Post-crisis learning in public agencies: what do we learn from both actors and institutions?

ABSTRACT

Post-crisis learning is a challenge for public organizations, and especially for agencies which handle health and environmental risks. This article investigates how the Belgian Food Safety Agency settles mechanisms for drawing lessons from crises while ensuring day-to-day routine. The framework by Crozier and Friedberg is used as a guideline to consider both the actors and the system, both strategic games and institutional constraints. The article helps in understanding the institutional logics underpinning how the public organizations learn from societal risk and crisis. Centralization and openness appear to be guiding principles, resulting from the learning games. They also generate tensions that the actors’ games manage by defining new rules for cooperation. Both the practice (through our case study) and the theory (combining actors and institutions) broaden the lens of policy analysis for what policy-making at organizational level concerns.

KEYWORDS:

• Agency
• public organization
• public policy
• multidisciplinary research
• risk
• learning

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the authors.

Notes on contributors

Nathalie Schiffino is Full Professor of Political Science at the Université catholique de Louvain. She earned a Ph.D. in government and public administration. Her research and teaching concern democracy and policy analysis with a focus on risk and crisis.

Laurent Taskin is Professor of Human Resource and Organization Studies at the Louvain School of Management at the Université catholique de Louvain (Belgium). His research focuses on critical approaches to management in the context of new forms of work organisation and knowledge management.

Céline Donis, Ph.D. in Management (UCL), is a member of the Louvain School of Management Research Institute. Her research adopts a spatial and critical perspective to study new forms of work organization.

Julien Raone, Ph.D. in Political Science (UCL), is a member of the Institute of Labour Sciences. At the crossroad of political science and organization studies, his research is anchored in a critical perspective on public management.

Notes

1. Interviews were conducted in two Belgian national languages (French and Dutch). Here they are translated.

Additional information

Funding

The authors thank the Belgian French-speaking community that funded the ‘Actions de recherche concertées’ (ARC) [ARC_10_15_034] research project entitled ‘Organisational regulations of societal risks’. Along with the invaluable support of the Université catholique de Louvain (UCL), the five-year research grant made this publication possible.