Learning and reform in the aftermath of COVID-19: The Swedish experience of learning from a creeping crisis

The purpose of this article is to use prior public policy and administration research on policy learning in relation to crises to assess the Swedish government's learning in response to COVID-19. To make sense of the learning processes at play, the pandemic is framed as a creeping crisis. The analysis is temporally organized according to conceptualizations of inter- and intracrisis learning and post crisis reform, and further focused by known challenges to crisis learning from previous research. The study underscores the importance of shedding light on challenges to crisis learning in order to be better prepared when future crises occur. More specifically, the analysis shows how internal disagreements on the objectives of the response strategy and polarisation on how to handle the crisis restrained the Swedish government's ability to learn from crisis experiences ( intercrisis learning ). Although instances of policy learning during the crisis ( intracrisis learning ) are observed, prerequisites for reform are limited due to interorganisational collaboration difficulties, politicisation of the crisis management initiative as a whole, and emerging challenges crowding out the agenda.