The increasingly complex context pressures governments to seek novel ways of adapting the existing public policies and designing new ones. Policy experimentation has been proposed as a key strategy for coping with the challenges. Despite considerable academic discussion on policy experimentation and on the use of different experimental approaches, there is surprisingly little systematic discussion on the political dimension of public policy experiments. The paper zooms in on the key challenge that the political setting poses for experimental policy-making: the clashes between political and experimental time-frames. The challenges that the political time-frames pose for experimental policy-making are explored.

Keywords: Policy experiments, politicians, time-frames, Estonia, Finland

Public administration has explored and experimented for some time with governance innovations which seek to mitigate shortcomings of elected representation and better respond to environmental complexity. I propose ‘learning from public challenges’ as an additional perspective on how public organizations may play more than a bystander role in questions of democratic deficits, especially in conditions of turbulence. By ‘public challenges’ I refer to all forms of challenge which members of the public may formally bring against actions of policy work which have affected them, including complaints, appeals and litigation, a class of external pressure on public organizations which has had little cohesive treatment in PA. I characterize public challenges as noisy democratic data which PA is in a unique position in representative government to interpret, with the potential to share themes and lessons with the wider public and with representatives.

I offer a preliminary exploration of the perspective with a study of how UK police forces interpret and learn from public challenges, analyzing a corpus of 42 semi-structured interviews with police leaders, officers and staff from 20 territorial police organizations. The research questions were: How are public challenges interpreted and handled within police forces? and What (if anything) do police forces learn from public complaints, and how? Policing is an extreme case among public functions for the diverse types of public challenge they receive, favoring the identification of a more exhaustive set of themes which could apply in other policy fields. UK policing is of particular interest given recent reforms which seek to shift from a blame to a learning paradigm in its systems for accountability. Thematic analysis was used to interpret the data.

The paper contributes a novel theoretical perspective, while the empirical work offers more systematic descriptions than currently exist of how public organizations interpret and handle the noisy signal which public challenges represent. Engagement, sharing and consulting within and outside of the public organization and theming – emergent and established – are found to be key ‘interpretive activities’. Empirical findings also include what can be learned from public challenges—including vulnerabilities and risk factors, cultural differences and sensitivities and officer assumptions and behaviors. The notion of learning accountability is shown to be broader than managerial perspectives suggest.

A distinctive attribute of organizational resilience—the ability to sustain performance in the face of extraordinary adversity—is commonly associated with the ability to realize organizational learning and change processes. However, organizational change has mixed performance implications, and little is known about how change and learning processes conjointly impact organizational resilience. We contribute to the literature by theorizing and testing arguments on the relationships between organizational learning and change processes and organizational resilience in the context of welfare services. The test utilizes survey-based data reporting on the handling of the COVID-19 pandemic in Danish eldercare in 2020—a critical context for realizing learning and change. We find that learning is overall positively related to resilience, and that change is either neutral or negatively related. However, learning also moderates (reduces) the negative relationship between change and resilience in a more severe crisis scenario. The findings emphasize the importance of the ability to realize change through learning for organizational resilience

The goal of this article is to explore how citizens’ perceptions about the government management of global crises change across different stages of the COVID-19 emergency. Scholars presume that groundbreaking value changes on a mass scale can only happen through generational replacement (Welzel & Inglehart 2009). On the other hand, rapid value changes throughout an entire population, by contrast, would require that large numbers of people substantially change their values within a short time span. Moreover, what would happen to citizens’ perceptions about how the government deals with a global emergency at different moments in the crisis?

Our research question is: the evaluation of government management of the emergency is related to how people perceive citizens’ behavior during crisis times?

The chapter uses evidence from two sources: First, we employ data from 77 countries with 124,854 participants who completed the World Values Survey (WVS) in the seventh (and most recent) wave between 2017-2020. The survey analyzes human values, including attitudes about daily life aspects and also, governments management. Second, we use data from the project called “Values in a crisis” (VIC) - a subproject of World Values Survey-, which includes categories on individual attributes and perceptions, in a panel of citizens in eighteen countries (eleven from the Global North and seven from the Global South) that were surveyed in three consecutive waves during the pandemic. The first wave occurred in 2020 when the curfews measured were in effect. The second wave was conducted in 2021, when public life began to turn back to normalcy. The third wave was applied 2022, which marks a year after the economy started its recovery after the pandemic recession. The respondents were taken from a representative sample in each country, and the same respondents were interviewed three times throughout the crisis. The countries included from the Global North in the survey are Austria, Georgia, Germany, Greece, Italy, Japan, Poland, Russia, South Korea, Sweden, and United Kingdom. On the other hand, the countries included in the Global South are Brazil, Chile, China, Colombia, Hong Kong, Kazakhstan, and the Maldives. We have available data for the first wave of VIC in the 18 countries, and data for Colombia for all the three waves.

This paper contributes to enriching the literature on public management, public administration, and public opinion by understanding citizens’ perceptions of governmental crisis management and policy solutions. The methodological contribution is that the chapter uses a novel panel dataset with three measuring points during the pandemic that has never been used before.