Author ORCID Identifier
https://orcid.org/0000-0003-2162-8166
Document Type
Article
Rights
Available under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial Share Alike 4.0 International Licence
Disciplines
5.6 POLITICAL SCIENCE, Political science
Abstract
This article joins with others in this special issue to examine the evolution of our understanding of how the coronavirus disease (COVID)-19 pandemic impacted policy ideas and routines across a wide variety of sectors of government activity. Did policy ideas and routines transform as a result of the pandemic or were they merely a continuation of the status quo ante? If they did transform, are the transformations temporary in nature or likely to lead to significant, deep and permanent reform to existing policy paths and trajectories? As this article sets out, the literature on policy punctuations has evolved and helps us understand the impact of COVID-19 on policy-making but tends to conflate several distinct aspects of path trajectories and deviations under the general concept of “critical junctures” which muddy reflections and findings. Once the different possible types of punctuations have been clarified, however, the result is a set of concepts related to path creation and disruption—especially that of “path clearing”—which are better able to provide an explanation of the kinds of policy change to be expected to result from the impact of events such as the 2019 coronavirus pandemic
DOI
https://doi.org/10.1093/polsoc/puab009
Recommended Citation
John Hogan, Michael Howlett, Mary Murphy, Re-thinking the coronavirus pandemic as a policy punctuation: COVID-19 as a path-clearing policy accelerator, Policy and Society, Volume 41, Issue 1, January 2022, Pages 40–52, DOI: 10.1093/polsoc/puab009
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License.
Publication Details
Policy & Society
Open access article:
https://academic.oup.com/policyandsociety/article/41/1/40/6503294