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Today the world is confronted with dual crises: creeping and acute threats unfolding at the same time—for example, the manifestation of extreme weather events such as drought and flooding and the creeping crisis of climate change. To cope with dual crises, this article develops a novel temporal perspective that offers policy actors a repertoire of interrelated strategies for enhancing the robustness of institutional efforts. The repertoire consists of five temporal strategies that policy actors can use to navigate the twin challenges of immediate and latent threats in conjunction: strategic coupling of short-term shocks and creeping crises, crafting time horizons, molding the pace of public problem-solving, mobilizing anticipatory capacity through futuring techniques, and adaptive iteration of policy decisions. We illustrate the practical application of these strategies in an exploratory case study of adaptive water management in the Netherlands. De wereld wordt geconfronteerd met duale crises: sluipende en acute dreigingen op hetzelfde moment, zoals extreme weersgebeurtenissen als droogte of watersnood tegelijkertijd met de sluipende crisis van klimaatverandering. Om te reageren op duale crises, ontwikkelt dit artikel een nieuw repertoire van vijf temporele strategieën voor beleidsmakers om de robuustheid van overheidssystemen te vergroten. Dit repertoire bestaat uit de volgende strategieën: strategische koppeling van onverwachte korte termijn schokken en sluipende crises, tijdshorizonnen creëren, het tempo aanpassen van implementatie, het mobiliseren van anticiperende capaciteit door middel van scenariotechnieken, en de adaptieve iteratie van beleidsbeslissingen. We illustreren de werking van deze vijf strategieën aan de hand van een uitgewerkt voorbeeld van adaptief watermanagement in Nederland: de invoering van het programma Ruimte voor de Rivier.

This reflective contribution tells the story of a veteran public sector crisis management (CM) researcher’s 35-year journey with educating students and CM practitioners, It offers preliminary insights about how the pandemic experience might – and should – induce a significant rethink of how educators conceptualize the nature of crises and the challenges governments and public agencies face in coping with them.

In Canada many public projects, programs, and services perform well, and many are very successful. However, these cases are consistently underexposed and commonly understudied in the public realm which, for various reasons, tends to focus on policy mistakes and learning from failures rather than successes. In fact, studies of public policy successes, as such, are rare not just in Canada, but the world over, although this has started to change. The aims of the book are to see, describe, acknowledge, and promote learning from past and present instances of highly effective and highly valued public policy-making. These aims are accomplished through detailed examination of selected case studies of policy success in different eras, governments, and policy domains in Canada.

This chapter reviews the volume’s 22 case studies of successful policies across Canada, which tracked policy histories and assessed policy outcomes over time. It seeks to generate broader lessons and themes for conceptualizing and explaining policy success. It begins by providing a summary of the success ratings arising from the case studies and considers the usefulness of the multidimensional PPPE (programmatic, process, political, endurance) framework for developing and analysing such case studies. Second, it draws on the cases to identify factors across policy domains—some common, some particular, some contingent—which contribute to the different dimensions of policy success. Third, we step back from the case studies to consider the complex influence of macro-institutions in Canada (e.g. federalism, executive-dominated parliamentary government, and the judiciary) in influencing policy success. Finally, based on lessons from the Canadian cases, future lines of research to strengthen our understanding of policy success are suggested.

This introductory chapter sets out the objectives, approach and methodology of this volume. The main rationale for the volume is to identify, reconstruct and narrate instances of governments in Nordic countries ‘getting it right’, and to do so in a manner that is analytically robust yet presented in easy-to-read and helpful-to-teach case-study narratives. It presents the central analytical tool that all case studies use, the PPPE assessment framework, which calls on analysts to ascertain cases against programmatic, process, political and endurance criteria. And it situates the question of individual instances of policy successes in Nordic instances in the context of the broader narrative about a ‘Nordic’ approach to politics, governance and public policy, in particular but not limited to socio-economic policies and the ethos and architecture of welfare states in Northern Europe. It concludes by offering some emerging patterns of success-enabling factors across the cases and by formulating implications for future research.

This chapter reviews the main governance challenges policymakers faced during the COVID-19 crisis. It examines how governments mobilized institutional capacity to tackle these challenges. We focus on attempts to centralize crisis decision-making and discuss whether centralization contributed to government effectiveness and legitimacy.

Communication is pivotal when a society faces a sudden, disruptive and disturbing event. People want to know what is going on, why it is happening, what is done to safeguard them and what they can to protect themselves. During COVID-19, governments were the main sources of that information, at least initially. Governments tried to shape the attitudes, emotions and behaviours of citizens in accordance with their policies. Over time, alternative crisis narratives emerged and influenced citizen behaviour. This chapter examines crisis communication in the COVID-19 crisis: how did leaders try to ‘make making’ of this unprecedented threat? How did they deal with the alternative crisis frames that emerged over time?

The COVID-19 crisis has tested public institutions, crisis leadership and societal solidarity to the core. Fault lines have come to the fore; unsuspected strengths have been noted. But will this be enough to initiate the necessary steps to prepare our societies for the future crises that will come? In this chapter, we offer the building blocks for an action agenda. We identify various pathways to enhanced resilience.

COVID-19 brought the ‘unthinkable’ to our doorstep. The pandemic caused a series of global, and interconnected, health, economic, social, institutional and political crises that are unprecedented in living memory. Political leaders struggled to contain the virus and persuade anxious, weary citizens to behave this or that way in order to overcome a giant collective action problem. This chapter is a primer for the detailed examination of political and policy responses to this impossible challenge. It describes pivotal governance challenges and the constraints operating on the crisis response.

