Uncertainty and ambiguity during a crisis and the challenge for public management: COVID-19 crisis management in the United States, the United Kingdom and Australia

This chapter assesses the dynamics of uncertainty and ambiguity during crisis management and the implications these have for crisis response success or failure in public management contexts. During crises, lack of information and policymaker bounded rationality heightens and worsens uncertainty. Ambiguity is similarly heightened during a crisis as new frames about crisis causes and solutions compete with unproductive or harmful older frames that reproduce poorer outcomes and inequitable power dynamics. The chapter demonstrates these dynamics and their implications with a comparative case study analysis of responses to COVID-19 in three Anglophone public management states: the United States, the United Kingdom and Australia. The comparison finds that whilst each country grappled with the dynamics of uncertainty and ambiguity under public management, the existence of an institutional venue for crisis cooperation, coordination and collaboration helped alleviate the worst effects of uncertainty and ambiguity during the acute phase of the COVID-19 crisis in 2020.