorer neighbourhoods and health outcomes worse than average among the poor. The initial effect of the pandemic in Argentina was felt worse in the Metropolitan Area of Buenos Aires (MABA), where approximately 15 million people live and economic activity is concentrated. The MABA is also where the greatest inequality in the country is concentrated; nearly 50 per cent of the population live below the poverty line and 20 per cent live in informal settlements (INDEC, 2019). Data on COVID-19 in the City of Buenos Aires showed higher rates of contagion and mortality in informal neighbourhoods over the first year of the pandemic (Suaya, 2020). In Argentina, prior to the pandemic, gender inequality was a structural problem, with women experiencing lower labour participation rates (41 per cent compared with 54 per cent for men, Q4, 2019), lower incomes (the pay gap was 28 per cent during Q4, 2019) and lower employment rates (45 per cent compared to 64 per cent, Q4, 2019). The most dominant sector for employed women in Argentina prior to the pandemic was domestic labour (17 per cent of all women’s jobs, Q4, 2019), which in addition to being the most feminised sector of the economy, is also highly informal, with 78 per cent of workers paid informally (without retirement or other benefits of formal employment) (Ministry of the Economy, Government of Argentina, 2021). Despite laws designed to prevent exploitation and fix minimum wages, those working informally earn almost half of the minimum wage (Ministry of the Economy, Government of Argentina, 2021). Women also dedicate double the amount of time to unpaid care within their households in Argentina compared with men at a rate of 6.4 hours daily (compared with 3.4 hours) (Ministry of the Economy, Government of Argentina, 2021). Women in Argentina are further disadvantaged by low public spending on services accessible to them and have fewer resources to spend on care. In 2013, UNICEF reported that day care attendance for infants between 0 and 4 years was only 20.7 per cent for the lowest fifth quintile of the population by income distribution, while for the wealthiest quintile it was 52.1 per cent. In this

330  Research handbook on public management and COVID-19 regard, more women in poverty are carrying heavier care loads in Argentina, reducing their possibility of labour insertion or further education (della Paolera et al., 2019; Díaz Langou et al., 2020). The pandemic accentuated and made more visible a deep crisis of inequality and the historical inaccessibility of rights and opportunities for women. With the election of the Justicialist Party in December 2019, Argentina’s political agenda was in many ways more aligned with local feminist priorities. The new political agenda included the legalisation of abortion, policies to expand the rights and reparation towards transgender populations, the public recognition of non-binary identities, and a comprehensive care policy. The new Government created the National Ministry of Women, Gender and Diversity and a gender mainstreaming strategy was established and federalised for the State apparatus. The centrepiece of this strategy is the National Plan for Equality in Diversity 2021–2023 and there is a suite of Gender and Diversity Public Policies (Government of Argentina, 2021). The care crisis aggravated by the pandemic made it possible to unite the feminist agenda and the pandemic response in some ways through mechanisms that have sought both the preservation of life and the recognition of social reproduction tasks undertaken by women daily. In this regard, we illustrate some of the changes introduced to public management approaches as well as material economic responses and a new direction for the national public works program focused on care infrastructure. National Machineries and Collaborative Public Management for Gender Mainstreaming after COVID-19 in the Government of Argentina The health emergency made visible the centrality of care arrangements in society, including as a support of the economy. In response, an inter-ministerial cabinet of “care” was established by the National Government of Argentina that brought together 15 agencies of the National Executive to work collaboratively on policies designed around the notion of “a fairer social organisation of care” (Ministry of Women, Gender and Diversity, 2021). The group seeks to bring an intersectional approach to the care crisis and draws on different feminist trajectories linked to local politics and scholarly influences. Among its main aims is better redistribution of labour between genders while also recognising care itself as a necessity, a job and a right. The cabinet group actively works on the implementation of specific policies in the context of the pandemic that seek to eliminate structural patterns of inequality in care. In line with this initiative, the first National Budget with a gender and diversity perspective was delivered in 2021 (Government of Argentina, 2021). The 2021 Budget offers insights into the effort made by the Argentine State to contain and cushion the impact of recent crises by targeting resources towards identified gaps in the use of time as well as the distribution of care and income. Specifically, it allocated 15.2 per cent of spending on policies impacting gender equality, including towards the Gender and Diversity Public Policies aimed at closing the time and care gaps between genders. To support this effort, the Ministry of the Economy has monitored the contribution of unpaid domestic and care work to GDP. This increases the visibility and recognition of this sector as a producer of fundamental goods and services for social, economic, and productive activity. In turn, valuing informal domestic and care work supports the development of policies that redistribute the care burden and strengthen its associated infrastructure. In this regard, a “Care Calculator” was launched after joint work between the Minister of the Economy, the Secretariat of Public Innovation of the Chief of Cabinet of Ministers and the International

Gender mainstreaming and collaborative public management during COVID-19  331 Labour Organization. The platform takes the data uploaded by users and compares it with the average time dedicated to domestic and care work from the Survey of Unpaid Work and Time Use, collected by the national bureau of statistics during the third quarter of 2013. The “Federal Care Map” was also developed by the members of the Interministerial Cabinet with the support of the Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean to identify and locate the spaces that offer care services for different populations in need as well as the different services that offer training opportunities in care services. These tools developed collectively through the Interministerial Cabinet have informed policy development in response to the pandemic with a gender perspective. The inter-ministerial cabinet also worked together across disciplines to develop a comprehensive law that would seek to redress the inequalities evidenced by the Care Calculator and Map. For its development, and in addition to the Interministerial Cabinet, a commission of external experts was convened, with representatives from organisations of people with disabilities, older people, children, chambers of commerce, feminist and diversity organisations, and representative organisations of informal labourers. A Bill called “Caring in Equality” was developed, which the President announced at the opening of ordinary sessions of Congress on 1 March 2022 and was sent to Congress on 2 May for approval (at the time of writing the law had not been introduced). The federal law is wide in scope, aiming to recognise the right of all people to receive and provide care and the right to self-care. It seeks to create an Integral System of Care with a Gender Perspective by providing a framework of goals and evaluation criteria for all State agencies to apply and follow, for example from changing labour relations to support care needs to increasing care infrastructure provision. The introduction of goals and evaluation criteria is an important aspect not only to measure the effects of gender mainstreaming efforts, but also to evaluate collaborative public management approaches. Transformations in the organisational structure of the State were also implemented. The Guidelines for gender equality in State Companies and Societies were approved by Administrative Decision 1744/2020. These guidelines constitute standards for equal treatment and opportunities in working conditions, the distribution of responsibilities and organisation models. The national Government committed to implementing the Guidelines and has started to work on detecting and eliminating gender wage gaps, promoting parity composition of its directories, and increasing the participation of women and the LGBTI+ population in leadership and decision-making positions. It is aimed at reversing disparities in hierarchical positions of the National Public Administration, which is 19 per cent at the Ministry level, 40 per cent at the Secretariats level and 38 per cent at Undersecretariat level (2021). The process of mainstreaming gender policy in the National State depends on the political will and public management capacity of each agency, and evidence from 2021 to 2023 suggests the existence of barriers in practice to deliver on formal targets. The chapter does not examine the barriers, though it is important to acknowledge contemporary public debate and highlight the persistence of participation gaps despite new standards introduced. Further steps in training and cultural change appear necessary, while others are underway. Gender Training and Awareness-raising for Technical Teams Concrete action to incorporate gender perspectives is possible only to the extent that protocols and formal work processes are established to support this. One driver of change is the composition of teams trained in gender awareness. Argentina had already made advancements

332  Research handbook on public management and COVID-19 in this type of training prior to the pandemic, in particular with the Micaela Law (27,499)1 introduced in December 2018 that established mandatory training on the subject of gender and violence against women for all people who work in the public sector across the nation’s executive, legislative, and judicial branches. The implementation of this regulation seeks to prevent gender-based violence in the workplace and promote adequate intervention, as well as to urgently start training processes on the subject, to mainstream the gender perspective in the design and implementation of public policies across sectors. Since its promulgation, all the provinces and the Autonomous City of Buenos Aires have adhered to the law, and progress is being made with local governments across the country as well. Thus, the implementation of the Micaela Law is representative of a paradigm shift that includes framing regulation itself as an opportunity for transformation of patriarchal culture and its innumerable violent consequences for society. It aims to strengthen the cultural and symbolic foundations of the necessary transformations through training that supports critical thinking and individual leadership by people across disciplines and areas of the State. The introduction of the Micaela Law underscores the significant role of the State and its function to train public servants on this issue to be capable and active agents in the design of policies that build cultural change towards a more just and egalitarian society. In harnessing a political window of opportunity, the movement around this law galvanised support for higher standards of equality in a society free of gender-based violence. By December 2021, three years after its introduction, approximately 104,000 public servants across the three levels of government had received training (Ministry of Women, Gender and Diversity, 2021). Economic Response to COVID-19 by the Government of Argentina In Argentina, a range of long-term economic reforms and short-term subsidies were introduced during the first year of the pandemic that have continued to benefit women. First, pension contribution and payment regulations were modified to recognise the care responsibilities of many women, including those on low incomes. Decree 475/2021 “Program for the Recognition of Contributions for Care Tasks” is a policy of redistribution and co-responsibility of care that recognises one year of work for each child born and two years for each adopted child for the pension, which is normally linked to hours worked and income. An additional year is included for the care of children with disabilities and a further two years for each child in families on low-income or unemployment benefits (those who received the Universal Child Allowance). In its first year of implementation, 150,000 people accessed this benefit. The reform also guarantees that maternity leave periods are considered to determine eligibility for retirement benefits, including for disability or death pensions. Overall, this policy tries to equalise access to the pension, given that the majority of women cannot accumulate 30 years of formal contributions as required by the traditional pension system to enter retirement on equitable grounds. This reform represents a significant milestone given the low rate of formal employment of Argentine women; in the first quarter of 2022 women’s occupation rate was 50.2 per cent while for men it was 68.2 per cent (INDEC, 2022). This gap is explained by gender inequities in the labour market, which, in turn, are related to the feminisation of care (Díaz Langou et al., 2020; UN Women, 2016). Short-term measures were also introduced, for example with the subsidy “Emergency Family Income” for individuals working in the informal economy affected by job losses, which benefited mostly women in informal domestic work and aimed to avoid poverty induced by the pandemic (ANSES, 2021).

Gender mainstreaming and collaborative public management during COVID-19  333 Care Infrastructure: Infant Development Centres and Comprehensive Centres for Gender and Diversity Policies In addition to the social safety net response delivered through economic subsidies, and through the care focus imbued in public management more generally, one immediate response to the health and care crisis has been the prioritisation of Care Infrastructure within the Ministry of Public Works, a traditionally male-dominated and masculinised sector. Care Infrastructure is understood as public works aimed at providing the necessary infrastructure to facilitate caring, contemplating both those who receive as well as those who provide care. The program includes the creation of the Care Infrastructure Fund, which establishes a minimum ministerial budget of 8.5 per cent per year, which is aimed at strengthening the Health Infrastructure Network, Comprehensive Centres for Gender and Diversity Policies, Infant Development Centres, Spaces for Youth and Care Spaces for the Elderly (Resolution 59/2021, Government of Argentina). Identifying Care Infrastructure as a central network of services and infrastructure to be integrated with road, energy, water and sanitation infrastructure transforms it into State policy and thus an equally important part of the infrastructure network as traditional investments in public works. The Infant Development Centres program of works was designed in line with the rights of the child to access care, but also with a specific territorial focus that reduces the time poverty of women from the most vulnerable sectors. The Centres were designed and planned nationwide through a collaborative approach between the Ministry of Public Works, the Ministry of Social Development and local governments. The aim is to build 1,200 new Infant Development Centres across Argentina and at the time of writing 600 centres were approved and under development. An Index of Inequalities in Early Childhood was developed to guide the equitable distribution of Infant Development Centres. It identifies needs and vulnerabilities in early childhood, considering the incidence of structural poverty in children from 0 to 4 years old and other aspects of vulnerability in the composition of households, such as female heads of households. Furthermore, a set of variables was developed that aims to capture aspects of structural poverty, including the lack of access to public services and the gaps in relation to demand for care infrastructure, such as in child health and early education. Challenges were faced in accessing current data with a sufficient degree of geographic disaggregation to define vulnerabilities from a multidimensional perspective. This encouraged additional collaboration between the Minister of Public Works and the Ministry of Social Development with the Ministry of Health, the National Council for Social Policies, and the national bureau of statistics (INDEC). Formal agreements were introduced that support the interoperability of databases and the shared development of criteria and guidelines for a comprehensive approach to social problems. The construction of the index was carried out collaboratively using the statistical technique of principal component factor analysis that measures early childhood inequalities in various ways: through housing conditions, access to educational services, the employment of responsible adults, among others. This was a significant advancement in collaborative public management in terms of the integration of distinct lines of policymaking to work on the development of indicators and programs with a care orientation. Another important area of action within the framework of Care infrastructure is the Comprehensive Centres for Gender and Diversity Policies, which function both as shelters for women and members of the LGBTI+ community who suffer violence, as well as support

334  Research handbook on public management and COVID-19 centres that deliver a multidisciplinary approach to these problems. This component of Care Infrastructure promotes a life free of violence as a horizon for everyone to naturalise. Through a co-design process between the Ministry of Public Works team, the Ministry of Women, Genders and Diversity, local governments, and social organisations, building characteristics were designed in a way that pays close attention to the needs of victims of gendered violence, including the privacy they require to present a claim, as well as the needs of people with children and those undergoing health treatments or who experience reduced mobility. The program aims to deliver at least one centre in each of the country’s 24 provinces by the end of 2023. In both experiences, significant transformation has occurred through collaborative public management of infrastructure focused on gender mainstreaming. This has improved multidimensional thinking for addressing complex problems associated with the feminisation of poverty. For example, new criteria have been developed and utilised to identify land for the centres that prioritised urban locations with good public infrastructure, such as transport connectivity. In the past, support services for women have often been planned through one area of government focused on social services, without a comprehensive view of women’s experiences in cities, and this can lead to barriers to fulfilling their rights because their access to services remained limited due to high care responsibilities, difficulties in managing work and care, as well as poor transport accessibility. Public Works Specifications with a Gender Perspective In addition to the specific Care Infrastructure program, other modifications to public works procurement and contract specifications with gender perspectives have been incorporated. Mainstreaming the gender perspective in public management, and especially in the public works sector, implies analysing and making visible gender inequalities so that public works can appropriately be designed to redress inequality. In Argentina, the construction labour force is predominantly made up of male workers, with women representing only 3.3 per cent of the total in the most recent survey (Falú, 2022) and in general the occupation rate is much higher for men than women. One initiative implemented to redress inequality in employment has been the implementation of contract specifications with gender targets. Gender targets have been trialled in public works tender and procurement processes since early 2022. Tender specifications generate project proposals that influence a range of actions associated with public works, from the actions of the companies that win the tender and the impact on the environment to the working conditions of the people who work on projects. Incorporating a gender perspective in these processes has been the product of collective work carried out by the Public Works Observatory within the Ministry of Public Works under the area of sustainability. This initiative was coordinated by the National Directorate of Transparency, the Directorate of Institutional Relations and the Directorate of Purchasing and Supplies, together with the Centre for the Implementation of Public Policies for Equity and Growth, the Argentine Chamber of Construction), the Construction Workers’ Union of the Argentine Republic, the Observatory of Public Procurement of the Austral University, and the University of Buenos Aires. It seeks to encourage female employment, but also adequate provisions for women in the workforce. To date, only a limited number of projects have incorporated a gender perspective on public works tenders and procurement processes. One example relates to works to enhance

Gender mainstreaming and collaborative public management during COVID-19  335 the Palacio Haedo (nineteenth-century heritage building in Buenos Aires), for which tender documents were released in March 2022 by the Ministry of Public Works (public tender No. 501-0025-LPU21). A new list of Particular Conditions and Technical Specifications was prepared with a gender perspective, including the purposeful use of gender-inclusive language, a requirement for payroll of personnel to be disaggregated by gender and functions, as well as the obligation to have health services differentiated by gender and to have appropriate clothing and corresponding footwear for all staff. While these procedural modifications incorporate evaluation indicators that measure benefits to women as direct employees of the works, they do not include minimum hiring quotas.

