Crises are intrinsic part of welfare policies and public management and should be examined specifically through different ways of sensemaking, not only through the nature and demands of singular health crisis. This study seeks to answer question, how pandemic as crisis is made sense of and portrayed of in different timeframes, as a past, present, and future event, and hod does this sensemaking process challenges (e.g. evidence based approach to) welfare policy formulation.

Pandemic policymaking context has been characterized by challenges to make sense of ‘issues or events that are novel, ambiguous, confusing, or in some other way violate expectations’ (Maitlis & Christianson, 2014, p. 57). Public authorities and policymakers have been contested to make sense of ambiguous events and thereby to form responses based on the ongoing sensemaking (Boin & Renaud, 2013; Desmidt & Meyfroodt, 2023).

This study contributes discussion in study group by presenting viewpoint of altering conceptions and underlining the meaning of sensemaking in policy formulation. It also explores humane conceptions affecting policy formulation process. Empirical interview data consist of the key national-level, influential Finnish pandemic policymakers, health policy and of crisis preparedness experts who were interviewed twice, in 2021 (N=21) and in winter 2022-2023 (N=16). The data is analyzed by applying discourse analysis by tracing sensemaking discourses on crises in different temporal points.

Preliminary results enlighten that 1) As a past, crisis is discussed by expressing violated expectations towards pandemic, crisis, time and globality. 2) As a present, crisis is spoken with desire to end the crisis and presenting how exceptional has started to feel as normal part of health policy, with a minor counter discourse of sense of crises and poly-crises. 3) As future, crisis is discussed with shift from crisis monolith towards multiple crisis branches and crises covering almost everything besides of health crisis.

To conclude the discursive strategies are employed to navigate and moderate the balance between normalizing and exceptionalising even the very same crisis. Temporality makes the politics of sensemaking visible in building health policies. This study contributes to the discussion in study group by presenting a viewpoint of altering conceptions and underlining the meaning of sensemaking in policy formulation.

References

Boin, A., & Renaud, C. (2013). Orchestrating Joint Sensemaking Across Government Levels: Challenges and Requirements for Crisis Leadership. Journal of Leadership Studies, 7(3), 41–46. https://doi.org/10.1002/jls.21296

Desmidt, S., & Meyfroodt, K. (2023). Be prepared! Local politicians’ proclivity for local government adaptive capacity building in response to COVID-19: The role of risk perceptions. Public Management Review, 0(0), 1–24. https://doi.org/10.1080/14719037.2023.2165699

Maitlis, S., & Christianson, M. (2014). Sensemaking in Organizations: Taking Stock and Moving Forward. Academy of Management Annals, 8(1), 57–125. https://doi.org/10.5465/19416520.2014.873177

Amidst crises, governments must balance the urgency of decision-making with the need for evidence-based policies. Permacrises - prolonged periods of complex crises that disrupt traditional solution-seeking - necessitate welfare policies that merely prevent worsening outcomes instead of permanent fixes. Arguably, dealing with permacrises requires learning, unlearning and selective choosing of knowledge. However, these processes are not necessarily intentional or desirable. The loss of knowledge, along with ignorance and the strategic dismissal of useful knowledge may all happen in a complex, fast-paced situation requiring a solution. We use the concept of permacrisis when examining crises that threaten societal well-being. We justify this choice by noting that various health crises are one part of the complex landscape of changes and poly-crises that impact each other’s emergence and increasingly shape the reality of our future.

The aim of this paper is to explore how governments navigate uncertainty and prioritise certain forms of knowledge over others during crises, utilising the theoretical frameworks of ignorance, institutional amnesia, and epistemic governance. Ignorance refers to the lack of information or its low usability. Ignorance may also be used strategically, as a blame-avoidance or agenda-promotion tool. Institutional amnesia is about institutions’ dismissal of previous learnings due to formal, technical, sociocultural or strategic reasons. Epistemic governance refers to different actors’ usage of available information to affect others’ interpretation of the world, values, norms, and their own agency. These frameworks provide a comprehensive lens through which to examine the intentional-to-unintentional selective use of knowledge by governments during crises, revealing the intricate dance between knowing, forgetting, and epistemic-based governing.

