Viewpoint Symposium: Pandemic Crisis Management: Responding to COVID-19 through Public Administration

COVID-19 Viewpoint Symposium: Scope and Objectives

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Given the overwhelming challenge posed by the COVID-19 pandemic, and the varied, innovative, and inspirational response by governments around the world, we issue this urgent call to public administration practitioners and scholars to report on novel approaches to coping with the pandemic, to offer comparative analysis, and even preliminary indications of failed approaches. In order to expedite the processing and publication of manuscripts, our focus at this time is on potential contributions to our Viewpoint feature that can bring to light significant, timely, salient, and impactful observations in 3,000 to 4,000 words. Given the short time frame, limited data available, and ongoing nature of the crisis, we seek practice-oriented observations that may offer insight that will inform practice and have the potential to shape future research.

PAR’s Viewpoint feature is geared toward stimulating a dialogue between scholars and practitioners in the public administration community.  PAR serves as a critical instrument for bridging these communities, and our Viewpoint feature offers an opportunity to engage the practice community in a novel way to increase involvement and participation.  For the COVID-19 Symposium, we seek manuscripts from key stakeholders that are directly impacted by the pandemic crisis, and may include such topics as: health care, emergency management, crisis management, collaborative governance, network management, intergovernmental relations, leadership, social equity, risk management, hazard mitigation, public budgeting, finance, procurement, and so on. Manuscripts should be approximately 3,000-4,000 words in length and actively engage both scholars and practitioners in a conversation regarding pandemic-related issues facing the broader public and nonprofit communities.

The purpose of the COVID-19 Viewpoint symposium is to inspire and share early and preliminary lessons emerging from the public administration and policy communities directly related to this global crisis. We are especially interested in pieces that help shed light on those places hardest hit by the pandemic, including, China, Italy, and the United States. Moreover, we would like to hear from communities that have seemingly been better able to cope with or contain the spread of the virus, including, Japan, Singapore, and Taiwan. While too early to definitively characterize any approach as “evidence-based,” we certainly expect to find “promising” or “best practices” as well as information disconfirming certain approaches (Jennings & Hall 2012).

Potential papers could address a variety of topics such as:  

• Procurement in times of disaster
• Dealing with widespread rather than targeted need
• Early impacts on the nonprofit and voluntary sector, resulting from drastic loss of endowments or investment income
• Disaster preparedness
• Budgeting for disaster
• Intergovernmental Decision making
• Social Equity
• Leadership
• Co-Production, Networked Governance, Public/Private Partnership
• Globalization
• Devolution
• Behavioral Public Administration
• Evidence-Based Practice

Timeline and Editorial Process:

In order to process the manuscripts in a timely manner, we are asking author(s) to submit their manuscripts by May 1.  We will then undertake an expeditious approach to the review process, handling the manuscripts internally by utilizing feedback from members of our editorial team as well as authors submitting to the symposium.   Our editorial team will provide further developmental feedback for authors to incorporate in their Viewpoint submissions for edits to occur before final publication.  While publication is not guaranteed, we will be able to post qualified manuscripts that do not gain acceptance into the final Viewpoint symposium on PAR’s Bully Pulpit Blog. With this attenuated timeline, we expect pieces to publish in the COVID-19 Viewpoint symposium in the next issue of PAR, issue 80(4): July/August.

Submission Guidelines: All submissions must be submitted through our Editorial Manager system here: https://www.editorialmanager.com/par/default.aspx. Please select “COVID-19 VP” in the dropdown list for manuscript type.

Any questions may be directed to the editors, Jeremy Hall and Paul Battaglio, at: editor@publicadministrationreview.com

Manuscripts received after the May 1, 2020 deadline cannot be guaranteed full consideration.

Citation:

Edward T. Jennings, Jr., Jeremy L. Hall, Evidence-Based Practice and the Use of Information in State Agency Decision Making, Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory, Volume 22, Issue 2, April 2012, Pages 245–266