DISCUSSION As a result of the crisis generated by the COVID-19 pandemic, it became clear that the care economy is a strategic and necessary sector. Argentina has started a process of recognising care as work, as a contribution to the economy and as a right. In addition, the pandemic laid bare the differential impact of suffering during crises, and also the vital role women play in safeguarding the future and the past of our communities during such crises. In the case of Argentina, it also highlighted the power of collective feminist movements and the receptiveness of the Argentine Government to adopt gender perspectives through collaborative public management responses to the pandemic. This chapter highlights how the care agenda became incorporated as official public policy as well as some of the early transformations in terms of collaborative public management practices and processes. The State is beginning to recognise itself as an organism that reproduces heteronormative practices and is making an attempt at change. Progress is being made in the training of public officials in matters of gender equality; visibility and awareness campaigns have been carried out; inclusive language has been incorporated; and gender parity is being promoted in higher positions of the public sector. National machineries, including the Inter-ministerial Cabinet, are driving collaboration on gender and diversity across the State. Notably, social services-related ministries are working with the traditionally masculinised ministries of infrastructure and public works, which has allowed the deconstruction of exclusively engineering criteria and parameters towards dealing with more multidimensional societal issues. As a result of this collaboration, preliminary progress has been made, with the integration of information generated by different agencies, and the development of more robust inputs for public policy analysis to design programs of works to address socio-spatial challenges more comprehensively and inclusively. However, all these changes face the inertia of practices rooted in procedures and bureaucracies that limit transformation potential. For example, although the application of the Micaela Law establishes minimum training standards for technical teams on gender equality, mainstreaming this within public management procedures requires more than training; it requires a deeper joining-up of diverse areas with many competing priorities. In terms of infrastructure and public works, it requires coordinating actions between projects, legal, administrative and execution areas that are usually organised in different ways with different procedures depending on the area of government. Another example relates to the gender parity objectives: while targets have been established, they are not yet met. Further research is required on the glass ceiling faced by women in public leadership. Although a new institutional framework was

336  Research handbook on public management and COVID-19 created in response to the COVID-19 pandemic that establishes a minimum social and political consensus to expand the rights of women and LGBTIQ+, this is insufficient for now given entrenched public management traditions that challenge new directions, as well as deep-rooted inequality and gender violence across society. For collaborative public management research, there is a need to better understand these pressing challenges, for example using different theoretical models of behaviour and the consideration of variables to track advancing women’s leadership, collaborative structures and their effect on gender mainstreaming in the context of COVID-19. Overall, it is clear that investing in care policies is essential to close gender economic gaps, and guarantee the rights of people with disabilities, the elderly, children and adolescents, and people who work providing care, who are mainly women. Argentina, like the rest of the region, has a window of opportunity to implement a comprehensive care system that considers the requirements of the different populations and redistributes care work.

NOTE 1. Law 27,499 is named after Micaela García, a 21-year-old social activist and feminist from Entre Ríos who was murdered in April 2017 by Sebastián Wagner, a man with a criminal record for sexual crimes against two women and who had been release by a judge from prison despite the fact that specialists recommended otherwise.

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Gender mainstreaming and collaborative public management during COVID-19  337 Falú, A. (2022). Manual 1. La perspectiva de género en el ciclo de la Obra Pública, Buenos Aires, Argentina: Ministerio de Obras Públicas. Accessed on 1 June 2023 at: https://​www​.argentina​.gob​.ar/​ sites/​default/​files/​manual​_1​_0​.pdf Falú, A., Morey, P., and Rainero, L (eds). (2002). Ciudad y vida cotidiana: Asimetrías en el uso del tiempo y del espacio. Red Mujer y Hábitat de América Latina. Filgueira, F., Galindo, L.M, Giambruno, C., and Blofield, M. (2020). América Latina ante la crisis del COVID-19: vulnerabilidad socioeconómica y respuesta social. CEPAL Políticas Sociales, 238 (LC/ TS.2020/149), 1–90. Gago, V. (2018) La potencia feminista. O el deseo de cambiarlo todo. Tinta Limón. Galindo, N., and Renne, M. (2021). Feminismo Bastardo. La Paz, Bolivia: Mujeres Creando. Government of Argentina. (2021). Resolución 59/2021, Programa de Infraestructura de Cuidados Accessed on 1 June 2023 at: https://​www​.argentina​.gob​.ar/​normativa/​nacional/​resoluci​%C3​%B3n​-59​ -2021​-347833 INDEC. (2019). Nuevas realidades, nuevas demandas. Desafíos para la medición de la identidad de género en el Censo de Población. Buenos Aires, Argentina, INDEC. Accessed on 1 June 2023 at: https://​www​.indec​.gob​.ar/​ftp/​cuadros/​publicaciones/​identidad​_genero​_censo​_2020​.pdf INDEC. (2021). Encuesta Nacional de Usos del Tiempo en Argentina. INDEC. https://​www​.indec​.gob​ .ar/​indec/​web/​Nivel4​-Tema​-4​-31​-117 INDEC. (2022). Dossier Estadístico 8 de Marzo de 2022. https://​www​.indec​.gob​.ar/​ftp/​cuadros/​ publicaciones/​dosier​_estadistico​_8M​_2022​.pdf Lugones, M. (2003). Peregrinajes: teorizar una coalición contra múltiples opresiones. Ediciones del Signo. McIlwaine, C. (2013). Urbanization and gender-based violence: Exploring the paradoxes in the global South. Environment and Urbanization, 25(1), 65–79. Ministry of the Economy, Government of Argentina. (2021). National budget. Accessed on 1 June 2023 at: https://​www​.economia​.gob​.ar/​onp/​presupuestos/​2021 Ministry of Women, Gender and Diversity, Government of Argentina. (2021). Informe Implementación de la ley No. 27.499. Accessed on 1 June 2023 at: https://​www​.argentina​.gob​.ar/​sites/​default/​files/​ 2020/​02/​informe​-leymicaela​-web​-2021​.pdf Montaño, S. (2010). Políticas para el empoderamiento de las mujeres como estrategia de la lucha contra la pobreza. Women and Development Department, CEPAL. https://​www​.cepal​.org/​sites/​default/​files/​ events/​files/​paper​.montano​.pdf Muxi Martínez, Z. (2018). Mujeres, casas y ciudades. DPR. Paterson, S. (2010). What’s the problem with gender-based analysis? Gender mainstreaming policy and practice in Canada. Canadian Public Administration, 53(3), 395–416. Pojani, D., Wardale, D., and Brown, K. (2018). Sexism and the city: How urban planning has failed women. The Conversation. https://​theconversation​.com/​sexism​-and​-the​-city​-how​-urban​-planning​-has​ -failed​-women​-93854 Rai, S. M. (2003). Mainstreaming gender, democratizing the state. Manchester University Press. Rai, S. M. (2013). Gender and the political economy of development: From nationalism to globalization. John Wiley & Sons. Rivera, C., (2018). Un mundo ch’ixi es posible. Ensayos desde un presente en crisis. Tinta Limón. Rolnik, R. (2017). La guerra de los lugares: La colonización de la tierra y las viviendas en la era de las finanzas. Editorial el colectivo. Segato, R. (2003). Las estructuras elementales de la violencia: ensayos sobre género entre la antropología, el psicoanálisis y los derechos humanos. Prometeo. Segato, R. (2013). La escritura en el cuerpo de las mujeres asesinadas en Ciudad Juárez. Buenos Aires: Tinta Limón. Segato, R. (2018). La guerra contra las mujeres. Prometeo. Siclari, P., Lopez, M., Mohamed, A., Taboada, F., Román, M., Carrión, A., Canestrano, M.L., Bonduki, N., Mendoza, B. and Pradel, P. (2022). Nueva Agenda Urbana en América Latina y El Caribe: implementación 2018–2022. Urban Agenda Platform: CEPAL & UN-Habitat. Santiago, Chile. Available at https://​www​.urbanagendaplatform​.org/​sites/​default/​files/​2022​-02/​Latin​%20America​%20Regional​ %20Report​.pdf

338  Research handbook on public management and COVID-19 Suaya, A. (2020). Inequidad y COVID-19 en la Ciudad de Buenos Aires. Cómo afecta la pandemia a los asentamientos informales. Documento de Trabajo No 193. CIPPEC. UN Women. (2016). Policy Briefing: Redistributing unpaid care and sustaining quality care services: A prerequisite for gender equality, United Nations. Accessed on 1 June 2023 at: https://​ www​.unwomen​.org/​en/​digital​-library/​publications/​2016/​3/​redistributing​-unpaid​-care​-and​-sustaining​ -quality​-care​-services Wayar, M. (2019). Travesti: Una teoría lo suficientemente buena. Buenos Aires: Muchas Nueces. Woodly, D., Brown, R.H., Marin, M., Threadcraft, S., Harris, C.P., Syedullah, J., and Ticktin, M. (2021). The politics of care. Contemporary Political Theory, 20, 890–925.

26. How useful is priority setting in an emergency? An analysis of its role in national responses to the COVID-19 pandemic Iestyn Williams, Suzanne Robinson, Chris Smith, Lydia Kapiriri and Helen Dickinson

INTRODUCTION It is often asserted that public managers should seek to make the best of the limited resources available to them and lead according to priorities the public agree to be the most important. However, these basic tenets are not easily implemented. The literature contains a multitude of models, ethical frameworks, and decision tools, each intended to aid the prioritisation of public resource allocation (Williams et al., 2012). These typically rest on the fundamentally rationalist premise that, given the right information, public managers will choose the path that promises the most benefits to their populations. But is this assumption borne out in practice? The extent that priority setting tools and frameworks have become embedded into management practice is mixed at best, with an array of other factors jostling for influence (Kapiriri and Razavi, 2017). One of the core aspirations of priority setting is making contentious decision-making processes open and transparent, and it therefore runs the risk of naivety when applied to rationing decisions characterised by high levels of political scrutiny, partisan interest group pressure, and public feeling (Klein, 2010). The COVID-19 pandemic temporarily redefined the challenges and conditions of public management and governance. In the immediate response to the crisis, it was not possible for governmental and other public leaders to merely sidestep or obscure the difficult resource decisions faced, for example in guiding access to personal protective equipment (PPE), tests, acute and other hospital care, and emerging treatments and vaccines. The experience of COVID-19 therefore offers an opportunity to explore the potential and actual value of priority setting as an aide to resource allocation decision-making during emergencies, and to draw lessons for its wider usefulness. We focus primarily on the allocation of health-related resources as this is the arena where priority setting tools have most consistently been advocated. However, it is important to recognise that pandemic and post-pandemic decision-making wrestled with many other dilemmas and trade-offs – not least in the imposition of major restrictive policies with a range of social, economic, psychological and health effects (Jeffrey, 2020). The chapter starts by considering how useful priority setting has proven to be for public management in ‘normal times’, before delineating the specific priority setting challenges posed by COVID-19. We then tackle three resource allocation ‘pinch-points’ along the journey from the initial wave, through the development and distribution of vaccines, to the emergence from the pandemic and the associated crisis of unmet health needs in other areas. We consider the role played by evidence in informing resource allocation decisions and examine the use of ethical frameworks and criteria – for example in vaccine rollout programmes – and their impact on 339

340  Research handbook on public management and COVID-19 equity. We also consider the crucial role played by social values and perceived levels of trust in decision makers. Ultimately, we argue that while COVID-19 raises some novel issues given the extent and urgency of demand, many of the challenges faced echo those always faced by public management. We argue that priority setting has a crucial role to play in resource allocation during turbulent times, but that greater investment is required into priority setting processes that are flexible, agile and combine a variety of values.

