Systematising Crises in Public Policy: Policy Change, Political Destabilisation, and the Politics of Governing Crises

In the political and social sciences, the concept of crisis is usually delineated by three unmissable elements: threat, urgency, and uncertainty. Throughout the years, building on these pillars, scholars from different fields, as well as from different epistemological perspectives, have contributed to theoretically, analytically and empirically define the concept, resulting in an abundance of underdeveloped formulations. For this reason, it becomes very difficult to build an inclusive literature covering the various aspects of crises, either by building on theoretical discussions, and/or on empirical applications. Therefore, crises become an all-encompassing concept. More specifically, by delving into public policy literature and its various research agendas, it is clear that crises – implicitly or explicitly – become a pivotal element in relation to mechanisms of policy change. However, also in this case, crises emerge as symptoms pointing to different illnesses. Accordingly, crises are described as events impacting day-to-day policymaking at multiple levels of governance, on one or more policy subsystems, throughout a variable timespan. For example, crises are thought of as bringing the failure of a policy instrument to the surface; or they are considered as an opportunity to be exploited by policy actors in order to push forward their preferred policy solutions; in all cases, they produce a [temporary] shift from ‘policymaking as usual’. Among the various directions taken by different public policy literature, it becomes clear that, due to the intrinsic variability of crisis as a phenomenon, and depending on its characteristics, crises initiate several mechanisms, possibly leading to policy change. What are they? How do we disentangle them? How do we get from a crisis to policy change? The aims of this paper converge around these questions. With a focus on exploring the possible mechanisms leading from crises to policy change, this paper conducts a systematic literature review. On the one side, it focuses on the ways in which the concept of crisis is defined and operationalised as a driver of policy change. On the other side, it investigates crises as destabilisers of ‘policymaking as usual’, by looking at how they impact the current way of governing by shifting the distribution of interests, ideas, and power. In other words, it relies on public policy literature to investigate the definition of crisis as a driver of change and as a destabiliser of the current way of governing. In a time in which crises are at the centre of our [scientific] world, with research spanning from the 2009 financial crisis to the 2020 COVID-19 pandemic, from the Russian invasion of Ukraine in 2022 to the explosion of the Palestine-Israel war in 2023, it becomes even more relevant to look at the state-of-the-art of our discipline in relation to the effects of crises. As previously pointed out, there is an abundance of studies looking at crises from different directions. What is missing is a synthesis of theoretical definitions, analytical approaches, and empirical applications, providing scholars with a necessary toolkit to conduct their research on the effects of crises in public policy.