The welfare-related crises explored in this paper are the COVID-19, the H1N1 and the SARS epidemics/pandemics. The data consists of recorded press conferences and newspaper articles capturing key announcements and policy decisions made during these crises in the Finnish context. The data is analysed using frame analysis, which enables the identification of dominant narratives and discursive strategies (cf. epistemic governance) employed by government actors. By utilising frame analysis, we expect to uncover patterns of institutional amnesia, ignorance and epistemic governance during crises, thus shedding light on how institutions manage information and construct knowledge while responding to the crisis. By examining multiple welfare-related crises, interpretations can also be made of how the continuum of crises affect the framing of amnesia and ignorance, thus affecting the possibilities of utilising past lessons.

The increasing literature on public value (PV) creation leaves open the question on the correspondence between its creation and its very recognition, especially when focusing on citizens. Citizens are indeed aware of the public services they use, and the resulting PV received. However, the question arises when dealing with services contributing to society as a whole, without directly affecting the general population.

It is the case of the agenda for equity, to which all public administrations are required to adhere through the 2030 Sustainable Development Goals and the universal value “Leave no one behind”(UNSDG, 2023). Within this priority agenda, public services are mainly directed to marginalized individuals, such as homeless individuals, prisoners, sex workers, individuals with substance use disorders (Luchenski et al., 2018), as well as migrants in vulnerable situations such as asylum seekers and refugees. Even if these groups are known to be a minority, reducing discrimination and exclusion at all levels have benefits for all (cit). Nevertheless, the general population may either not be aware of the public services offered to reduce the marginalization phenomenon, nor to the benefits derived.

Specifically, for People Experiencing Homelessness (PEH) the literature has reported citizens to have poor knowledge about homelessness (Petit, 2019), even if there is a shift toward more compassion and liberal attitudes (Tsai, 2017). Furthermore, people in several international settings believe that governments are not doing enough to address homelessness and have also shown to have a slow attitudinal change (Batterham, 2020).

Focusing on the actions undertaken by the municipality of Milan (Italy) and building on the previous research (Petit, 2019), we developed a survey to collect information on the public perception on PEH. We had two aims: first, investigate public perception about the needs that PEH experience; second, investigate citizens’ perceptions of the role played by the public actors. We investigated the emerging difference and we analysed the relationship between this difference and a set of sociodemographic characteristics and personal experience with PEH.

Our study fosters the understanding of citizens’ recognition of PV, by shedding light on the limits that prevent from gaining it. Our findings may serve as a basis to design public services that better contribute to citizens’ PV recognition, fostering public legitimation.

References

Batterham, D. (2020). Public Perceptions of Homelessness–A Literature Review. Posjećeno, 13(8), 2022.

Luchenski, S., Maguire, N., Aldridge, R. W., Hayward, A., Story, A., Perri, P., Withers, J., Clint, S., Fitzpatrick, S., & Hewett, N. (2018). What works in inclusion health: Overview of effective interventions for marginalised and excluded populations. The Lancet, 391(10117), 266–280. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0140-6736(17)31959-1

Petit, J., Loubiere, S., Tinland, A., Vargas-Moniz, M., Spinnewijn, F., Manning, R., ... & HOME-EU Consortium Study Group. (2019). European public perceptions of homelessness: A knowledge, attitudes and practices survey. PloS one, 14(9), e0221896.

Tsai, J., Lee, C. Y. S., Byrne, T., Pietrzak, R. H., & Southwick, S. M. (2017). Changes in public attitudes and perceptions about homelessness between 1990 and 2016. American Journal of Community Psychology, 60(3-4), 599-606.

UNSDG. (2023). UNSDG | Leave No One Behind. https://unsdg.un.org/2030-agenda/universal-values/leave-no-one-behind, https://unsdg.un.org/2030-agenda/universal-values/leave-no-one-behind

This paper examines how frontline professionals in education and healthcare interpret risky behavior among children and families in their care, following a policy shift that expanded their roles to include preventive work. Using interviews, I explore how these professionals balance their private aversions with professional norms in assessing social normality and risk. The analysis reveals that frontline professionals' regulation of aversions is shaped by collective orientation: those with specific boundaries for inclusion and normality tend to rely on their private aversions, while those with broader perspectives regulate their aversions and avoid using them in assessments. Unregulated private aversions can lead to stereotypical judgments rather than individualized assessments.

Focusing on frontline professionals' interpretations of risky behavior in healthcare, daycare, and education, this paper contributes to the literature on frontline agency by highlighting the role of collective orientation in shaping professionals' responses to their own values and aversions in their work. The paper discusses the theoretical implications of collective orientation in frontline agency studies and presents empirical findings through descriptive and comparative analyses. By integrating collective orientation into frontline agency research, we gain insights into how professionals navigate between private values and professional obligations.