Adam Hannah, Jordan Tchilingirian, Linda Botterill and Katie Attwell
This blog post is based on the Evidence & Policy article, ‘The role of ‘non-knowledge’ in crisis policymaking: a proposal and agenda for future research’.
The ability to locate, comprehend, and discriminate between competing sources of knowledge is a major challenge for policymakers, particularly in times of crisis.
In our recent Evidence & Policy article, we argue that to better understand these ‘knowledge challenges’, policy scholarship should also consider ‘non-knowledge’. Examining non-knowledge involves investigating the strategies, practices and cultures that surround what is not known. Non-knowledge can result from genuine lack of knowledge or strategic avoidance.
Three forms of non-knowledge are most relevant for studies of public policy: amnesia, ignorance and misinformation.
Amnesia happens when knowledge that was once embedded within institutions disappears or fades away. The turnover of knowledgeable staff can lead to such losses, as can the failure to inscribe lessons into lasting institutional practices.
Ignorance, the second kind of non-knowledge, is not the inverse of knowledge. Sociologists such as Linsey McGoey have detailed how the ability to create doubt, to obscure or cast aside relevant knowledge, or make viable claims to ignorance may serve the interests of power. They may also be used as coping mechanisms by actors under pressure.
Finally, accepting misinformation (the subject of much academic and popular attention since the onset of the COVID-19 pandemic) involves actively believing false or misleading information, whether spread deliberately (disinformation) or unintentionally (misinformation).
In our research, we examined decision making around COVID-19 hotel quarantine in Melbourne, Australia. Outbreaks from Melbourne’s hotel quarantine programme sent the city into a strict lockdown lasting four months and resulted in 768 deaths. While this is a small number of deaths compared with outbreaks in other countries, relative to the rest of Australia in 2020 this was viewed as a major programme failure.
COVID spread into the community via private security staff employed in quarantine hotels, who also worked casual shifts at other public venues across the city. Three main instances of non-knowledge are identifiable in a subsequent inquiry report into the failure, which we analysed for this study. These forms of non-knowledge compounded upon each other, making it more difficult for policy actors to identify the risk of COVID transmission in the setting where the breach occurred.
First, no decision maker who gave evidence to the inquiry was able to recall who was responsible for the decision to use private security at the frontline (amnesia). The inquiry found no documented rationale or clear account of the decision-making process. As such, the ability to hold senior figures to account or identify specific lessons was limited.
Second, public managers setting up and managing the programme initially failed to understand the extent of risk inherent in utilising private security firms. The government awarded contracts to larger firms, who were then heavily reliant on smaller subcontractors for staff. The latter’s involvement hindered training and monitoring efforts. The extent of subcontracting was hardly a secret, but was apparently not well understood or scrutinised by key public managers.
Finally, the Department of Health of Human Services (DHHS) utilised a novel interpretation of ‘control agency’, as defined by the state of Victoria’s emergency management legislation. While other agencies and key actors understood DHHS to have central responsibility for pandemic management, including hotel quarantine, DHHS staff described relying upon a more nebulous ‘shared accountability’ model. Clarifying these responsibilities would have been fairly straightforward, yet this did not occur. The shared accountability model allowed DHHS to relieve some of its burdens in the short term, but it contributed to a lack of oversight of the hotel quarantine programme.
One explanation for the non-knowledge(s) at play in this case is that during a crisis, organisations and individual decision makers operate under conditions of bounded rationality. An alternative explanation, worthy of greater research attention, is that knowing less can help actors to achieve more. Knowing what not to know or remember, what not to report and what not to scrutinise can help to simplify complex scenarios (despite the risk of damaging consequences). It can also provide a source of plausible deniability when things do go wrong.
Adam Hannah, The University of Queensland (email: a.hannah@uq.edu.au; Twitter: @adamjhannah)
Jordan Tchilingirian, University of Bath (Twitter: @JordanTchil)
Linda Botterill, University of Canberra (Twitter: @lindacbotterill)
Katie Attwell, The University of Western Australia (@slatz_soapbox)
Image credit: Photo by Ante Hamersmit on Unsplash
Read the original research in Evidence & Policy:
Hannah, A. Tchilingirian, J. Botterill, L. and Attwell, K. (2022). The role of ‘non-knowledge’ in crisis policymaking: a proposal and agenda for future research. Evidence & Policy, 10.1332/174426421X16552882375377.
Also read a commentary in Evidence & Policy:
Howlett, M. (2022). Towards an agnotology of policy studies: identifying, understanding and addressing knowledge limitations in real world policymaking. Evidence & Policy, 10.1332/174426421X16607429323592.
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