Crisis in public policy

Abstract

Crises in public policies are those unanticipated events or situations that disrupt ‘normal’ policy-making, threaten societal interests or values, and put extra pressure on decision-makers to resolve them with urgency. Crises constitute a major contemporary challenge for public policy: their multiplication challenges the effectiveness of regular policy tools and the legitimacy of decision-makers; they require policy-makers to become crisis managers; and they accelerate the pace of and transform policy-making as more and more problems are framed as crises and as crisis policies become institutionalised.