PRIORITY SETTING IN ‘NORMAL’ TIMES Priority setting can be defined as the process of determining how best to allocate limited resources (Mitton and Donaldson, 2004). While the term is prevalent in the field of health policy and management, it rarely features in the public management literature, including the longstanding subfield of public sector budgeting (Wildavsky and Caiden, 1988; Anessi-Pessina et al. 2016). The preoccupation with setting priorities stems from the near-universal trend towards ever greater disparities between health care budgets and spending demands. These disparities are seen as driven by a range of factors. Some of these are demographic, such as increased life expectancy and lower fertility, leaving a decreasing proportion of economically active individuals funding the care of an expanding older age group. It is also simultaneously claimed that population health profiles have worsened in recent times – for example the ‘obesity epidemic’ – leading to additional pressure on health systems and services (James et al., 2001). Compounding these drivers are rising patient expectations of health services, as well as the vast range of health treatments and technologies and associated lobbying, which again places pressure on finite public budgets. While versions of these challenges exist in all sectors of public management, including education, criminal justice and social care, they take on some apparently unique characteristics in the health care arena. For example, broadly speaking, health policy has proven relatively immune to the major programmes of service cutback and retrenchment characteristic of these other domains (Starke, 2006; Fredriksson et al., 2019). This has meant health care spending has often continued to increase, but also makes imposition of constraints by public leaders difficult to justify. Many initiatives have been tried to enable rational approaches to limit-setting in health systems, including setting up stakeholder panels to set acceptable decision criteria such as in Norway (Ottersen et al., 2016), and delegation to non-majoritarian guidance-producing bodies such as the National Institute for Health and Care Excellence in the UK (Rumbold et al., 2017). Despite progress, however, none of these ‘models’ has enabled fully transparent processes for actual resource allocation, which remains characterised (to greater or lesser extents) by acute media scrutiny, intense group contestation, and implementation failure. In ‘normal times’, public bodies can absorb these problems without resorting to unpalatable rationing decisions. These strategies include, for example, cost shifting (Alders and Schut, 2022); imposing performance regimes (Anessi-Pessina et al., 2016); interest group bargaining and horse trading; and outsourcing (Levine, 1978; Grimshaw et al., 2002; Cusack, 1997). The relationship of formal priority setting processes with these formal and informal budgeting regimes and with broader neo-liberal reforms is not always clear (Smith et al., 2014), although the foregrounding of an economics discourse is arguably linked to these wider trends (Kislov et al., 2021). Certainly, the rhetoric of priority setting stands in opposition to resource allocation based on informal historical patterns of trade-offs between partisan interests and agendas

How useful is priority setting in an emergency?  341 (Mitton et al., 2021). As well as being ethically indefensible, such ‘log-rolling’ practices are argued to be unsustainable in an era of greater legal challenge and public scrutiny (Jost, 2003). Priority setting instead embodies the ‘design’ approach to policy formulation described by Howlett and Mukherjee (2014, p. 58) as ‘the deliberate and conscious attempt to define policy goals and connect them in an instrumental fashion to instruments or tools expected to realize those objectives’. The ‘policy goals’ that underpin many priority setting frameworks revolve around some combination of overall health improvement and population-based health equity (Lübbe, 2016). The fundamental tenets of priority setting are therefore that decisions over allocation of resources should be explicit and consistent. This means the reasoning behind them should be clear and transparent, and applied in all cases, such that deviation only occurs in unusual circumstances. This also implies the necessity for explicit recognition of the need for trade-offs as resources are always finite and demand can never be fully satisfied. In practice, priority setting is highly data hungry, implying the need for rigorous analysis of decision alternatives (Hall et al., 2018). However, there are also points of significant divergence between priority setting schools and traditions. While some models adopt a strict utilitarian focus on benefit maximisation – for example through cost-utility modelling of available alternatives – others emphasize either ethical plurality, stakeholder inclusion or both (Hunter et al., 2016). For example, ‘Accountability for Reasonableness’ has become a somewhat popular, neo-Rawlsian framework for incorporating deliberative principles and procedural justice into priority setting (Daniels and Sabin, 2002), in response to more reductive design-based models. The primary debates have therefore been conducted largely between advocates of ‘technocracy’ and ‘democracy’ as the driving logic of priority setting (Landwehr, 2010). In the public management literature, these challenges have been mapped using Mark Moore’s strategic triangle, which depicts the three interlocking domains of the value task (Moore, 1995; Williams, 2011). The ‘value’ mission requires adjudication between the multitude of social value considerations relevant to priority setting – for example improving health, reducing inequalities, creating trust, saving lives, and so on. The ‘operational’ domain concerns how best to organise and deploy the available resources to attain as much value as possible. Finally, the ‘authorisation’ domain concerns external factors such as citizens, government and other stakeholders whose support is required for priorities to be deemed legitimate. Only by simultaneously addressing all three challenges can public leaders and decision makers effectively set and implement priorities. More detail is provided in frameworks such as that put forward by Kapiriri and Martin (2010) who seek to systematically itemise requirements of effective priority setting, including ethics, evidence, procedure, inclusion, systems, politics, cultures, implementation, and impact. These developments notwithstanding, priority setting remains among the more marginal of public management tools, especially outside of the health arena. In many cases, the reasons for this have institutional origins. For example, Williams (2013) shows how a specific constellation of institutional factors – public scrutiny, interest group lobbying, and separation between formulation and implementation – can incline decision makers towards explicit priority setting. Priority setting is therefore more attainable when the need for tough decisions is generally accepted, and where the ‘messy’ realities of implementation are stripped out of the decision-making arena. Such conditions are rare, especially in high income settings, and priority setting is more commonly perceived as being the wrong solution to the problems

342  Research handbook on public management and COVID-19 posed by resource scarcity, or else promises to generate additional problems in and of itself. It is perhaps not surprising that these resource intensive and process-heavy methodologies are not always embraced by managers who seek to avoid controversy while also being embedded in imperfect implementation systems (Robinson et al., 2012; Kapiriri and Razavi, 2017). It has long been noted that priority setting draws attention to contentious decisions that might otherwise be dealt with through deflection and blame avoidance; the political jeopardy posed by openly rationing health care is perhaps the most intractable barrier to embedding priority setting (Klein, 2010).

PRIORITY SETTING DURING THE COVID-19 PANDEMIC The conditions brought about by the COVID-19 pandemic might in theory engender a greater than usual role for priority setting. For example, a national state of emergency allows – and arguably requires – governments to make extraordinary decisions and to formally acknowledge demands on scarce resources to an extent that might attract criticism in normal times. During the pandemic it was clear that, at various times, shortages existed in areas of: staff; general hospital beds and intensive care beds; other treatments and equipment; COVID tests; masks and other PPE (Williams et al., 2021). However, recognition of the need for decisions was accompanied by intense scrutiny of the decisions, thereby necessitating a decision-making rationale that stakeholders and wider society could accept (Rieger and Wang, 2022). In theory, priority setting offers precisely this kind of defensible decision-making methodology in scenarios where the requirement for trade-offs is accepted but there is dispute over what options should be taken – for example when making potentially tragic decisions over access to treatment. In the context of the pandemic one such example is determining who should get access to intensive care facilities if demand exceeds the treatment facilities available (Newdick et al., 2020). However, it is harder to predict the impact of other conditions of COVID-19 on receptiveness to explicit priority setting. For example, the early phases of the pandemic were marked by an atmosphere of extreme urgency and turbulence, with decisions required in unusually short timescales. Furthermore, these decisions were made under conditions of notably poor information, for example about the properties of the virus and the likely effectiveness of the available courses of government action. Rapid decision-making in conditions of uncertainty is antithetical to most models of priority setting. For this reason, it is difficult to predict the role of priority setting alongside other strategies such as: scaling up of resource supply, for example through increased production and procurement; innovation in the delivery of services, for example through remote delivery of health care services, and reducing demand for resources, for example social restriction measures aimed at reducing transmission (Ansell et al., 2021). There are numerous ways the outcomes of priority setting processes might be disseminated including, for example, policy announcements and directives, planning and guidance documents, and professional guidelines (Seixas et al., 2021). To examine the role of priority setting in initial COVID-19 responses, the authors were involved in documentary analysis of pandemic preparedness plans (PPPs) published by governments in the period March–September 2020, in response to the COVID-19 outbreak. These were either drafted from scratch or else adapted from existing formal pandemic preparedness plans and tailored to the specific case of COVID-19. The countries sampled included representation from each of the WHO regions

How useful is priority setting in an emergency?  343 and covered the full range of income level categories (see Kapiriri et al., 2022; Vélez et al., 2022a, 2022b). The aim of the study was to extract data on the presence of the domains of priority setting as itemised in the Kapiriri and Martin (2010) framework. This meant analysing the extent to which the PPPs: ● ● ● ● ● ●

demonstrated a commitment to explicit allocation of scarce resources, described use of an explicit decision-making tool, method, or framework, cited explicit criteria (e.g., effectiveness, efficiency, equity) informing decisions, cited the evidence drawn on in support of the proposed course of action, described citizen and stakeholder involvement in the development of the plans, demonstrated the presence of procedural measures of decision quality such as publicity and appeals.

The Kapiriri and Martin framework includes additional domains – such as broader contexts, implementation of decisions, and impact – that would not plausibly be covered in the PPPs and so therefore were not included in the analysis. Perhaps unsurprisingly, given the circumstances, there was evidence in the PPPs of significant political commitment to making explicit resource decisions. Whereas in normal times priority setting recommendations are rarely authored directly by government, each of the PPPs was explicitly situated within government bodies including health ministries. Furthermore, there was a clear recognition of resource scarcity, with many plans itemising where the pinch points were expected to be felt. For example, in the 24 plans included from the EURO region of the World Health Organization, the resource shortages included: ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ● ●

Human resources (18 plans). Testing kits (17). Personal protective equipment plus related materials (15). Health care facilities (15). Laboratory equipment (13). Essential medicines (11). Acute care beds (10). Medical equipment and supplies (9). Ambulances (8). Vaccines (6). Life support equipment (6). (Source: Williams et al., 2022).

Evidence, broadly defined, was also a common feature of most plans. However, this was primarily confined to references to guidance produced by bodies such as the World Health Organization. While some plans – e.g., those of Ireland and the UK – referred to the role of modelling (for example of the spread and impact of the virus), this lacked substance and detail. Overall, therefore, robust evidence was clearly identified as important without being available at the time that the plans were drafted. Roughly one third of plans also outlined the criteria upon which resources would be allocated and underlying ethical principles were either explicitly stated or could be inferred from these. These principles most typically included protection of those with clinical vulnerability (including due to their age) and protection of key workers (primarily on utilitarian grounds).

344  Research handbook on public management and COVID-19 A small number of PPPs also cited the importance of preserving the dignity of human life, maintaining solidarity, and promoting cost-effectiveness in resource allocation. No reference was made to other sources of disadvantage and/or vulnerability, for example resulting from dislocation or relating to ethnicity, gender or economic disadvantage. This lack of consideration given to poor and vulnerable communities has been widely noted (see for example Castelyn et al., 2020). Although evidence and decision criteria therefore featured to some extent, this fell short of the level indicated in the Kapiriri and Martin (2010) framework. Furthermore, only 7 per cent of the overall sample of PPPs from across all WHO regions included a description of a specific priority setting process. Finally, stakeholder participation was described in over 80 per cent of plans but this was almost entirely confined to ‘technocratic’ groups – e.g., learned societies and arms of government – with no public engagement strategies described beyond unidirectional ‘communications’ plans. This is perhaps not surprising given the urgency with which plans were drawn up, but still suggests a tendency towards technocracy, and away from democracy, in times of turbulence. Overall, these findings suggest that priority setting played only a limited role in the typical response to COVID-19 as revealed by the PPPs, and in ways that were largely consistent across regions of the world, irrespective of income levels (see Kapiriri et al., 2022; Vélez et al., 2022a, 2022b). As noted, the analysis was confined to plans and therefore will have missed important aspects of context. For example, those lower- and middle-income countries that were in receipt of international donations typically presented more detailed descriptions of resources required, plans for allocating resources and improving internal accountability (Razavi et al., 2022). The constraints of the document analysis also prevent us from examining the extent to which explicit priorities were implemented in practice. For this, other methods of inquiry are required. The next two sections of this chapter therefore extend the analysis into two specific areas of prioritisation, drawing on evidence of resource allocation in practice. The first considers evidence around prioritisation of access to acute care, and the second focuses on COVID-19 vaccines.

PRIORITISATION AND ACUTE CARE IN THE FIRST WAVE OF COVID-19 One of the most distressing features of the pandemic was the pressure placed on acute and intensive care facilities which were overrun in many countries. While the availability of a ventilator does not guarantee survival for patients with severe COVID-19 (mortality rates for patients requiring mechanical ventilation have been reported to be up to 86 per cent) (Norman et al., 2021), governments worldwide scrambled to create response plans to ensure large-scale availability of ICU beds and ventilators. Despite this, there were widely reported shortages, pitting individual patients in competition over access to treatment. Furthermore, it was unclear where that decision-making burden should fall. Indeed, it is likely that the default position was for individual clinicians to be responsible for this, at a time of considerable physical and emotional strain for medical professionals (Arie, 2020). When making such resource allocation decisions, there have been concerns that some groups might be de-prioritised in terms of access to healthcare resources. Rationing by age was evident in some jurisdictions, as emergency doctors refused to see the elderly and some

How useful is priority setting in an emergency?  345 aged care residents were left to die (Stevis-Gridneff et al., 2020). Across the globe we saw elderly people being left without adequate medical and social support, with tiers of government lacking direction and policy in relation to who was responsible for care (O’Flynn, 2021). Another such group is people with disability. It is well established that people with disability experience significant challenges in accessing health services due to discriminatory attitudes and practices (Green et al., 2020). In some countries (e.g., England), initial clinical guidance on ‘triaging’ and rationing access to critical care for all people with COVID-19 recommended use of a frailty index designed to predict outcomes for elderly patients. This meant COVID-19 patients with a disability were less likely to get access to critical care such as respiratory support (NICE, 2020). A high-profile campaign and legal action overturned aspects of these guidelines (Disability Rights UK, 2020). However, reports suggested that people requiring assistance with daily living were less likely to receive advanced respiratory support and more likely to die than other groups (Intensive Care National Audit and Research Centre, 2020). There were also cases where primary care services issued blanket Do Not Resuscitate (DNR) notices to groups of people with disability without consultation, and where DNRs were found on the notes of people with disability without consultation (Learning Disability England, 2020). Asghari et al. (2021) undertook a survey of 1262 Iranian citizens about principles and criteria for allocation of ventilators. While they found that most participants agreed that it was necessary to avoid discrimination on the basis of gender, economic and political status, they also supported the view that maximising health benefits should be the main driver of ventilator allocation. Such a prioritisation process is highly utilitarian in nature and would likely discriminate against those with poorer health due to structural drivers. In a discrete choice experiment in Australia, Norman et al. (2021) asked 1050 community members how they would prioritise access to ventilators based on characteristics such as likely effectiveness of intervention, smoking status, whether an individual has dependents, whether they are a health worker and whether they had a disability. On average, prioritised patients were younger, more likely to benefit from care, non-smokers, with dependents, healthcare workers, and those with no physical or intellectual disability. What we see in findings from Asghari et al. and Norman et al. are community perspectives that would likely see people with poorer health and people with disability being de-prioritised in terms of access to life-saving treatment. Such examples show the limits of utilitarian perspectives on prioritisation of health resources.

