Policy & Politics sponsored an international symposium on Ambiguity and Crisis: Disasters, Governance and Social Risk in February 2016 convened by Editorial Advisory Board member Professor Nikolaos Zahariadis from the University of Alabama at Birmingham, US (pictured below) and Professor Tom Birkland from North Carolina State University, US. You can read more about it in their article below.
While ambiguity is a fact of public life, scholarship on its implications for public policy is not yet well developed. The gap is particularly deep during periods of crisis because of rapid and turbulent change and the lack of adequate information and limited information processing capacities. We have a good understanding of the strategic use of ambiguity but do not fully comprehend its implications for creating winners and losers in public policy.
On February 28, 2016, Tom Birkland and Nikolaos Zahariadis convened a two-day symposium on ambiguity and its effects during crises. The symposium explored the implications of ambiguity on policy making as conceptualized through the multiple streams approach (MSA) during man-made crises and natural disasters. The approach draws inspiration from March and Olsen’s garbage can model of organizational choice and John Kingdon’s agenda setting framework. MSA contends there is a “right” (and “wrong”) time to propose solutions to pressing public problems. The likelihood of any one idea becoming official government policy has as much to do with when Continue reading
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