Pandemic challenges for public managers: juggling parallel crisis playbooks

COVID-19 has drawn public managers everywhere into the vortex of the biggest and most prolonged acute transboundary crisis of the twenty-first century. Much attention has gone to the tragic choices that political leaders have had to make in this crisis. In this chapter, we focus on the challenges faced by public managers, whose roles are different and in some ways even harder to fulfill. We introduce two distinct action logics that may inform how public managers approach the key tasks of crisis navigation: a technical-managerial and a strategic-political playbook. We illustrate how public management researchers can detect these different action logics and the competing imperatives they generate in the way governments and public managers governed the pandemic, focusing in particular on the challenges of sense-making, decision-making and meaning-making.