PRIORITISATION AND ACCESS TO COVID-19 VACCINES As we moved through the pandemic, new resources such as vaccines needed to be allocated. Priority setting for vaccines is a different challenge to that of ventilators (at least in high income settings). Here, ethical concerns relate to the sequence of provisioning, rather than whether to provide at all, and the removal of resources from one patient to treat others is highly unlikely. Priority setting of vaccines during a pandemic involves effective allocation at both country and global levels. Thus, a focus on prioritisation of vaccines within and across countries that ensures access for low- and middle-income countries is important (Williams et al., 2021). When allocating vaccine resources under conditions of scarcity it is essential to develop a plan around which groups to prioritise, so as with all rationing exercises there will be

346  Research handbook on public management and COVID-19 winners and losers. Some of the more traditional ethical principles applied to rationing – such as utilitarian approaches focused on cost/benefit often used in cost effectiveness analysis, or human capital approach – seemed less attractive in the priority setting of COVID-19 vaccines. Many of the emerging frameworks have included a focus on social justice and prioritising vaccinations for disadvantaged populations (Schmidt et al., 2020). Several vaccination allocation frameworks have been developed which include conceptual and theoretical frameworks, as well as more prescriptive framework plans. The main frameworks are outlined in brief below. The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine (NASEM) framework is a comprehensive tool that draws on previous vaccination evidence and expert opinion to provide allocation frameworks for use within and among countries. The document provides information relating to the priority setting process including aspects of implementation (cost, risk, communication, engagement, etc.). The framework does have a strong focus on equity within and across countries. The National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine (NASEM) (2020) framework is shown in Figure 26.1.

Figure 26.1

Major elements of the framework for equitable allocation of COVID-19 vaccine

The NASEM framework sets out a staged approach to vaccination with phase one prioritising high-risk health workers and those particularly vulnerable to severe morbidity and mortality due to COVID-19 (NASEM, 2020). The WHO SAGE values COVID vaccination framework (WHO, 2020) is a values driven framework based around six key principles outlined in Table 26.1. At a national level, the UK Joint Committee on Vaccination and Immunisation – who provide advice to the UK Government – applied the accountability for reasonableness frame-

How useful is priority setting in an emergency?  347 Table 26.1 Goal statement

The WHO SAGE values COVID vaccination framework (WHO, 2020) COVID-19 vaccines must be a global public good. The overarching goal is for COVID-19 vaccines to contribute significantly to the equitable protection and promotion of human wellbeing among all people

Principles Human wellbeing

of the word. Objectives Reduce deaths and disease burden from the COVID-19 pandemic. Reduce societal and economic disruption by containing transmission, reducing severe disease and death, or a combination of these strategies. Protect the continuing functioning of essential services, including health services.

Equal respect

Treat the interests of all individuals and groups with equal consideration as allocation and priority-setting decisions are being taken and implemented. Offer a meaningful opportunity to be vaccinated to all individuals and groups who qualify under prioritisation criteria.

Global equity

Ensure that vaccine allocation takes into account the special epidemic risks and needs of all countries, particularly low-and middle-income countries. Ensure that all countries commit to meeting the needs of people living in countries that cannot secure vaccine for their populations on their own, particularly low- and middle-income countries.

National equity

Ensure that vaccine prioritisation within countries takes into account the vulnerabilities, risks and needs of groups who, because of underlying societal, geographic or biomedical factors, are at risk of experiencing greater burdens from the COVID-19 pandemic. Develop the immunisation delivery systems and infrastructure required to ensure COVID-19 vaccines access to priority populations and take proactive action to ensure equal access to everyone who qualifies under a priority group, particularly socially disadvantaged populations.

Reciprocity

Protect those who bear significant additional risks and burdens of COVID-19 to safeguard the welfare of others, including health and other essential workers.

Legitimacy deserved trust Engage all countries in a transparent consultation process for determining what scientific, public health, in prioritization decisions and values criteria should be used to make decisions about vaccine allocation between countries. Employ best available scientific evidence, expertise, and significant engagement with relevant stakeholders for vaccine prioritisation between various groups within each country, using transparent, accountable, unbiased processes, to engender deserved trust in prioritisation decisions.

work when allocating vaccines. The focus here is on fair process, that is transparent and relevant to stakeholders, and includes a mechanism for revised decision-making (Campos-Matos et al., 2021). We have seen a number of countries develop vaccination priority criteria aligning closely with the NASEM and WHO frameworks. Both vaccine allocation frameworks have a very strong focus on equity and the importance of this in relation to access and benefit. For example, we have seen the targeting of frontline health workers and those at high risk of mortality and morbidity being included in the early phase of vaccine rollout plans. Here a number of countries have prioritised the elderly, especially those living in aged care facilities where increased contact and spread of disease is an issue. In Australia, Indigenous groups have been prioritised to receive vaccinations due to poorer health outcomes. However, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander COVID-19 vaccination rates continue to lag behind the general population (Woodley, 2022). Not only does the uptake from Indigenous populations lag behind the broader population, but it also varies across jurisdictions, with geography and access to services (supply) being a major factor. In addition, uptake does seem to be impacted by COVID prevalence, with states that have been least impacted by COVID having the lowest vaccination

348  Research handbook on public management and COVID-19 uptake (Briggs and Truu, 2021). The focus of equity in this context means endorsing unequal access to vaccines for some groups above others. Emanuel and colleagues (2020) set out a ‘fair priority model’ as an ethical framework for global vaccine allocation. This model incorporates three phases including reducing premature deaths, reducing serious economic and social deprivations and returning to full functioning. The accelerated pace of vaccine programmes during the COVID-19 pandemic was key to success and early implementation saw wealthier countries much more able to fund and organise vaccine rollouts than low- and middle-income countries. In the early stages of vaccine roll-out the shortage of vaccines meant that jurisdictions within and across countries saw chaotic allocation of COVID-19 vaccinations, with logistical issues, varying priority setting strategies and disproportionate socioeconomic power structures affecting equity at state, national and international levels (Kearney et al., 2021, p. 2). The G7 countries made a commitment to increase access to, and fair distribution of, vaccines for low- and middle-income countries (Adrien, 2021). However, the equity gaps around access, distribution and coverage remained. Issues with rationing of vaccines went beyond mere availability of the vaccine itself, with access being further compromised by logistical deficits, the ability to source and distribute vaccinations and client-related factors which make it difficult for populations to physically access the vaccines.

RATIONING OF ANTIVIRAL DRUGS A number of approved antiviral treatments are available for those with COVID-19. As with vaccines, these are not available for all individuals, but are restricted according to various criteria, which are usually not just effectiveness. For example, Persad et al. (2022) and colleagues note that due to increased demand the US Federal Government asked states to ration supply, and there are similar restrictions across the globe. The World Health Organization (WHO) recommends antiviral treatment for non-severe COVID-19 at highest risk of hospital admission. This would include those who are unvaccinated, those with weak immune systems or chronic diseases and older people (BMJ, 2021). In response to the priority setting and rationing dilemmas associated with the allocation of antivirals, Persad and colleagues (2022) cautioned against the prevailing approach around allocation due to vaccination status and age. They suggested that more data are needed to really understand which patients benefit from therapies, and then develop priority categories to allocate therapies effectively while considering important ethical values around equity.

CONCLUSIONS In this chapter we have examined the role of formal priority setting processes in the COVID-19 response, including government planning during the first wave, and specific approaches to distributing scarce hospital services and vaccines. Our analysis suggests that whilst priority setting was a feature in all of these areas, its influence remained limited. Such turbulent times or wicked problems need cross boundary solutions and agility and flexibility to respond to changing contexts (Ansell et al., 2021). Although, as noted above, the turbulence of the pandemic may suggest a greater role for priority setting, it is hard to ascertain the role it did play.

How useful is priority setting in an emergency?  349 This is especially the case in the early phase when limited knowledge and uncertainty, alongside panic and stress of health services and broader communities, continued to place pressure on decision makers and governments globally. This highlights a criticism often levelled at more traditional approaches to priority setting, wherein rationalism and normative naivety make such methodologies seem impractical during turbulent times. There are several implications that we might draw out as lessons for future public management. The first of these concerns evidence, and its centrality to many models for rational decision-making. During the pandemic it was evident that priority setting requires levels of evidence that were not present, with public leaders operating with huge uncertainty about the consequences of their decisions, and with little ability to forward plan given the unknown properties of the virus. Indeed, there was no unified interpretation of what COVID-19 meant for public health or the economy (Argento et al., 2020). The reality of the pandemic involved muddling through, learning through experience, having to adapt and change when new information became evident and taking calculated risks rather than following traditional priority setting approaches. Many public managers operate with, at best, imperfect information on the likely outcomes of the decision options with which they are faced. In extraordinary circumstances, such as those thrown up by COVID-19, there simply is not a sufficient well of reliable evidence to inform prioritisation decisions (or indeed policy more widely). In such circumstances, there is a requirement for flexibility and capacity to adapt to an unfolding environment which is at odds with the rules-based proceduralism that characterises priority setting methodologies. Allied to this, the additional time pressures on decision-making mean that adoption of elaborate, multi-component priority setting frameworks is unrealistic. In conditions of turbulence and uncertainty, priority setting is best presented as a series of relatively simple rules that can be quickly applied and re-applied as more becomes known about the wider decision environment. Paradoxically, however, our analysis also suggests that there are no ready-made ethical injunctions or principles by which resource decisions can be made. The example of people with disabilities reminds us that the privileging of health gain serves to disadvantage an already underserved population group. More broadly, the dominant approach to pandemic decision-making combined autocracy and technocracy, with little room for collective input. Whilst this reflects the extraordinary circumstances faced by governments and public services, such circumstances no longer pertain and it is essential that public and patient constituencies are empowered to influence ongoing priority setting, if such perverse effects are to be avoided. Ultimately, we argue that – while the COVID-19 pandemic has raised some novel issues given the extent of demand – many of the challenges simply highlight the types of issues faced by public management in setting priorities in accessing services in general. In other words, COVID-19 has merely exposed areas of under-investment and exacerbated both patterns of need and the challenges of meeting these. Ansell et al. (2021) note that the COVID-19 pandemic makes clear that turbulent problems require ‘robust governance strategies that facilitate and support adaptive and flexible adjustment’ with an entrepreneurial style of engagement. So what does this all mean for priority setting? We argue that priority setting still has a crucial role to play in resource allocation during turbulent times, and greater investment in priority setting processes that are flexible and agile and combine a variety of different values is required. What is clear is that unless and until priority setting is embedded into routine management and decision-making, it is unlikely to provide the answers to resource allocation in times of crisis (Baltussen et al., 2017; Kapiriri et al., 2022).

350  Research handbook on public management and COVID-19

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27. The future of public management as we emerge from the acute phase of COVID-19: key themes and future trajectories Sophie Yates, Janine O’Flynn, Helen Dickinson and Catherine Smith

The global pandemic reshaped the lives and futures of many around the world. It has also had a profound effect on public management – not just in relation to the practical challenges, triumphs, and failures, which have emerged so strongly through the chapters in this collection, but also in how it has challenged the field of public management. For some it has raised the issue of whether the questions our field has pursued matter, or whether our attention to them has obscured deeper problems that deserve our attention (O’Flynn, 2021). For certain, a global pandemic of this scale has acted as an accelerant for deeply entrenched challenges, but also amplified these in new ways. Across the chapters in this book, authors from around the world have explored a range of important topics and questions, bringing to the forefront critical public management issues. In our final chapter we draw on these contributions to focus on six cross-cutting themes that position us to think about the future of the field. Many more themes and issues are raised by the authors; however, we focus here on six themes that build on their findings and position us to think about the future of the field. First, we consider the challenges and implications of operating in a world where ‘business as usual’ is increasingly marked by volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity (VUCA). We then explore central trade-offs and tensions raised by governing during the pandemic, followed by what has been revealed about government capacity. Next, we consider what various chapters have raised about who is talking and who is listened to during the pandemic era, followed by a related theme about the worsening of entrenched disadvantage precipitated by COVID-19. Lastly, we explore notions of temporality and what has been revealed about our ability to plan for protracted or ‘creeping’ crises. As we noted in the introductory chapter, the COVID-19 pandemic offers an opportunity for the field of public management to reflect and re-orient. In our view it is an opportunity that should be grasped enthusiastically.

NAVIGATING A VUCA WORLD Central to public management is understanding the environmental dynamics within which action takes place. As Ansell et al. (2021) have argued, we will continue to be confronted with turbulent problems – ‘surprising, inconsistent, unpredictable and uncertain events’ (p. 949), that disrupt society and challenge government. Similarly, Barrett et al. (2021) describe a world increasingly subjected to viral uncertainty and ongoing crises. In this handbook, Van der Wal notes that COVID-19 created an operating environment best characterised as a VUCA world 354

The future of public management as we emerge from the acute phase of COVID-19  355 – one marked by volatility, uncertainty, complexity, and ambiguity. Indeed, in an increasingly interconnected world affected by climate change and profound technological shifts, it has been argued that public management as a field, and public managers in practice need to grapple more with the turbulent VUCA world we inhabit, rather than push it aside. Holding onto approaches that can solve simple problems and which give public managers an illusion of simplicity and control, often driven by rational legal rules is seen as increasingly futile (Lowe, 2021; Ansell et al., 2021; O’Flynn 2022). Across the contributions in this collection, notions of uncertainty, complexity, ambiguity, volatility, dynamism and turbulence are frequently present. Authors draw out insights on how to respond to such situations and provide guidance on how to plan for this reality. For example, Fenton-O’Creevy et al. analyse police responses to COVID-19 in the UK, and conclude that in planning for uncertainty, specific and detailed plans will not be fit for purpose. Instead, “the priority should be on modes of planning which support the capability to monitor and adapt rather than predict and plan” (p. 202). While value has been derived from planning for specific contingencies and exercising for specific hazards and threats, this has come mostly through building preparedness for the unexpected in a way that can be applied to a wide range of threats and hazards. Also focusing on pandemic policing in the UK, Davies draws on research participant accounts to model a ‘hypernetwork’ of human activity. In doing so, he demonstrates the interconnected human activities that are required to ‘get the job done’ beyond the functional descriptive priorities set within a contingency plan, arguing that contingency planning needs to consider the complex networks that can be created as part of the development of mitigation to critical scenarios. Current contingency planning methods in public sector management, he argues, do not take account of human participation in organisational systems. For Bromfield too, the implementation of plans needs adaption, not dogmatism. Importantly, adaption should ideally be informed by assessment of evidence from a variety of sources that also reflect co-production with the diversity of affected communities. Similarly, Williams et al. argue that the ‘rule-based proceduralism’ of traditional priority setting approaches does not work where much is unknown about the nature of the crisis: In conditions of turbulence and uncertainty, priority setting is best presented as a series of relatively simple rules that can be quickly applied and re-applied as more becomes known about the wider decision environment (p. 349).