For a crisis to be effectively governed, it must first be noticed, interpreted, understood and assessed. This chapter explores how policymakers ‘made sense’ of the emerging COVID-19 pandemic. We focus on: (1) how policymakers around the world detected the developing threat as it emerged first in China and then in Italy; (2) the prominent involvement of scientific expertise in government sense-making processes (and in narratives about those processes). We discuss the complex dynamics between experts, decision-makers and publics that ensued.

In this chapter, the editors make the case for positive policy evaluation. They survey classic and contemporary public policy and governance research and debates to demonstrate how they are slanted towards fault-finding, the language of disappointment, failure and crisis. They reflect on the contributions and the limitations of this state of the art and argue that it needs to be complemented by a more sustained and systematic conceptualization and empirical study of highly (and perhaps improbably) successful public policy endeavours. This chapter ends by outlining the analytical protocol used in this project, and debating the methodological strengths and limitations of the brand of positive policy evaluation applied in this volume.

Contrary to stereotype, democratic governments are not so bad at what they do. What can we learn about the craft and politics of policy design and policy implementation from instances of public policy success? Systematically distinguishing between program, process, political success as wel as endurance of success over time, this volume presents fifteen in-depth case studies of policy successes from around the world. Each case study contains a detailed narrative of the policy processes and assesses the extent to which the policies pursued can be regarded as successful. It offers a unique tool for researchers, teachers and students to apply theories of policy design, policymaking, and implementation to.

This edited book will make an important, timely, and innovative contribution to the now flourishing academic discipline of political leadership studies. We have developed a conceptual framework of leadership capital and a diagnostic tool—the Leadership Capital Index (LCI)—to measure and evaluate the fluctuating nature of leadership capital. Differing amounts of leadership capital, a combination of skills, relations, and reputation, allow leaders to succeed or fail. This book brings together leading international scholars to engage with the concept of “leadership capital” and apply the LCI to a variety of comparative case studies. The LCI offers a comprehensive yet parsimonious and easily applicable ten-point matrix to examine leadership authority over time and in different political contexts. In each case, leaders “spend” and put their “stock” of authority and support at risk. United States president, Lyndon Johnson, arm-twisting Congress to put into effect civil rights legislation, Tony Blair taking the United Kingdom into the invasion of Iraq, Angela Merkel committing Germany to a generous reception of refugees: all ‘spent capital’ to forge public policy they believed in. We are interested in how office-holders acquire, consolidate, risk, and lose such capital. This volume concentrates predominantly on elected ‘chief executives’ at the national level, including majoritarian and consensus systems, multiple and singular cases. We also consider some presidential and sub-national cases. The purpose of the exercise is indeed exploratory: the chapters are a series of plausibility probes, to see how the LCI framework ‘performs’ as a descriptive and analytical tool.

This introductory chapter sets out the conceptual and methodological rationale for the book. The chapter reviews the field and places this new approach within the context of current leadership research. The Leadership Capital Index (LCI) builds on advances in understanding of how to track and assess political leadership. It offers the concept of “leadership capital,” as an aggregate of authority that reaches across the traditional divide between structure and agency through a flexible analytical tool. The LCI offers a comprehensive yet parsimonious and easily applicable ten-point matrix to examine leadership authority over time and in different political contexts. The chapter sets out how this tool is utilized in the examination of the eleven-country case studies to better understand and explain the “puzzles” of contemporary political leadership.

This concluding chapter reflects on how the LCI has performed and how it can be developed. Application of the LCI is analyzed across different leadership puzzles and contexts and for what this tells us about the authority of political leaders. Some interpretations of capital fluctuation across the chapters are presented. The LCI allows exploration of how skills, relations, and reputations create, build, or erode authority. Questions remain over the weighting of indicators, the balance between hard and soft measurements, and broader questions about how capital is acquired, preserved, and, in rare cases, regained. Leaders in weakly democratic systems may be less prone to “normal” patterns of capital fluctuation. Overall, the LCI does allow students of political leadership to think about the difference between political office-holding and exercising political leadership, and about why and when some leaders are able to make the political weather rather than being swept along by it.

Triggered by the recent inquiries into the Fukushima nuclear disaster, this article reflects on the challenges of developing and operating risk regulation and crisis management regimes in an era of highly complex and tightly interconnected socio-technical systems. These challenges are not just technical and professional but fundamentally institutional and cultural. The article identifies three key paradoxes and challenges of contemporary risk and crisis management, signals a range of recurrent problems in governments' efforts to cope with these challenges, problematizes current patterns of societal learning from crises, and sketches an agenda for public administration research in this area.

Crisis management has become a defining feature of contemporary governance. In times of crisis, communities and members of organizations expect their leaders to minimize the impact, while critics and bureaucratic competitors make use of social media to blame incumbent rulers and their policies. In this extreme environment, policymakers must somehow establish a sense of normality, and foster collective learning from the crisis experience. In the new edition of this uniquely comprehensive analysis, the authors examine how strategic leaders deal with the challenges they face, the political risks and opportunities they encounter, the pitfalls they must avoid, and the paths towards reform they may pursue. The book is grounded in decades of collaborative, cross-national and multidisciplinary case study research and has been updated to include new insights and examples from the last decade. This is an original and important contribution from experts in public policy and international security.