Learning to learn: Conditions for change in the EU's Public Health Governance amid the Covid 19 Crisis

Crises are often considered gold opportunities for learning and radical change. With SARS in 2002, and H1N1 in 2009 European institutions were indeed prone to put forward “lessons learned” from these severe health crises. Yet, the EU’s response to COVID-19 is, at best, patchy. Coordination between member states regarding lockdown measures and border closures has remained modest. Acts of solidarity between individual member-states have not alleviated competition among them for rarified stocks of medical devices. COVID-19 sheds light on the shortcomings of the EU’s soft governance of public health. The Commission’s competences are limited to harmonizing epidemiological surveillance, supported scientifically by the European Centre for Disease Prevention and Control (ECDC). Despite discussing coordination in the Health Security Committee (HSC), Member States remain wary about any encroachment on the management of health threats. Has learning failed in the European governance of health threats despite three major health crises over the last 20 years? We contend that health crises have produced punctuated learning over time but that additional conditions beyond “learning lessons from crisis” are necessary to enable sustainable change. Drawing on process tracing, we identify the conditions under which interactions between the HSC, the Commission and the ECDC foster learning and change. Our comparative analysis of the EU’s response to SARS, H1N1 and COVID-19 demonstrates that crises do foster policy and organizational learning. However, it is not determined that learning necessarily translates into sustainable change. If policy learning occurs intra-crisis without concomitant organizational learning, the policy lessons learned are likely to translate into only modest change at the post-crisis stage. If organizational learning also takes place intra-crisis, it is more likely to trigger durable policy and organizational change post-crisis. This paper provides critical insights on conditions for learning as a condition for sustainable change in the European governance of health threats in the post-COVID-19 era.