Fenton-O’Creevy et al. argue that when plans are implemented, “sensitivity to operations” becomes important because no set of rules can foresee the complexities of messy working reality even during mundane tasks, let alone during the challenges of an unfamiliar situation (p. 198). This means paying attention not just to what should be happening, but what is happening operationally. It means scanning for weak signals that events may not be unfolding as expected, and implementing effective communications channels and practices that avoid blaming the messenger or disregarding information that is inconsistent with current assumptions. As Boin and ‘t Hart note, the latter is a constant tension in crisis situations – public managers may fall prey to motivated misperception consistent with the strategic-political playbook principle of minimising uncertainty. Deference to expertise regardless of hierarchy is an important part of the ‘collective mindfulness’ shown by high reliability organisations (Fenton-O’Creevy et al., p. 193).

356  Research handbook on public management and COVID-19 Making sound policy decisions is difficult in crisis conditions characterised by volatility, complexity, uncertainty and ambiguity. Large-scale crises are beyond the capacity of any single public agency, or even government, and therefore require the capacity to coordinate key actors, especially in complex intergovernmental settings. Evidence presented in this book shows that cross-boundary working can help alleviate the worst effects of uncertainty – for example, Bromfield’s comparative analysis of the US, UK and Australia points to the relative success achieved in jurisdictions that have “an institutional venue for crisis cooperation, coordination and collaboration” (p. 57). Ashworth and Farrell draw on OECD evidence showing that in countries such as Denmark and France, where governments established structures for inter-agency collaboration and decision-making, the outcomes were more positive. Conversely, Kapucu and Moynihan argue that in the context of Trump’s populist leadership, delayed coordination between US federal agencies and state and local governments on the distribution of medical resources, supply chain stabilisation, and vaccinations contributed to the failed response. Continued adherence to approaches that privilege stability and rationality takes us away from the complex reality of the world in which we now operate (and in which we have operated for some time). A key area for attention in the field of public management is developing approaches that account for the VUCA environments in which public managers operate and that help managers to operate effectively in them. Rather than trying to sideline this complexity in pursuit of rational, simple, rules-based approaches that offer one-size-fits-all solutions, we must develop the capacity for change, experimentation, and adaptation for an era where the mega-crisis looks set to dominate (McConnell and Stark, 2021). Systems thinking and systemic thinking (Covarrubias, 2021), collective intelligence and problem definition (Noveck, 2021), cross-boundary collaboration, public innovation and robust governance structures (Ansell et al., 2021) have all been pointed to as important in an increasingly turbulent, VUCA world.

TRADE-OFFS AND TENSIONS Trade-offs and tensions are central to public management theory and practice, and in an increasingly VUCA world these become more pointed. From exploring trade-offs between equity and efficiency (Fernández-Gutiérrez and Van de Walle, 2019) through to those regarding human life (Roberts et al., 2021), the notion of trade-offs and trying to calculate winners and losers permeates the field. The global pandemic brought this theme to the fore, with some of the biggest debates of the pandemic revolving around the trade-off of whether to “preserve lives or livelihoods”, as expressed by Thani in her chapter on Ubuntu philosophy and public management (p. 251). Bromfield also highlights this theme in his chapter, which discusses the “competing health versus economy frames” evident in the US, UK and Australia (p. 61). Although these frames were always contested to varying degrees depending on the political context, many countries initially prioritised the health frame due to the rapid spread of the disease, high severe illness and mortality rate, and paucity of information about the virus. In other words, the trade-offs had some temporal aspect to them. Lockdowns, border closures, school closures, mask mandates and density limits were implemented in many jurisdictions, and in some cases (such as parts of Australia) remained in force for long periods of time. These trade-offs, however, have been hard to calculate; it is difficult

The future of public management as we emerge from the acute phase of COVID-19  357 to know, for example, what the impact might have been without lockdowns in many nations (Lewis, 2022) or indeed what the long-term mental health impacts of these protections might be. It was clear, however, that as the pandemic wore on, these supposed trade-offs shifted and many measures became difficult to sustain. It was also the case that these measures were not borne equally across society. For example, people employed in the informal economy were less able to benefit from welfare measures aimed at compensating people for staying home, something that Thani and Dopazo et al. remind us occurs disproportionately in regions such as Africa and South America. As Boin and ‘t Hart explore in their discussion of differing crisis management playbooks, there was increasing tension between the ‘technical-managerial’ imperative of adherence to public health advice aimed at bringing down the number of people in intensive care, versus ‘political legitimacy’ concerns associated with eroding public support for coercive measures, and attention to longstanding political aims of safeguarding economic wellbeing, education, and the cultural sector. According to Bromfield, the creation and rollout of vaccines was the key factor that adequately resolved both uncertainty and ambiguity in this frame competition and prompted the transition out of the acute phase of the COVID-19 crisis in the US, UK and Australia. However, he notes that using vaccines to resolve the issues in this way also marginalised other non-pharmaceutical policy solutions that would augment vaccines – such as mask mandates and air purification, as explored by Williams in her chapter. The vaccine solution has created uneven policy impacts on marginalised groups – for example, those who are immunocompromised and are now limited in their ability to engage in many day-to-day activities in a safe manner, instead living in a sort of COVID-19 limbo (Yong, 2022). COVID-19 has taught us (again) that trade-offs are problematic, and that attempts to calculate them are fraught. Many attempts to do so hew towards a rationalist mindset, with a sense that we can clearly list them out and weigh them up against each other in some sort of idealised decision-making process. We need to be more comfortable in working with unsolvable tensions and across time. Perhaps one of the most powerful lessons for public management from the COVID-19 pandemic is that the world is a complex place, and we need to expand our field in ways that allow us to comprehend and cope with this in new ways. A more mature public management will somehow move beyond the more simplistic notion of trade-offs. Some recent developments in public management (and beyond) are pushing us more in that direction, embracing complexity, tensions, and ambiguity in different ways, but also rejecting some of the taken-for-granted foundations of the field. Work on human learning systems (Lowe, 2021), humble government (Annala et al., 2020), and the decolonising movement (Matsiliza, 2020), for instance, are all bringing new perspectives and challenging key ideas in the field. In other ways we are seeing a movement beyond trade-offs associated with negative impacts of the pandemic. There is even evidence for positive impacts of the global pandemic – air pollution drastically (but temporarily) reduced (Berman and Ebisu, 2020), fewer people were involved in car crashes, and there were fewer presentations for respiratory illnesses and reduced rates of sexually transmitted diseases (Nelson, 2020). In this collection, several authors raise positive impacts or opportunities that have arisen from operating outside of the ‘business as usual’ paradigm. The call for a positive public administration movement that emerged in earnest during the pandemic has focused on paying attention to successes and positive externalities in public management (Douglas et al., 2021). As Boin and ‘t Hart argue in this volume, “any crisis may harbour both threats and opportunities for governments, agencies and their leaders”

358  Research handbook on public management and COVID-19 (p. 22). The opportunities, positive outcomes, and promising beginnings outlined in this book include greater collaboration between agencies and even between sectors (chapters by Van der Wal, Bromfield, and Dopazo et al.); more citizen co-production (although this often occurred in the context of government failure) (Steen et al. and Durose et al.); greater use of robotic technologies (Dickinson and Smith); and public service managers embracing greater flexibility in working arrangements (Williamson and Colley). For marginalised groups, opportunities included moves toward gender mainstreaming in the Argentinean pandemic response (Dopazo et al.); greater citizen inclusion via online participation (Ashworth and Farrell); increased social welfare spending that lifted some people out of poverty for the first time (Ashworth and Farrell); and positive outcomes for Australian Indigenous communities enabled by strengths-based approaches (Althaus et al.). A critical question for the field of public management is how can these positive or promising outcomes be sustained beyond the acute crisis phase? Indeed, some improvements – for example increased social welfare payments – have already long since been rolled back, but the imperative of the crisis showed that it was possible and that these measures can be both politically and practically feasible given the right circumstances.

GOVERNMENT CAPACITY It has been argued that “crises reveal government capacity” (Moynihan, 2020, 21), and certainly an ongoing global pandemic has done so in extraordinary ways. Government capacity often rests on a “cadre of experts who are thinking about low-visibility problems when few others are” (Kelman, 2020) and it is true that the success of government can often be hidden (see Lewis, 2018; Lipton and Steinhauer, 2020). For example, “public health is an enterprise with an intrinsic problem: people can’t see sicknesses avoided or deaths averted” (Achenbach et al., 2020). Whilst notions of governance capacity may be ambiguous (Christensen et al., 2016), debates about it have been ongoing, and often tied to the long-running effects of the so-called New Public Management reforms. Some have argued that an over-reliance on external parties and protracted austerity measures over time have seriously impacted governmental capacity (O’Flynn, 2021). The long-run effects of some of the underinvestment or hollowing out of state capacity are perhaps not known until the capacity is called upon. As Mazzucato and Quaggiotto (2020) have argued, “effective government, as it turns out, cannot be conjured up at will, because it requires investment in state capacity”. A key lesson from the global pandemic for public management will be how to ensure that government capacity is nurtured across time to ensure that when it is needed, it can be called upon. As governments the world over sought to respond to the initial stages of the crisis, we saw evidence of the mixed capacity to do so, made worse by the fact that there had been warnings for many years that such a crisis was inevitable (O’Flynn, 2021). At worst, these warnings were ignored (The Economist, 2020), almost guaranteeing that government would not have the capacity to respond to a crisis of the scale and scope of the COVID-19 pandemic. Contributors have stressed the importance of government capacity for how well jurisdictions have weathered the pandemic (e.g. Van der Wal). In addition, authors have raised the question of how to maintain pressure and attention on key resourcing, capacity and trust issues that have been revealed by the pandemic, as the agenda moves on from acute crisis management. As Hannah et al. reflect:

The future of public management as we emerge from the acute phase of COVID-19  359 There will be significant pressure to wind down programs, reallocate resources, and press pause on potential avenues for learning. Ironically, this temptation may be most difficult to resist in countries which have done enough to satisfice the various public demands faced during the crisis period. However, doing so risks ignoring key inequalities and trust deficits that have been made visible during the COVID-19 period (p. 214).

As many authors point out, most of the public management issues raised by the pandemic are not new: they existed in one form or another for as long as public management itself. In the introduction to this handbook, we argued that the advent of New Public Management has coincided with a hollowing out of the state, and concerns regarding the capacity of government to effectively manage public services. For example, an accountability gap arose in many countries as they rushed to procure medical equipment and PPE, implement stimulus programs (for example, in infrastructure), and police stringent lockdown measures (Bice, Ashworth and Farrell, Allen). But we have long known that crises put incredible pressure on accountability regimes and relationships in various ways (Christensen et al., 2016). As Allen argues, COVID-19 has accelerated what was already happening with respect to accountability issues with procurement. It drove home the known issues: that procurement is highly vulnerable to corruption, that innovation can emerge from urgency, but also that international mechanisms for procurement of health products such as vaccines have demonstrable weaknesses. Yates and Dickinson outline policy capacity weaknesses in Australia’s support for people with disability during the pandemic, and yet research has long shown that people with disability are left out of emergency planning, resulting in their needs going unmet (Yates and Dickinson, 2021). Hannah et al. contend that the capacity challenges discussed in their chapter are likely to be more acute when a crisis emerges following a longer period of government neglect or ignorance. While much can be done at a program level to improve access and outreach, addressing deeper capacity and trust deficits will require ongoing political prioritisation. It is imperative that governments share their learnings from the acute COVID-19 period, rather than let yet another crisis come and go without reforms specifically aimed at improving the response to the next major crisis. For example, as Ashworth and Farrell argue, “there is an urgent need for ministers worldwide to develop protocols that enable them to engage in real-time and appropriate procurement procedures” (p. 158). What the COVID-19 pandemic has shown starkly is that government capacity matters. Webs of complex relationships need to be activated, not just in the initial crisis phase, but across the phases of the pandemic. Yet these rely on continual investment to operate effectively; they cannot be conjured at will. An over-reliance on other actors to do the core work of government has placed many governments at risk of being unable to act. A renewed focus on government capacity is needed – this is an area which has not had the attention it deserves in the past (Christensen et al., 2016).

