From SARS to COVID‐19: Crisis Governance and Institutional Learning in Taiwan

ABSTRACT This article examines how Taiwan's crisis governance evolved from the SARS outbreak of 2003 to the COVID‐19 pandemic of 2020–2023, tracing the institutional learning mechanisms that transformed a widely criticized governance failure into an internationally recognized model of pandemic preparedness. Employing a diachronic comparative case study design, the analysis is structured around the five crisis leadership tasks—sense‐making, decision‐making, meaning‐making, terminating (accountability), and learning—supplemented by a governance capacity and legitimacy model and by a framework of crisis‐induced learning. Drawing on a documentary analysis of governmental, oversight, and secondary sources spanning 2003–2023, the study advances and assesses three analytical propositions concerning the nature, mechanisms, and boundaries of inter‐crisis institutional learning. The findings demonstrate that SARS triggered double‐loop learning manifested in fundamental legislative, organizational, and operational reforms—including the establishment of the National Health Command Center, revised communicable disease legislation, and systematic infection control protocols—that directly enhanced governance performance during COVID‐19's early phase. However, the later phase of COVID‐19 revealed three boundary conditions of inter‐crisis learning: crisis‐type specificity, temporal distance, and institutional scope. The article contributes to crisis management theory by extending the crisis‐induced learning framework to cross‐pandemic governance and proposing an additional analytical dimension—the scope of learning—while introducing a democratic developmental polity into a comparative literature dominated by Western and centralized governance contexts.