Intra-crisis lesson-drawing in real-time: the pandemic lessons available in the UK media during the first six months of Covid-19

Abstract

This article assesses, using a framework derived from lesson-drawing, policy transfer and crisis research, the lessons offered by the media from abroad and from the past in the UK COVID-19 Pandemic. The lesson-drawing literature focuses on a series of steps and questions associated with the 'fungibility' of lessons, and the crisis literature, with its constituent elements of threat, uncertainty and between 'routine' and 'non-routine' or 'less routine' crises. The paper utilises the LexisNexis Database in order to provide a content analysis of newspaper coverage of lessons offered, giving analysis in 'real time' of the source of potential lessons (eg past pandemics or other nations), and the type of lessons (eg copying or instruments). Its analysis highlights the complexity of lesson-drawing in 'real time' in a period of considerable uncertainty, where knowledge is contested, and is subject to change over time.

Rights

© The Author(s), 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press. This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution licence (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

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Identifiers

DOI

https://doi.org/10.1017/S1474746421000610

Repository URI

https://strathprints.strath.ac.uk/77616/