Elite Sensemaking During Crisis: The Case of Denmark's 2020 'Minkgate' Scandal

On the 2nd of November 2020 the scientific director of the Danish Infection Authority stated that a new mutated strain on of the COVID virus called ’cluster 5’ had been found among Danish mink and that the vaccine resistant cluster 5 carried the risk of restarting the Covid-19 pandemic, thus making Denmark “a new Wuhan”. This statement becomes the spark that ignites a series of events. Following a frantic and opaque decision-making process, under intense time pressure from the Prime Minister’s Office, the Prime Minister on November 4th says the Government calls for culling the entire Danish mink population, 15-17 million animals. The side effect of this effort to avoid restarting the pandemic is the destruction of Denmark’s third largest animal-origin export industry and the livelihood of 1000 farmers. Upon it becoming evident that the culling - essentially expropriating private property – was decided and enforced without the necessary legal authority, a major scandal ensues over the following 12 months: Relentless parliamentary and media scrutiny, intensified center-periphery conflicts, mink farmers receiving billions in compensations, an investigative commission seeking to hold a number of top civil servants culpable, the Prime Minister being forced to call an early election, and eventually a change of government. Seen as a case of core executive decision making, “Minkgate” is full of paradoxes. Ironically, the cluster 5 mutation had in fact died out one month before the Wuhan statement. Furthermore, culpability for Minkgate was doled out based on the assumption that the civil servants failed to fulfill their obligation to secure legality. Though, several key actors felt unable to do so due to informal organization and power wielding by the PMO. Also, Denmark has a world class system of government with high levels of trust and competence, had recently aced numerous other aspects of the Covid 19 pandemic, and had recently undergone a cultural shakeup of the importance of legality in government decision making. Still, it managed to bungle a relatively straightforward decision-making process wherein the fog of urgency was self-inflicted by the actors themselves. The aim of the article is to make sense of the decision process leading to the decision to kill 15-17 million minks and the decisions leading to the illegal implementation of the decision. The overall research question is: How did civil servants make sense of the statement, that Denmark was at risk of becoming “a new Wuhan” and how was the distribution of the sense-making supported by the organizational fabric of the core executive. In-depth case studies of decision-making processes are quite rare in public administration. It is often left to commissions preoccupied with placing a legal liability to unravel these processes. However, it is often difficult to hold individual civil servants and politicians accountable. If accountability for the scandal is difficult to place, there is a need to understand the decision making. Thus, we draw on Karl Weick’s sensemaking theory. Empirically, the paper is based on evidence documented in the Danish parliament’s investigative commission.