Intra-crisis policy transfer: the case of COVID-19 in the UK

This chapter brings together the literatures on learning and policy transfer with material on crisis learning in order to assess policy transfer in the COVID-19 pandemic in the UK. The policy transfer literature focuses on ‘normal’ times, but there is little on policy transfer in a crisis, with its constituent elements of threat, uncertainty and urgency. Conversely, it is broadly argued that lesson-drawing is one of the most underdeveloped aspects of crisis management. The literature distinguishes learning across crises and learning within a crisis, or inter-crisis and inter-crisis management, and between ‘routine’ and ‘non-routine’ or ‘less routine’ crises. While there is some literature on inter-crisis learning from Pandemics, the material on intra-learning during Pandemics is limited. The main aim of the chapter is to explore the UK response to COVID-19 with respect to the crisis and lesson-drawing literatures. The material is primarily drawn from ‘scientific’ and ‘political’, and analysed by Interpretative Content Analysis. It is concluded given the difficulty of learning in the urgency, uncertainty and threat of a crisis situation, it is hardly surprising that in the case of COVID-19, high complexity and limited fungibility intra-crisis policy transfer from the past and from abroad was limited.