About the Book
Following the extensive global impact of COVID-19, this forward-looking Research Handbook examines the pandemic from a public management perspective, exploring the roles and responses of public managers and considering how public organisations will be reshaped in the future.
This Research Handbook brings together a wealth of established and early career international scholars who offer summative and comparative analyses of jurisdictions’ pandemic responses, alongside vital in-depth studies of jurisdictional pandemic experiences. Chapters interrogate public management successes and failures in response to the pandemic, the systemic inequalities highlighted by the pandemic, how the pandemic challenged public managers and political leaders, and crucially how the pandemic challenged fundamental concepts of public management. Offering key advice as to how public management can adapt and reorient going forward, this Research Handbook is a vital contribution to the developing discussion and debate taking place within this discipline.
Exploring a broad range of key concepts in the field, this book will be an invaluable read for students, academics and researchers of public management, public administration, health care management, sociology and social policy. Providing important data relating to crisis response, this book will also be of practical benefit to public leaders and their professional teams when coordinating action in emergency situations.
Table of Contents:
Contents:
1 Introduction to the Research Handbook on Public Management and COVID-19 1
Helen Dickinson, Catherine Smith, Sophie Yates and Janine O’Flynn
PART I PUBLIC PROBLEMS AND PUBLIC MANAGERS:
THE CHALLENGES OF COVID-19 AND HOW THEY
HAVE CHALLENGED PUBLIC MANAGERS IN THEIR
ESTABLISHED ROLES
2 Pandemic challenges for public managers: juggling parallel crisis playbooks 19
Arjen Boin and Paul ‘t Hart
3 Reconsidering public management in a post-COVID world 31
Zeger van der Wal
4 What COVID-19 showed us about populism, democracy, and
performance: the case of the United States 43
Naim Kapucu and Donald Moynihan
5 Uncertainty and ambiguity during a crisis and the challenge for public
management: COVID-19 crisis management in the United States, the
United Kingdom and Australia 57
Nicholas Bromfield
6 The politics of “letting it rip”: why Australia went from zero-COVID to
COVID-central 72
Blair Williams
PART II HOW COVID-19 CHALLENGED THE FUNDAMENTALS
OF PUBLIC MANAGEMENT
7 Procurement and public spending: amplification and emergence of
issues arising from COVID-19 86
Barbara Allen
8 Citizen participation in public management: activated, empowered,
responsibilised, abandoned? 99
Catherine Durose, Beth Perry and Liz Richardson
9 Public Service Logic: a service lens on the COVID-19 vaccination programmes 112
Stephen Osborne, Maria Cucciniello and Tie Cui
10 Can co-production that emerged during the COVID-19 pandemic be sustained? 126
Trui Steen, Taco Brandsen and Menno Hoppen
11 Examining the impact of COVID-19 on managing public sector
employees: overcoming or exacerbating incoherences? 137
Sue Williamson and Linda Colley
12 The governance of public services during COVID-19: a review of
challenges and opportunities 150
Rachel Ashworth and Catherine Farrell
PART III SUCCESS, FAILURE, AND IN-BETWEEN: WHAT THE
PANDEMIC TAUGHT US
13 Responding to COVID-19 in Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander
communities: the importance of strengths-based public administration,
cultural safety and working in genuine partnership 162
Catherine Althaus, Dawn Casey and Lucas de Toca
14 A review of COVID-19 organisational recovery in a UK metropolitan
police force utilising a complexity theory framework 176
Phil Davies
15 Policing the pandemic: deciding and acting in the face of uncertainty
and the unexpected 192
Mark Fenton-O’Creevy, Nicky Miller, Helen Selby-Fell and Benjamin Bowles
16 Trust, capacity and management of vaccine rollouts 206
Adam Hannah, Katie Attwell and Jordan Tchilingirian
17 The governance of food security in the post-COVID-19 context:
innovative principles for public management in Argentina 218
Joaquín Pérez Martín
18 ‘Build back better’: infrastructure policy’s post-pandemic promise 228
Sara Bice
19 Ubuntu philosophy in times of crises: COVID-19 pandemic period and beyond 243
Xolile Carol Thani
20 Small island states, COVID-19, and public policies: a thematic analysis 257
Kim Moloney
21 Death management in public administration: lessons from the front lines 274
Staci M. Zavattaro
22 The rise of robots in the COVID-19 pandemic: implications for public
management 286
Helen Dickinson and Catherine Smith
PART IV REVEALING AND ADDRESSING SYSTEMIC PROBLEMS
23 “Stay home” and queer(y)-ing the heteronormative assumptions of
COVID policy responses 300
Peter Matthews and Daniel Edmiston
24 Public management challenges with the emergency response for people
with disability during COVID-19 312
Sophie Yates and Helen Dickinson
25 Gender mainstreaming and collaborative public management during
COVID-19: a case study of national machineries for gender equality
and care infrastructure in Argentina 325
Natalia Dopazo, Maria Daels and Hayley Henderson
26 How useful is priority setting in an emergency? An analysis of its role
in national responses to the COVID-19 pandemic 339
Iestyn Williams, Suzanne Robinson, Chris Smith, Lydia Kapiriri and Helen
Dickinson
27 The future of public management as we emerge from the acute phase of
COVID-19: key themes and future trajectories 354
Sophie Yates, Janine O’Flynn, Helen Dickinson and Catherine Smith
About the Author :
Edited by Helen Dickinson, Professor of Public Service Research, School of Business, University of New South Wales Canberra, Sophie Yates, Research Fellow, Crawford School of Public Policy, Australian National University, Janine O’Flynn, Professor and Director, Crawford School of Public Policy, Australian National University, Catherine Smith, Senior Lecturer, Centre for Wellbeing Science, Faculty of Education, University of Melbourne, Australia
Review :
‘This Handbook draws together theory and empirical evidence to tease out important implications for understanding the role of public management in the pandemic, across a wide range of countries and public services, and with insights across a range of themes of relevance to government, public organizations, and citizens. Read it to understand this complex recent past – and also to understand how to prepare for the future. A fine collection of chapters.’
‘This remarkable book analyzes the COVID-19 crisis through the eyes of some of the most insightful and creative public policy and public management scholars in the world. It is a “must read” – now and in the future – for anyone interested in improving our collective response to global public challenges.’
‘A fascinating collection on the potential and limitations of public management to meet the challenges posed by COVID-19. A key message is that mainstream public management theory and practice is fatally flawed by its ongoing failure to take account of structural inequality. Happily, it offers ideas and evidence of how to do better in the future.’
‘The COVID-19 pandemic posed unprecedented public management challenges and exposed weaknesses that had festered for a long time. This is a timely book on the challenges and how they were addressed. Public management scholars and practitioners around the world will find the book useful.’