WHO IS TALKING AND WHO IS LISTENED TO? In various ways, public management has asked the questions of who is talking and who is listened to. The field pays considerable attention to themes such as community engagement, co-production, co-design, and the importance of expertise. During the global pandemic these questions of who talks and who listens have been central. In the earlier, ‘health frame’ dominated stages of the pandemic, public health experts such as epidemiologists and virol-

360  Research handbook on public management and COVID-19 ogists were heavily relied upon to guide policy responses in many places. COVID-19 press conferences became daily events, and millions of people tuned in to see public health experts share the stage on equal footing with politicians. Some became celebrities and even household names in their own right, with (for example) Victorian Chief Health Officer Dr Brett Sutton appearing on mugs and tea towels in Australia, and cult Canadian shoe brand Fluevog releasing a style named after British Columbia’s Chief Provincial Health Officer Dr Bonnie Henry. However, Boin and ‘t Hart note that as time went on the “halo of experts” was undermined by the virus regularly outpacing their diagnostic capacity and predictions (p. 25). Meanwhile, concerns about the social, economic and psychological ramifications of social distancing, lockdowns and curfews mounted. In many nations resistance movements emerged (van der Zwet et al., 2022) and protests erupted which placed pressure on political actors (Dyer, 2022).1 The addition of economic, behavioural and social science experts created a more pluralistic and contentious sense-making process, and it also robbed politicians of a handy trope that “we follow the advice of our [public health experts]” (Boin and ‘t Hart, p. 25), through which they had previously been able to side-step responsibility for some difficult decisions. Van der Wal notes the strategic stakeholder management skills required under these circumstances, including the ability to engage supportive and adversarial stakeholders and the ability to harness and optimise the potential of collaborative networks. Winning over stakeholders can produce significant long-term gains in terms of legitimacy and support (Van der Wal), helping with Boin and ‘t Hart’s ‘strategic-political’ playbook. He also advises public managers to maintain a nodal position in collecting competing streams of advice targeting political masters, as providing credible and usable information in a timely manner allows for a more critical stance when needed. Similarly, Fenton-O’Creevy et al. recommend the capability of ‘conceptual slack’ – the availability of a sufficient diversity of perspective, and openness to different perspectives – to help organisations (particularly hierarchical ones) avoid “becoming stuck in an oversimplified single story” (p. 198). Unfortunately, hierarchical command-and-control situations such as those implemented during crises often work to reduce conceptual slack and “encourage too rapid simplification and convergence to a single story” (p. 198). Conceptual slack, Fenton-Creevy et al. argue, can be bolstered by use of lateral networks in a command-and-control structure. Other chapters show the successes that can be achieved when paying attention to perspectives from historically marginalised groups in the community – see for example Althaus et al. on strengths-based thinking and self-determination in the Australian Indigenous COVID response. Similar results were achieved by Māori communities in Aotearoa New Zealand during the early months of the pandemic (McMeeking and Savage, 2020). Still others underline the need for public management to broaden its perspective beyond dominant voices. O’Flynn (2022) has argued for a broader set of perspectives to be recognised in the field, and that our view of public management is hampered by the power of the few who have defined it (O’Flynn, 2021). Such concerns are echoed in this collection and there is a call for a more inclusive approach – for example, Moloney’s exhortation for us to look to the example of small island states, and Matthews and Edmiston’s ‘queer(y)-ing’ of public management and the COVID-19 response. In her chapter, Thani suggests that the key principles of Ubuntu philosophy link neatly to big ideas in public management such as community engagement, justice, fairness, compassion, empathy, collaboration, and care. Elements of Ubuntu can be infused into public administration and management training and development to ensure that

The future of public management as we emerge from the acute phase of COVID-19  361 future public managers possess these attributes. In her exploration of death management and ‘last responders’, Zavattaro argues that scholars of public administration should note that there is a world of public service knowledge going untapped … It can be valuable to ask people whose job might seem weird or strange or invisible how and why they do what they do. Sharing their stories is a way to get at tacit knowledge that can aid other public servants and scholars in their journeys (p. 283).

Citizen Participation, Co-production and Co-creation One way that public management certainly broadened its reach during the pandemic relates to citizen participation and co-production. As several authors note, COVID-19 threw into sharp relief the reliance of the state on citizen participation during crises (Steen et al., Durose et al.). At its most basic level, co-production can be described as the contribution of citizens to the design, delivery, or evaluation of public services (Steiner et al., 2023). While the definition of co-production remains controversial (particularly whether participation must be voluntary), certain conceptions encompass compliance with public health measures to reduce the spread of disease. How assiduously citizens complied with these measures was certainly crucial to government response efforts in the first 18 months of the pandemic, as noted by Steen et al. – it was not possible to punitively police all aspects of public health compliance, so governments were forced to rely on essentially voluntary co-production. It is important to note, however, the considerable penalties that many governments introduced for failure to comply with COVID-19 mitigation measures. When vaccines were introduced, co-production remained a vital part of the story, as explored by Osborne et al. in their chapter on public service logic and mass vaccination. As discussed earlier, community participation was necessary to co-create culturally appropriate health responses in some communities. But beyond health and medical interventions, co-production and co-creation were also necessary to augment and sometimes replace government services in areas such as social welfare and education. Schools were forced to rely on parents to supervise and sometimes even deliver lessons, and communities across the globe came together to financially, materially and socially support each other in isolation. Yates and Dickinson note that people with disability, who in the parlance of Durose et al.’s citizen participation chapter can be seen as ‘abandoned citizens’, organised to support each other with information, practical strategies and mutual aid. However, such an extensive effort to build ‘networks of care’ was only necessary because governments had failed to provide people with disability the information and assistance they needed to weather the pandemic. When Steen et al. reflect on which co-production initiatives might survive the pandemic, they emphasise that sustained co-production relies on complementarity – in other words the contribution of professionals and citizen co-producers should be complementary rather than merely substitutive. An example is where citizens provide on-the-ground knowledge that public servants cannot easily access. In addition, the provision of a supportive regulatory framework and the structural allocation of funds can turn co-productive innovations into routine business. Lastly, sustainment requires a sense of urgency – which was sharp at first, but has since dwindled for many citizens. Steen et al. suggest that governments can work to communicate the benefits of both top-down initiated co-production projects and support bottom-up ‘small wins’ initiatives in addressing the long-term effects of the crisis. The longer the pandemic lasts, the more complicated it will get to sustain citizens’ co-production.

362  Research handbook on public management and COVID-19 A striking example of this reliance on citizen participation, and one that revealed a public management blind spot, was mass vaccination. Taken together, chapters in this handbook argue that there has been an over-reliance on the technical, practical and administrative components of vaccine rollout without a corresponding focus on understanding the needs and characteristics of the population to facilitate maximum uptake. Osborne et al. provide a public service logic perspective on vaccination programs. They argue that governments tend to ignore the fact that effective vaccination implementation is ultimately determined by the trust, acceptance and cooperation of citizens and service users. Therefore, a focus on logistical supply of vaccines should be supplemented by research on their use and uptake. In addition, the fixation with the operational speed and efficiency of vaccine logistical deployment should be supplemented by a focus upon the external value-creation impacts. The role of individual citizens is essential: they uptake vaccines as users, and act as the final arbiter of value-creation results. Therefore, their hesitancy and refusal need to be taken seriously. Hannah et al. also explore the need for a focus on underserved groups, noting that administrative capacity for the vaccine rollout needs to include the mobilisation of data and resources to understand unvaccinated citizens and design effective interventions to drive uptake. While Australia’s initial vaccination efforts were overall successful, the gathering of data to determine which groups are falling behind and why has been intermittent and patchy. In addition, the ‘hesitancy’ paradigm often applied to non-vaccination inappropriately individualises the problem. As Yates and Dickinson note, people with disability faced many challenges in organising safe and accessible vaccination experiences. Hannah et al. discuss the capacity of the state to negotiate conflicting demands of citizens, the difficulty of which can lead to governments implementing mandates rather than undertaking “the work of outreach and persuasion to unvaccinated populations” (p. 213). Mandates can change behaviour without necessarily changing minds. However, the authors raise the risk that people who vaccinate as a result of coercion may be further alienated from public services, and perhaps radicalised into fringe political movements, which can also be the case for people who are punished or marginalised for not vaccinating (Dickinson et al., 2023). Steen et al. provide examples of citizens stepping in to fill gaps in government provision and persuasion – for example by translating vaccination information into minority languages and ensuring information reaches places that government cannot. However, such co-production should be well supported, well planned, and complement rather than replace government efforts.

ENTRENCHED DISADVANTAGE Public management as a field has tended to marginalise issues of entrenched disadvantage. Many scholars have focused on justice, inequality, and entrenched disadvantage, and social equity has been acknowledged as an important part of public administration for over 50 years (Stokan et al., 2022); however, these have not been seen as the ‘big questions’ of the field (Blessett et al., 2019; O’Flynn, 2021). In recent years we have seen passionate calls for social equity to be a foundational anchor for public administration and management (Blessett et al., 2019). A global pandemic which has killed millions of people and placed the achievement of the Social Development Goals in extreme peril (United Nations, 2023) has clearly served to accelerate and amplify disadvantage in many ways. The long-run impacts of this remain

The future of public management as we emerge from the acute phase of COVID-19  363 unknown, but the United Nations has sounded the alarm about the reversal of the Sustainable Development Goals, and the combined impact of the global pandemic, the war in Ukraine, and climate catastrophe being borne by the world’s poorest in setting out its rescue plan for people and the planet (United Nations, 2023). Crucially, the UN (2023, p. 9) emphasises that the impact of the global pandemic has been unequally shared: The lack of SDG progress is universal, but it is abundantly clear that developing countries and the world’s poorest and most vulnerable people are bearing the brunt of our collective failure. This is a direct result of global injustices that go back hundreds of years but are still playing out today.

In the early stages of the pandemic, O’Flynn (2021, p. 969) argued that: The COVID-19 pandemic has acted as an accelerant for many entrenched issues across the world, highlighting injustice, systemic inequality and entrenched disadvantage. Global evidence shows that a growing sense of unfairness negatively impacts on trust in institutions; recent data also shows that people believe that those with less are bearing more of a burden of suffering, illness, and sacrifice during the pandemic … . These perceptions are playing out in real time, with the poorest and most vulnerable bearing the biggest burdens of the COVID-19 crisis. Those least able to cope and already in dire circumstances are suffering.

A key theme running through many chapters in this handbook relates to how entrenched disadvantage has been highlighted and exacerbated through the pandemic period. In their ‘queer(y)-ing’ of the COVID-19 response, Matthews and Edmiston note that “public policy and public management routinely appeals to the circumstances, needs and preferences of the majority in designing services and distributing resources”. Extensive evidence in this handbook reveals stark deficiencies in the ability of governments worldwide to support marginalised groups in crisis situations. Durose et al. draw on Clarke’s conception of citizenship to explore the notion of ‘abandoned’ citizens – those who have been marginalized by neoliberal economic policies. While many countries initially implemented radical extensions to welfare protections, these were time-limited and far from comprehensive. Abandonment differed in demographic and spatial terms, with various groups experiencing differential public management engagement and support during the pandemic. For example, there were significant effects on communities in low and middle-income countries dependent on international and national tourism, and those without formal citizenship. For Durose et al., this points to how pre-existing structural inequalities have shaped the impacts on the pandemic on different groups and their construction (or dismissal) as citizens. Chapters in this handbook have also explored the experiences of people with disability in Australia (Yates and Dickinson), food insecurity in Argentina (Pérez Martín), poverty in African countries (Thani), racial disparities in COVID-19 health outcomes (Durose et al.), and inequities in the vaccine rollout (Williams et al., Steen et al., Hannah et al.). While Dopazo et al. explore promising moves toward gender mainstreaming in Argentina and explain how the pandemic revealed the activities of women in their care work to be the support of society, their chapter underlines the feminisation of poverty in Latin America, where economic inequalities persist in order to maintain a society at the cost of the exclusion and repression of women. However, groups outside the mainstream may have valuable insights to offer in crisis situations. For example, Matthews and Edmiston (p. 307) argue that an opportunity was missed to draw on the experiences of the HIV/AIDS epidemic when designing the COVID-19 response:

364  Research handbook on public management and COVID-19 When imposing measures such as lockdowns or mask mandates, many states relied upon social shame and stigma … . If you did not follow the measures, you were letting down wider society and putting others at risk by your selfishness. Ergo, if you were infected with COVID it was your fault for not following the public health guidance. Decades of campaigning and research on HIV/AIDS, led by the LGBT+ community, highlighted how the use of shame and stigma in such a way was self-defeating. It led to people avoiding getting tested and not changing their behaviour when required to do so. Normalising testing and treatment is recognised as the most effective way to control the spread of disease.

This example highlights how marginalised communities have strengths to offer in times of crisis, as well as being in need of tailored services and interventions. Issues of entrenched disadvantage and inequality cut across the chapters in various ways, highlighting the impact of the global pandemic on these areas. These feed into a growing movement in the field of public administration and management toward centring these issues (McCandless et al., 2022). As Blessett et al. (2019, 296–297) so powerfully argued prior to the onset of the pandemic: in light of the current state of affairs across the globe, those who constitute the field – both practitioners and scholars – must engage in intentional, active, and ethical efforts to serve and safeguard all people, especially the most vulnerable in our society. No longer can we engage in functional activities that do harm, nor can we passively stand on the sidelines. This is a defining moment that will reveal what we value.

TEMPORALITY The issue of time is central to how we understand several of the themes set out above, however the field of public management has not tended to focus much attention to the notion of time. A major exception to this is the work of Pollitt (2008), whose book, Time, Policy, Management, explored in detail temporal aspects of public management, making the case that we need to account more for time, including the past. A major reason for the sidelining of time, he argued, has been the adoption of rational choice and managerial perspectives that have helped spur an ahistorical and decontextualizing trend in public management. A decade and a half later, it is fair to say that time still sits at the margins of public management. An important lesson from the COVID-19 pandemic for the field of public management is that time matters. The protracted nature of the crisis has impacted the themes discussed above, shifting our evaluation of policy initiatives and the actions of political actors and public managers in different ways. This is an effect that Ugyel and O’Flynn (2017) noted in their assessment of public sector reform, which provided evidence that perceptions of those evaluating reforms change significantly over time. Similarly, we expect to see that perceptions and assessments of actions during a protracted mega-crisis will shift around in a more dynamic way. The tendency for temporal shifts in perceptions has also been exacerbated by the way in which the global pandemic has warped both individual and collective notions of time, with evidence demonstrating that is has disrupted our temporal viewpoints (Grondin et al., 2020; Noguchi, 2022). Time, it turns out, is much more than just the distance between t1 and t2 (Pollitt, 2008), and is an important factor to consider in thinking about the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on public management.

