Clemence Bouchat, Sonja Blum, Ellen Fobé and Marleen Brans
This blog post is based on the Evidence & Policy article, ‘Policy advisory bodies during crises: a scoping review of the COVID-19 literature in Europe’.
The number of academic papers written about advice and policymaking increased following the start of the COVID-19 pandemic. When this kind of scholarship boom happens, it is easy to miss the forest for the trees. In our Evidence & Policy paper, ‘Policy advisory bodies during crises: a scoping review of the COVID-19 literature in Europe’, we clarify what actually came out of this new scholarship. We focus on the structures that formally provided policy advice to European governments during the pandemic, such as government agencies, ad hoc taskforces and research institutes.
Our review spanned 981 academic outputs published between 2020 and 2023. The review protocol follows the Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA) guidelines. In the end, a corpus of 59 publications informed our findings.. Our corpus was mostly composed of qualitative studies, studies about the UK and Sweden, and studies that examined the first half of 2020. We found that the academic community has mostly focused on advisory body composition, body structure and the advisory process.
COVID-19 advisory bodies initially consisted of medical scientists and practitioners (including virologists, epidemiologists and immunologists), and social scientists were neglected for at least the first year of the pandemic. In some contexts, even public health experts were excluded in favour of clinical experts. As government responses became more multisectoral, the advisory infrastructure changed: some advisory bodies became less prominent, others were dissolved altogether and replaced. Others yet saw their mandates broadened to accommodate the diversification of policies. In several countries, advisory body members were directly appointed by a high-ranking member of the executive, typically a minister. Generally, the nomination process was not completely transparent.
Countries that had a strong tradition of policy advice and detailed emergency protocols tended to rely more on established advisory bodies during the crisis (e.g. Robert Koch Institute in Germany, RIVM in the Netherlands). Conversely, countries with weaker policy advisory infrastructure primarily received advice from ad hoc advisory bodies created during the crisis (e.g. GECKO in Austria, COVID-19 emergency taskforce in Italy). France stands out as having a highly institutionalised public health advisory system, but relying heavily on newly-formed advisory bodies.
The autonomy of advisory bodies from governments was an understudied topic in the COVID-19 advisory body literature. While in Italy, Bosnia Herzegovina and Switzerland, publications found that advisory bodies produced both solicited and unsolicited advice, in the UK, the main advisory body could only advise on matters dictated by the government. Advisory bodies struggled to reconcile political and scientific logics. Whereas governments sought scientific consensus, experts were hard-pressed to formulate simple recommendations confidently. As time passed, experts increasingly voiced disagreements among themselves and with policymakers.
The advisory process was largely an opaque one. The evidence used to inform decisions was not always presented to the public, which led to some backlash about this lack of transparency. The politicisation of expertise was also apparent in a number of countries, including the UK, Denmark, France and Germany, where policymakers cherry picked advice to legitimise their decisions. One way or another, recommendations had a relatively strong impact on policy decisions in most contexts. However, there were also instances where governments ignored recommendations. The bodies’ influence varied according to the given advisory body (socioeconomic experts were less influential than medical experts) and the stage of the crisis (advice was more influential during the beginning of the crisis).
We are in an era of ‘polycrisis’, where international conflicts, socio-environmental disasters, and public health emergencies consistently coexist. Now more than ever it is important to learn from the study of crisis policymaking to become more resilient to other crises. Our review will help scholars grasp the key insights of the COVID-19 advisory body scholarship, and understand where gaps in the research remain.
Image credit: Photo by Andy Holmes on Unsplash
Clemence Bouchat
KU Leuven, Belgium. Email: clemence.bouchat@kuleuven.be
Sonja Blum
Universität Bielefeld, Germany
Ellen Fobé
KU Leuven, Belgium
Marleen Brans
KU Leuven, Belgium
Read the original research in Evidence & Policy:
Bouchat, C. Blum, S. Fobé, E. & Brans, M. (2024). Policy advisory bodies during crises: a scoping review of the COVID-19 literature in Europe. Evidence & Policy, DOI: 10.1332/17442648Y2024D000000031. OPEN ACCESS
If you enjoyed this blog post, you may also be interested in reading:
How did UK policymaking in the COVID-19 response use science? Evidence from scientific advisers
Examining research systems and models for local government: a systematic review
Disclaimer: The views and opinions expressed on this blog site are solely those of the original blog post authors and other contributors. These views and opinions do not necessarily represent those of the Policy Press and/or any/all contributors to this site.
Evidence & Policy Blog 