Policycrises are becoming increasingly salient in the practice of contemporary public policy and administration. Policymakers often find themselves dealing with successive, overlapping, and interrelated crises. This is particularly as several of these emerging crises are “creeping”, i.e., crises that linger over extended periods and spill over different policy domains. Each of these crises, on its own, often requires systematic learning and evidence to drive policy analysis, from problem definition to solution formulation, identification, implementation, and evaluation. Extant research has indeed provided ample insights on the how learning and evidence are employed across different types of crises. However, it is yet to catch up with how the intersection and simultaneity of these crises affects these policy analytical practices. In this article, we adopt a novel perspective to explore how do polycrises influence the governance of learning and evidence collection?

To do so, we leverage a case study of the European Commission’s practices of learning and evidence collection at the nexus of two overlapping crises that urged conflicting solutions: the ongoing climate change crisis and the war in Ukraine. We source our data from interviews with privileged informants, and stakeholders from different directorate generals (DGs) involved in responding to both crises. Our findings provide a more robust better theoretical understanding of policy analytical practices, and thus the dynamics of policy change within polycrises. They also provide practitioners with an elaborate account of these practices, key challenges faced and recommendations for enhancing critical learning and evidence-based policymaking processes in future crises.

In any crisis governments are faced with extraordinary circumstances that challenge regular policymaking. Still, the standard way of governing, dominant policy style in a specific country, strongly affects what is done during crisis. The concept of policy style has been relevant in policy sciences since the 1980s, when Jeremy Richardson first elaborated on its meaning and components. Recently the concept was again deployed in research endeavours around the globe. But it is still underdeveloped as it does not contain precise operationalization that guides data gathering and analysis, and systematic empirical comparison among states.

Therefore, our research is focused on the question – how to operationalize the concept of policy style. Our goal is to contribute to the development of the concept to enable precise empirical comparison among countries during crisis or ordinary policymaking settings. We propose combining policy style concept with the theory of policy design, and we build an indicator of policy style on policy goals. Policy goals are the basic element of policy design in any public sector, that is usually the first to transform during the time of policy change.

Our previous research, based on inductive coding of governmental strategical documents, shows how goals vary according to two dimensions. Goals differ by their content – issues and topics they employ, and this is a thematic aspect of policy goals. Additionally, goals appear in specific forms, and they have diverse structural elements (non)present. This is the technical aspect of policy goals, which is dedicated to their shape. In this paper we combine those two aspects to develop a complex indicator of policy goals that shows the overall design of goals in one country. End radar chart illustrates how policy goals swing on thematic and technical aspects.

The paper is founded on qualitative content analysis of 11 strategical documents produced by Croatian government. The sample contains diverse sectors: security, justice, employment, transport, education, gender equality, disability, and youth policy; and issues of domestic violence, enhancing reading, and wood and furniture industry. Our approach offers detailed guidebook on the data gathering, then segmentation process and coding procedures, as we try to enhance operationalization of policy style by setting-up rules for exact and systematic empirical comparison of policy design among states.

Paper will bring literature review on policy style, to stress the pitfalls, and the advantages of the concept. Then, it will offer merging of policy style with policy design theory, to develop an approach of policy style operationalization through policy goals indicator. Then we will apply the goals indicator on the case of Croatia, to detect some potential flaws and breakthroughs of our proposal in the end of the paper.

The crisis conditions of the COVID-19 pandemic amplified the significance of multisectoral governance networks – involving state (government at all levels) and non-state (e.g., community sector) actors - to enhance community wellbeing. The capacity of these networks for innovative policy design, delivery and evaluation has continued relevance as we deal with the ongoing effects of the pandemic, respond to the climate emergency, and tackle the cost-of-living crisis. In particular, there is a need to better understand the mechanisms and spatial dynamics that enable and sustain community action to solve complex social problems.

To do that, this paper draws on the experience of over 50 informal and small-scale formal groups working to support wellbeing in communities across Wales. Our findings – like wider research – highlight local action interacting within wider governance networks and service-provision arrangements to identify and address crisis and need in ways distinct to (but often building on) pre- pandemic arrangements. However, this paper takes an additional step by examining the spatial dynamics underpinning these emergent governance networks. This helps to uncover why and how they appeared (or did not); what made them effective (or not); and what relevance or sustainability they might have beyond the pandemic context. We present findings from storytelling and visual mapping interviews with 71 participants between December 2020 and February 2021. These demonstrate emergent governance networks that (sometimes) redistributed power, built trust and mutuality across and within sectors and localities, supported coordination, collaboration, service integration, and created (both productive and counterproductive) policy and delivery conflict and challenge. Crucially, we examine the specific and diverse spatial dynamics underpinning these possibilities.

Pandemic conditions placed restrictions on physical mobility while radically increasing the use of digital technologies to enable social interaction, community service coordination and provision – often, but not always, leading to novel ways of identifying and addressing crisis, need and inequalities in both, by creating conditions for innovation in community responsiveness. Our findings suggest that these conditions are associated with an emergent spatial dynamic. Seemingly paradoxical experiences of ‘stuck’ physical space (due to mobility restrictions) and ‘fluid’ digital space (due to increased online communications) coalesced into ‘relational local action’ that was simultaneously more grounded in place and extensively networked. That is, multisectoral digital interactions became more grounded – focused on coordinating people, places and things at local level (e.g., a Facebook group that organised food delivery in a specific area) - while, simultaneously, local action was more functionally connected to wider (regional, national, international) networks than before (e.g., local councils and public services, through funding, liaison and referral pathways). ‘Relational local action’ appeared in diverse forms, but was consistently a key condition underpinning examples of innovation and effective collaboration in identifying and reducing need at community level.

These findings challenge prevailing debate around local community action as either acting in support or in spite of state retrenchment. Our data highlight alternative possibilities for local action that is engaged with and supported by wider governance structures, while retaining the difference that make both more powerful in combination.

The COVID-19 policy context can be characterized by high levels of uncertainty and imperfect knowledge as well as a need for immediate action on the part of policymakers (Ansell et al, 2010; Berger et al, 2020). Therefore, to make better decisions and design the right policies, several governments in Europe relied on the expertise provided by advisory bodies (Bogner and Menz, 2021; Camporesi et al, 2022; Hardon et al, 2022).

This paper presents a wide-ranging comparative review of these advisory bodies, with regards to formation and selection, membership, and institutionalisation. Moreover, the advice provision process for the purpose of policy formulation is also under examination. The paper seeks to assess the bodies' varying levels of influence during the COVID-19 crisis.

While our work relies on a strong theoretical and conceptual basis informed by the extant literature relating to policy advisory systems and evidence-based policymaking, it offers a new perspective by focusing on advice and crisis policymaking during the early stages of the pandemic, when uncertainty was at its peak. To this end, we conducted a scoping review of the literature on the creation and activation of COVID-19 crisis advisory bodies, and their provision of advice to policymakers with regards to the formulation of policy solutions.

The scoping review uses the PRISMA method and follows a strict review protocol to capture the relevant literature published on COVID-19 advisory bodies. Using the PRISMA method, we first devised a keyword search to cast a wide net across academic writings located within the evidence-based policymaking and policy advisory system literature, in the context of the Covid-19 crisis in Europe. The search was conducted in two scientific databases (Scopus and Web of Science). Second, we designed a review protocol, and the abstracts of the publications obtained through the keyword search were reviewed systematically and sorted according to the review criteria. Third, the selected publications were read in full and, on that basis, sorted further to obtain a final list of relevant publications to inform this paper (Arksey and O'Malley, 2005).