The future of public management as we emerge from the acute phase of COVID-19  365 Building on the five themes above, it is clear that the protracted nature of the global pandemic – which is still occurring in mid-2023 more than three years after the WHO first declared a global pandemic and will almost certainly continue at the time of publication and beyond – has presented additional complications for public management. Across the contributions to this collection, authors draw out the importance of time in different ways. In their chapter, Boin and ‘t Hart advocate for public management scholars to study the specific political-administrative challenges that are generated by what can be termed ‘creeping crises’, which emerge slowly yet in full view. The COVID-19 pandemic is a classic case, with experts advising for many years that a pandemic of this type was imminent. As late as September 2019, the Global Preparedness Monitoring Board warned that the world was at risk of a global pandemic that would wreak havoc, kill millions of people, and damage economies (Leoni et al., 2021). These kinds of crises pitch Boin and ‘t Hart’s two crisis management playbooks – technical-managerial and strategic-political – against each other from the start. For example, employing a technical-managerial perspective, it is always clear when to intervene (e.g. when the threat reaches a certain threshold). From a strategic-political perspective, the definition of crisis is a political act. COVID-19 has demonstrated that public managers do not have a foundational perspective to negotiate the incubation phase of crises. To understand how public managers can negotiate this tension, Boin and ‘t Hart suggest bringing together research findings from the risk management field, political science (framing and attention), crisis management (detection), and ethics (the prevalence of precautionary principles). Second, we need to think about how public managers can prepare for protracted acute crises. Most countries have political-administrative crisis arrangements in place, but these are predicated on the assumption that crises are short-lived events. Little thought has gone into the maintenance of formal crisis arrangements for longer periods of time. For example, Fenton O’Creevy et al. explore the limits of the strategic management approach in policing – where gold commanders have strategic oversight, silver set operational/tactical objectives and bronze lead operations on the ground – over a long time period. The resilience of police leadership under this model came under question. Consequently, “processes need adaptation in the face of crises of extended duration to support the wellbeing of those in command roles and attention should be given to defining boundaries of command responsibility where those crises are of extended scope” (p. 197). A clear lesson of the pandemic is that tacit assumptions about bounded scope and duration should be re-examined, and scholars and practitioners should think ahead about the processes needed to evolve from short-term to long-term crisis management.

CONCLUDING REMARKS Developing a handbook of what the COVID-19 pandemic means for public management in real time has been a challenging endeavour, but one worth pursuing. As mentioned in the introduction to the collection, this endeavour has suffered from all of the broader trends operating around us – fatigue, change, shifting temporal perspectives, and introspection. Many authors were, understandably, unable to produce chapters; shifting contexts mean that we asked a lot of authors to adapt and incorporate new information where they could. In the end, we have drawn together a set of chapters that give us great insight into how COVID-19 has impacted, and may in future impact, the field of public management.

366  Research handbook on public management and COVID-19 In structuring our conclusion around these six cross-cutting themes we have sought to stake out some big issues that we believe demand attention across the public management field. These are not exhaustive, but rather important signals for the future. We sought out scholars from across the world so that we could understand the impact of the pandemic from the broadest range of perspectives, insights that allow us all to understand public management in new ways. This in and of itself is critical to the future of public management, which has tended to be dominated by voices from a narrow set of places. A more multicultural public management, which includes and respects a broader set of voices, traditions, and expertise and reflects on its history, is an important part of the future of the field (Dreschler, 2019; Haque, 2019; Erasmus, 2020; O’Flynn, 2022). If there is one lesson that we must take from this collective experience, it is that public management matters. Across the world, people looked to government to protect them, sustain them, and be out in front of an uncertain and existential threat. This experience also forces us to look beyond our focus on questions of ‘doing’ and look much more toward the consequences and value for the society in which our field is embedded (Kirlin, 2001, p. 140). Writing over two decades ago, Kirlin made the case that the big questions that occupied us should be less about instrumental issues, and more about “understanding the role of public administration in influencing society historically and understanding its use to shape society in the future” (Kirlin, 2001, p. 140).

NOTE 1.

For a worldwide view see the Global Protest Tracker which can be filtered to show COVID-related protest activity: https://​carnegieendowment​.org/​publications/​interactive/​protest​-tracker​#

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Index

abandoned citizens 105–8 Aboriginal communities 162–73, 347 see also Indigenous populations Aboriginal Community Controlled Health Services 165–7, 169, 172 accountability 21–3, 28, 43, 60, 78, 86, 119, 133, 138–9, 150–58, 162, 169, 197, 200, 203, 247, 249–50, 252, 293, 341, 344, 346–7, 359 activated citizens 101–2, 107–8 administrative capacity 32–3 African Sex Workers Alliance 103 Agbedahin, K. 250 Ahn, P. D. 153 Akinola, A. O. 244 Albanese, A. 78, 81 Algeria 252 Aliye, A. A. 244, 252 Allemandi, L. 221 Allen, B. 359 Allenby, B. 194 Althaus, C. 360 ambiguity 57–68 Andersen, D. 107 Andreaus, M. 153 Andrews, D. 73 Angola 252 Ansell, C. 6–8, 151, 349, 354 Aotearoa New Zealand 6, 10, 32, 88–94, 103, 151, 230, 290, 360 Argentina 218–26, 325–36, 358, 363 Arko-Achemfuor, A. 244 Arnstein, S. R. 107 artificial intelligence 117, 291–2 Asamoah, K. 245, 252 Asghari, F. 344 Ashworth, R. 356, 359 AstraZeneca 3, 65–6, 106 Atkin, R. 188 austerity 62–4, 308, 358 Australia 2, 5–6, 9–10, 32, 57, 60–62, 64–5, 67–8, 72–81, 103, 257, 260–61, 267, 302, 344, 356–7, 360 Black Summer 5, 64–5 disabled citizens 312–21, 359, 363 Indigenous populations 5, 9–10, 65, 105, 162–73, 347, 358, 360 infrastructure 228–30, 233–8 politics of “letting it rip” 72–81

public procurement and spending 89, 92–4 public sector employees 137–47 robots and automation technology 290–91 vaccination 5, 9, 65–6, 73, 76, 92, 105, 128, 165–6, 168, 170, 172, 207–14, 317–20, 347, 362 Australian Immunisation Register 209 Australian Medical Association 75 Australian Public Service Commission 142–3 Austria 128 Bahamas 259, 261, 263 Bailey, N. 184–5 Bangladesh 229 Barbados 259, 261 Barrett, K. 354 Belt and Road Initiative 229, 233 Berejiklian, G. 73 Biden, J. 44, 48, 51, 92 Birks, M. 178 Birx, D. 48, 53 Black Lives Matter 103, 181, 185 Black Summer 5, 64–5 blame avoidance 49–50, 61, 203, 208, 211, 342 blame culture 61, 197 Blessett, B. 364 Blom, A. 155 Boin, A. 192, 355, 357, 360, 365 Bolsonaro, J. 49 Bolton, J. 47 Boone, M. 177 border closures 2, 5, 35, 72–4, 78, 172, 235, 264–6, 356 Borenstein, J. 290 Botswana 250, 252 Boughey, J. 153–4 Bovaird, T. 150–51, 221 branding 35 Brandsen, T. 108 Brazil 49, 103 Brenton, S. 207–8, 318 Brexit 62–3, 67, 196, 202 Briggs, C. 80 Bromfield, N. 355–7 bushfires 5, 64–5, 230 Byrne, D. 178 Callaghan, G. 178

369

370  Research handbook on public management and COVID-19 Cameroon 251 Canada 89, 155, 302, 305 Candel, J. J. L. 222 Caribbean island states 257–67 Carroll, E. 275 Casey, E. 156 Centers for Disease Control and Prevention 47–8, 50 Chad 252 Charles, M. 113 Chigangaidze, R. K. 247 Chile 211 China 2, 23–4, 45, 47, 49, 51, 61, 92, 107, 126, 132–3, 156, 183–4, 229, 233, 301, 230 Cinar, E. 130 citizen participation 99–109, 126–34, 361–2 citizenship 99–109, 152, 222, 304, 363 Clarke, J. 99, 101, 107 climate change 13, 39, 87, 90, 230–31, 257–8, 264–5, 355 Coalition for Epidemic Preparedness and Innovation 91 collaboration 27–8, 32–3, 37–9, 43, 45, 50–51, 60, 325–36 Colombia 229 communication 33–5, 38, 43, 48–50, 65, 170 Community and Public Sector Union 140 complexity theory 176–90 Compulsory Competitive Tendering 87 conspiracism 49, 51, 53, 118, 211 contact tracing 5, 73, 78, 105, 133, 151, 153, 167, 172, 186, 306 coordination 27–8, 43, 45, 50–51, 59–60, 63, 65, 68 co-production 99–109, 126–34, 361–2 Cornell, S. 164, 172 Coronavirus Job Retention Scheme 304, 306 corruption 11, 44, 49, 89–90, 94, 152, 207, 243, 249–50, 252–3, 359 cost of living crisis 158 COVAX 91–2 COVID-19 pandemic 1–4 in individual countries see individual countries making sense of 23–6 pandemic fatigue 3, 6, 10, 80, 132, 238 policing 154, 176–90, 192–203, 263, 266, 355 and public management see crisis management; public management COVID-19 testing 5, 51, 78, 81, 105, 151, 153, 186, 342 PCR tests 2, 74, 80, 167, 314 point of care testing 167–8 rapid antigen tests 3–4, 74, 80, 171

COVID-19 Vaccine Global Access 91–2 COVID-19 vaccines 3, 5, 9, 26–7, 37, 60, 65–6, 91–2, 94, 105–6, 112, 117–23, 127–8, 130–31, 151, 244, 266, 339, 343, 357, 361–3 allocation frameworks 345–8 AstraZeneca 3, 65–6, 106 in Australia 5, 9, 65–6, 73, 76, 92, 105, 128, 165–6, 168, 170, 172, 207–14, 317–20, 347, 362 and disabled citizens 317–20 hesitancy 26, 105, 117–18, 120–21, 128, 166, 206–8, 210–11, 319–20 management of rollouts 206–14, 345–8 mandates 26–7, 212–13, 362 Moderna 3 Pfizer 3, 65 service lens on 112, 117–23 Sputnik V 3 take-up 3, 51–2, 66, 105–6, 108, 131 in the UK 3, 65–6, 106, 119–20, 346–7 in the US 50–52, 65–6, 92, 106, 213–14, 320, 356 COVID-19 variants 3 Delta 3–4, 73, 76 Gamma 3 Omicron 3, 26, 72–7, 117, 314 Crane, S. 179–82, 188 creeping crises 28 crisis management 1, 7 infrastructure 92–3, 228–39 key competencies 34–9 parallel crisis playbooks 19–28 and populism 43–53 priority setting 339–49 Ubuntu philosophy 243–54 uncertainty and ambiguity 57–68 Cucciniello, M. 120 cultural safety 170–71 Cummings, D. 62 Cyclone Harold 265–6 Darwin, C. 76 Davies, P. 355 death management 274–83, 361 decision-making 23–4, 26, 43, 45, 47–8, 61, 150, 152–4, 157, 192, 200, 245 Defoe, D. 134 Deloitte 287 Delphy, C. 328 Delta variant 3–4, 73, 76 Demirag, I. 153 Democratic Republic of Congo 252 Denemark, D. 208 Denmark 32, 131, 157, 356

Index  371 Dickinson, H. 291, 320, 359, 361–2 digital exclusion 106, 156 digital technology 116–17, 132–3, 155, 224, 235, 244, 264 artificial intelligence 117, 291–2 robots and automation technology 286–94 dignity 13, 19, 246, 249, 253, 344 disability 3–4, 6, 61, 77, 105–6, 155–6, 169, 172, 312–21, 336, 344, 359, 363 divisiveness 49 domestic abuse 302 Dominica 259–62 Dopazo, N. 357 Dorasamy, N. 252 drones 288–9 Durose, C. 363 Ebola 2, 118 Economic Commission for Latin America and the Caribbean 326 Edmiston, D. 360, 363–4 education 4, 26, 130–31, 134, 263, 313, 316, 326, 356, 361 Egypt 2 Elawad, E. 251 Emanuel, E. J. 348 emotional intelligence 276, 280–82 empowered citizenship 102–4, 107–8 Eppel, E. 178 Ethiopia 251 European Commission 90–91 European Union 38, 62, 88 Brexit 62–3, 67, 196, 202 Eurozone crisis 27 experts 25, 47–8, 64, 359–60 Fagbadebo, O. 252 family violence 4, 302 FAO 218, 225 Farrell, C. M. 156, 356, 359 Fauci, A. 34, 48, 53 feminism 325–8, 331, 335 Fenton-O’Creevy, M. 201, 355, 360, 365 Ferguson, N. 306 Fforde, C. 172 Fiji 259–64 Fink, J. 194 Fisher, J. 106 flattening the curve 26, 45 flexible working 4, 145–6, 156, 185 see also working from home Food and Drug Administration 50–51 food security 218–26, 326, 363 Ford 91

framing 35, 50, 61, 66, 105, 107, 210–11, 213, 365 France 103, 155, 157, 356 Free-Trade Agreements 88 Gamma variant 3 GAVI 91 gender 100–101, 107, 151, 266, 325–36, 343, 363 gender mainstreaming 325–36 Germany 155 Ghana 121 Gibbs, E. 314, 321 Giest, S. N. 292 gig economy 8 Gioia, D. A. 275 Glaser, B. G. 178 global financial crisis 7, 218, 231, 264 Global Health Security Index 260 globalization 31, 35, 88, 220, 231 Goss, K. 45 Gramsci, A. 79, 81 Great Resignation 4 Greer, S. L. 151 Grenada 259, 261, 263 Grewal, D. 280–81 Grounded Theory 178–9, 188–9 Guterres, A. 2 Gutwein, P. 73 Guy, M. E. 281–3 Hancock, M. 300 Hannah, A. 358–9 Hanson Robotics 290 Harman, S. 100 Hartley, J. 36 Hawthorne, C. 101 Henry, B. 360 herd immunity 52, 73, 79, 117, 122 Hibbs, L. 155 high reliability organisations 192–3, 198, 200–201, 203 Hill, P. L. 320 HIV/AIDS 307, 363–4 HMICFRS 180, 182 homelessness 105, 107, 169, 184, 301–2 Howard, A. 290 human resource management 137, 139–40, 145–7, 185–6, 199, 201 hypernetworks 178–9, 182–3, 185, 187–8, 190 Idoniboye-Obu, S. 243 India 3, 92, 105, 229 Indian Alliance of Sex Workers 103 Indigenous populations 5, 9–10, 65, 105, 162–73, 327, 347, 358, 360

