Don’t Let the COVID-19 Crisis Go to Waste: Breaking Through the Status Quo & Flattening the Opioid Epidemic Curve

The objective of the paper is to understand the impact of the COVID-19 focusing event that resulted in a distinctive response by the Federal government. The paper focuses on the rapid deregulation that occurred in the opioid use disorder treatments. We frame the narrative using primarily the economic literature on deregulation during a crisis. The temporary deregulation has significantly increased access to treatment and medications and allows for the discovering of a different equilibrium. We also suggest other deregulations that need to be considered. In this paper, we suggest that the provisional deregulations should be made permanent to improve the outcome of the patients who abuse opioids.

Modeling reactive attention among congressional witnesses during the COVID-19 pandemic

Although often considered dichotomous drivers of congressional agenda activity, indicators and focusing events may exist on a continuum if indicators are capable of culminating in a singular event that focuses attention. Identifying this culmination point could help explain how anticipatory, indicator-driven threats such as COVID-19 can dominate policy agendas in a manner similar to a focusing event. This paper investigates whether the culmination point can be identified by quantifying anticipatory and reactive attention of congressional committee witnesses towards an indicator-driven threat. The findings demonstrate that peaks in congressional witness numbers during the COVID-19 pandemic coincided with a transition from anticipatory to reactive attention, which was associated with rapid increases in unemployment. This demonstrates that a transition from anticipatory to reactive attention could mark the culmination point of an indicator-driven event such as COVID-19, and explain how and why some indicators are capable of focusing attention, but others are not.

COVID-19 Crisis and Labor Migration Policy: A Perspective From Estonia

Crises can function as catalysts for policy change, but change depends on multiple factors such as the actual content of the event, the agenda-setting power of the advocates of change, and their abilities to foster advocacy coalitions and break up policy monopolies. The COVID-19 crisis is an event that halted virtually all movement, including labor migration across the world, thus having great potential to act as a major focusing event. This article will look into the possibilities of this crisis to induce permanent labor migration policy change based on the case of Estonia. The article thus contributes to the literature on migration policy change from the Central and East European perspective.

The duty of candour and the NHS agenda

PurposeThe purpose of the study is to explore how the duty of candour got onto the agenda of the British National Health Service.Design/methodology/approachThe conceptual approach is based on multiple streams approach, with the methodology being interpretive content analysis, which uses a deductive approach that focuses on both manifest and latent content.FindingsThe duty of candour got onto the NHS agenda as a result of the Mid Staffordshire inquiry report and the long-term “interest group” campaign associated with Robbie's Law. It is argued that the “focusing event” of the Mid Staffordshire Inquiry Report opened the “policy window”. It also highlights the importance of “policy entrepreneur” Sir Robert Francis whose “claim to a hearing”, “political connections” and “persistence” was vital.Research limitations/implicationsAnalysis was confined to published documents.Originality/valueIt highlights some of the factors that suggested why the duty of candour got onto the NHS agenda when it did.

Agenda Setting and the Policy Process: Focusing Events

Agenda setting is a crucial aspect of the public policy process. Sudden, rare, and harmful events, known as focusing events, can be important influences on the policy process. Such events can reveal current and potential future harms, mobilize people and groups to address the policy failures that may be revealed by such events, and open the “window of opportunity” for intensive policy discussion and potential policy change. But focusing events operate differently at different times and in different policy domains. Although the idea of focusing events is firmly rooted in Kingdon’s “streams approach” to the policy process, focusing events are an important element of most contemporary theories of the policy process. But not every event works as a focusing event. The process by which a focusing event can yield policy change is complex and involves attention to the problems revealed by the event as well as evidence of learning from the event on the part of policymakers. Although focusing events are important, in many ways the concept remains underdeveloped, with few researchers seeking to understand the dynamics of these important events.

The World

Comparable environmental reforms have never occurred at the global scale of governance. Segments of the dynamic described in the four case studies have taken place at the global scale. A focusing event, World War II, spurred the creation of a global governance institution, the United Nations, which later became the organizational sponsor for the ongoing international effort to counter climate change. Different kinds of focusing events, extreme weather in the form of droughts or storms, have over time contributed to an increase in the number of nations advocating for radical reductions in greenhouse gas emissions. These changes suggest that, over time, an international “climate club” could emerge. These trends, while fragmentary and so far unsuccessful in producing mandatory global-scale reforms, are consistent with the theoretical dynamic that has driven the national-scale reforms analyzed in the case studies.

Conclusion

Radical reforms tend to occur in polycentric ways, in multiple arenas at the same time. They also occur in polymorphous ways. In large political arenas, the shock of a focusing event almost immediately mobilizes citizens and leaders, so coalitions assemble without prolonged dialog. In smaller political arenas, labor-intensive persuasion by word of mouth has built the support necessary to enact the reforms. Although the link between radical reforms and eco-authoritarian politics seems plausible, the reforms examined here did not generate eco-authoritarian regimes. The reforms did encourage a corporativist style of governance in which local reform efforts worked in conjunction with reform efforts in larger political arenas. These experiences suggest that corporatism may provide particular advantages as a political strategy for confronting the challenges of climate change.