372  Research handbook on public management and COVID-19 Indonesia 229 inflation 218–23, 225, 230, 251–2 influenza 4, 49, 165, 167 infrastructure 92–3, 228–39 Iran 23, 344 Ireland 155 isolation requirements 74, 78, 81, 102, 152–3, 167, 184, 246, 301, 317 see also quarantine Italy 2, 5–6, 23, 153, 301 Ivory Coast 252

lockdowns 2–3, 5–6, 34, 44, 51, 63, 72–3, 75, 104–6, 134, 139, 143–4, 147, 152, 171, 181–2, 184, 195, 228, 235, 246–8, 250–51, 253, 266–7, 290, 300–304, 306–7, 313, 356–7, 359–60 Lodge, M. 192 Löffler, E. 221 long COVID 3, 24, 72, 80 Lowe, J. 275 Lusch, R. 113 Lynn Jr, L. E. 150–52

Jabber 142 Jackson, P. M. 220 Japan 23, 89, 229 Jaspers, S. 129–30, 132–3 Johnson, B. 62–3, 67 Johnson, J. 178, 187 Julliet, L. 152

Mabovula, N. N. 247 MacQueen, K. M. 246 Malawi 252 Malaysia 275 Manski, C. F. 63, 68 Mantzaris, E. 250 Marshall, S. 73 Marshall Islands 259, 261–2 Marston, C. 99 Martin, D. K. 341 mask-wearing 2, 4–5, 26, 44, 48, 52–3, 74, 78, 105, 132, 152, 246, 250, 263, 317, 342, 356 mass fatality incidents 274–5 Mastracci, S. 275 Matshabaphala, D. J. 253–4 Matthews, P. 360, 363–4 May, T. 62 Mazzucato, M. 358 McGowan, M. 73, 211 McNamara, K. A. 156 Meijer, A. 152, 154 mental health 4, 116, 172, 263, 265, 275–8, 293, 303, 308, 357 Messenger 142 Miao, Q. 133 Micaela Law 331 Micronesia 259, 261–2 Middle East respiratory syndrome 2 Mills, J. 178 Mitleton-Kelly, E. 178 Mnyaka, M. 244 modern slavery 94 Moderna 3 Moloney, K. 360 Moon, M. J. 152 Moore, M. H. 341 Moore, S. E. 300 Morçöl, G. 178 Morrison, S. 64–5, 72–9, 81, 211 Moser, C. 152 Motlhabi, M. 244 Moynihan, D. P. 213, 356

Kapiriri, L. 341 Kapucu, N. 356 Kavanagh, A. 319 Kayuni, H. 248 Kelly, P. 77 Kenya 106, 252 Kessa, R. 90 Keynesianism 72, 74 Kiribati 259, 261–2 Kirlin, J. J. 366 Klievink, B. 292 Kodiaga, S. T. 251 Krönke, M. 250 Kushner, J. 51 Lai, J. 156 Lancaster, L. 250 lateral flow tests 3–4 Lebanon 103 Ledin, C. 307 Lee, H. 307 Lee, H. J. 282 Lefebvre, H. 101 Lember, V. 287 Lesotho 246, 250 “letting it rip” 72–81 LGBT+ community 169, 300–308, 327, 331, 333, 336, 364 Linos, K. 121 Liston-Heyes, C. 152 Lithuania 155

Index  373 Mozambique 252 Mulaudzi, G. 250 Muxi Martínez, Z. 328 Namibia 252 National Aboriginal Community Controlled Health Organisation 165–6, 169 National Academies of Sciences, Engineering and Medicine 346 National Crime Agency 180 National Disability Insurance Scheme 314–17, 319–20 National Indigenous Australians Agency 166 National Police Chiefs Council 195 National Police Coordination Centre 179 National Security Council 47, 61 Nauru 259, 261–2 Ncube, G. 247 neoliberalism 72–5, 77–8, 80–81, 88, 101 Netherlands 24, 27, 35–6, 131 New Public Governance 8 New Public Management 7–8, 88, 112–13, 137–40, 145–7, 206, 220, 315, 358–9 New Zealand see Aotearoa New Zealand Ngala Ndi, H. 251 Ngcamu, B. S. 250 Ngcaweni, B. 252 Niger 252 Nigeria 106, 250, 252 Nkondo, G. M. 243 Nordic Council of Ministers 89 Norman, R. 344 Norway 103, 155, 340 Nzimakwe, T. I. 245 Obama, B. 47, 49 OECD 89, 91–2, 157, 208, 230–31, 304, 356 O’Flynn, J. 151, 228, 360, 363–4 O’Keefe, J. 277 Omicron variant 3, 26, 72–7, 117, 314 Omonisi, A. E. 275 Operation Talla 178–9, 181–3, 186–8 Operation Warp Speed 51, 65 Osborne, S. 112–13, 361–2 Ostrom, E. 127, 130–31 Oszlak, O. 222 Oxford vaccine see AstraZeneca OzSage 75 Pacific island states 257–67 Pakistan 229 Palaszczuk, A. 73 Palau 259, 261–2 pandemic fatigue 3, 6, 10, 80, 132, 238 pandemic preparedness plans 342–3

panic buying 104, 263 participatory citizenship 101 Pasquale, F. 290–91 paternalism 101–2, 104, 107 PCR tests 2, 74, 80, 167, 314 Peel, R. 194 Pence, M. 48 Persad, G. 348 personal protective equipment see PPE Petrescu, M. 113 Pfizer 3, 65 Pichault, F. 139–40, 144–5 point of care testing 167–8 polarization 34, 36, 44, 51, 53, 59, 61–2, 66–7 police 154, 176–90, 192–203, 263, 266, 355 Pollitt, C. 364 polymerase chain reaction tests 2, 74, 80, 167, 314 Poonawalla, A. 92 populism 36, 43–53, 356 Portugal 6 Positive Public Administration 9 poverty 2, 7–8, 75, 77, 102, 105, 171, 218–19, 221, 244–5, 251–2, 304, 326–30, 332–4, 363 PPE 26–7, 51, 86, 90–91, 154, 181–4, 188–9, 249–50, 277–8, 314, 316, 339, 342, 359 Prigogine, I. 178 priority setting 339–49 privacy 153, 291, 293–4, 306, 334 prosperity gospel 72, 75–8, 81 protests 103, 120 public procurement and spending 86–94, 154 public sector employees 137–47 Public Service Ecosystem 113–22 public service governance 150–58 Public Service Logic 112–23, 361–2 Public Value 8, 89, 94, 112–13, 115–17, 119–23, 129, 362 public–private partnerships 51, 63, 65, 91–2, 153, 230–31, 233 Quaggiotto, G. 358 quarantine 65, 73, 78, 153, 303 see also isolation requirements race 100–101, 103, 106 rally-around-the-flag effect 27 rapid antigen tests 3–4, 74, 80, 171 remote working see working from home Rennick, G. 211 responsibilized citizens 104–5, 107–8 risk management 20, 28, 189, 199–200, 365 robots 286–94 Robson, S. 78

374  Research handbook on public management and COVID-19 Roosevelt, F. D. 229 Rosenthal, U. 151 Royal Flying Doctor Service 168 Rudman, L. A. 76 Russia 3, 92, 213–14 Ryan, J. M. 74 Sadiq, A.-A. 90 Salovey, P. 280–81 Sambala, E. Z. 254 Samoa 259, 261, 263 Sanchez-Graells, A. 90 SARS 2, 35, 152 Saud, L. H. 76 School Strikes for Climate 103 Scientific Advisory Group for Emergencies 62–3, 346–7 Scott, J. 100 self-isolation see isolation requirements Senegal 103 Serum Institute of India 92 severe acute respiratory syndrome 2, 35, 152 sex workers 103, 106 Shale, I. 246 short-term responses 20, 26, 102, 115–16, 122, 129, 151, 222, 234, 238–9, 293–4, 332, 365 Sian, S. 154 Sidebotham, A. 185–6, 188 Singapore 32, 35 Singapore Tourism Board 35 small island states 257–67, 360 Smart Management System 153 Smith, A. 229 Smith, C. 293 Smyth, S. 154 Snowden, D. 177 social Darwinism 72, 76–8, 81 social distancing 25, 47, 51, 106, 108, 126–7, 131, 142, 152, 155, 171, 235, 263, 275, 277, 289, 300, 360 social justice 7, 74, 307, 346 social media 35, 38, 120–21, 170, 172, 235 social movements 103–4 Solomon Islands 259, 261, 263, 266 Somalia 252 Song, Y. 156 South Africa 3, 107, 244, 248, 250–53 South Korea 23, 103, 152–3, 306 South Sudan 252 Spain 3, 301 Spanish Flu 118 Sputnik V 3 Sri Lanka 229 St. Kitts and Nevis 259, 261, 263

St. Lucia 259, 261 Stanch, P. M. 156 stay-at-home measures see lockdowns Stedman, R. C. 290 Steele-John, J. 77 Steen, T. 108, 129–30, 132–3, 361–2 Stengers, I. 178 Stott, C. 154 strategic–political playbook 21–4, 27–8 strategic public procurement 86–94 Strauss, A. L. 178 Strokosch, K. 113 supply chains 31, 51, 66, 74, 87, 89, 91–2, 94, 195–6, 202, 207, 222, 224, 230–31, 289, 356 sustainable co-production 126–34 Sustainable Development Goals 2, 252, 362–3 Sutcliffe, K. M. 192–4 Sutton, B. 360 Sweden 27, 89, 104, 106, 128 Switzerland 155 Szescilo, D. 130 ‘t Hart, P. 355, 357, 360, 365 Taiwan 32, 103 Tambulasi, R. 248 Tansley, A. G. 113 Tanzania 252 technical–managerial playbook 20–21, 23–5, 27–8 Terrence Higgins Trust 307 Test Treat and Go 167 Thailand 229 Thani, X. C. 356–7 Thatcher, M. 87 Theletsane, K. I. 253 Timor-Leste 259, 261–3, 266 Tomkins, L. 200 Tonga 259, 261–2 Torres Strait Islander communities 162–73, 347 see also Indigenous populations tourism 35, 106, 261–6, 363 trade unions 8, 72, 146 transparency 12, 35, 45, 89–90, 92, 121, 150–58, 249, 339–41, 347 Transparency International 90 travel bans see border closures; lockdowns Trinidad and Tobago 259, 261–3, 265–6 Trischler, J. 113 Trump, D. 34, 43–5, 47–53, 60–62, 64–5, 67, 92, 356 Tuckett, D. 201 Tuvalu 259, 261 Ubuntu philosophy 243–54, 356, 360–61

Index  375 UDESA 222 Uganda 250, 252 Ugyel, L. 364 Ukraine 93, 225, 363 uncertainty and ambiguity 57–68, 192 unemployment 3, 76, 231, 245, 251, 266, 286, 304, 326, 332 UNICEF 329 United Kingdom 3, 6, 10, 35, 57, 60–64, 67–8, 73, 81, 121, 155–8, 301, 340, 344, 355–7 Brexit 62–3, 67, 196, 202 citizen participation 100–102, 105–6 disabled citizens 312, 344 infrastructure 230 LGBT+ community 300–308 police 154, 176–90, 192–203 public procurement and spending 86–90, 93–4, 154 vaccination 3, 65–6, 106, 119–20, 346–7 United Nations 2, 38, 100, 157, 164, 181, 230–31, 251, 363 United Nations Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disability 320 United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples 164 United States 2–3, 5, 10, 34, 43–53, 57, 60–64, 67–8, 73, 81, 156, 257, 260–61, 267, 348, 356–7 citizen participation 103 death management 274–83 Indigenous populations 163–4 infrastructure 229–30 populism 43–53, 356 public procurement and spending 89, 91–2, 154 vaccination 50–52, 65–6, 92, 106, 213–14, 320, 356 Universal Credit 304–6 Universal Declaration of Human Rights 7 Uruguay 224 Usman, M. 247, 249 Uzodike, U. 244 vaccination 3, 5, 9, 26–7, 37, 60, 65–6, 91–2, 94, 105–6, 112, 117–23, 127–8, 130–31, 151, 244, 266, 339, 343, 357, 361–3 allocation frameworks 345–8 AstraZeneca 3, 65–6, 106 in Australia 5, 9, 65–6, 73, 76, 92, 105, 128, 165–6, 168, 170, 172, 207–14, 317–20, 347, 362 and disabled citizens 317–20 hesitancy 26, 105, 117–18, 120–21, 128, 166, 206–8, 210–11, 319–20 management of rollouts 206–14, 345–8

mandates 26–7, 212–13, 362 Moderna 3 Pfizer 3, 65 service lens on 112, 117–23 Sputnik V 3 take-up 3, 51–2, 66, 105–6, 108, 131 in the UK 3, 65–6, 106, 119–20, 346–7 in the US 50–52, 65–6, 92, 106, 213–14, 320, 356 van der Wal, Z. 354–5, 360 van Holstein, E. 314, 321 van Wynsberghe, A. 287 Vanuatu 259, 261–3, 265 Vargo, S. 113 Venezuela 265–6 Viego, V. 219 virtual meetings 155–6, 158, 300 VUCA 33, 354–6 Weber, M. 162 Weick, K. E. 192–4 Weil, B. 307 Wellstead, A. M. 290 West, R. 314 WhatsApp 142 Wheeler, H. 182–3, 188 Whetho, A. 243 White, H. 155 wicked problems 7, 33, 37, 192, 275, 348 Wickramasinghe, D. 153 Widmar, N. O. 156 Williams, B. 357 Williams, I. 341, 355 Williams-Elegbe, S. 250 working conditions 8, 144, 146, 331, 334 working from home 4, 137–47, 155–6, 185, 235, 300 working hours 141, 146 World Bank 230–31, 259 World Health Organization 2, 24, 38, 51, 61, 91–2, 117, 342–3, 346–8, 365 World Poverty Clock 252 Wu, Z. 107 Yates, S. 359, 361–2 Yeboah-Assiamah, E. 245, 252 Zambia 250, 252 Zavattaro, S. M. 361 zero hours contracts 8 Zhao, T. 107 Zheng, S. 151 Zimbabwe 250, 252