‘Pushing the crisis button’? Temporal space and institutional synchronization in Finland's COVID-19 governance

The article examines how the temporal space of a crisis is constructed, synchronized and contested within crisis governance. Drawing on conceptual history and recent scholarship on crisis temporalities, we introduce the concept of ‘institutional synchronization’ to capture the active, precarious work of aligning diverse governance actors into a shared temporal framework. Through an in-depth case study of the Finnish COVID-19 response, utilizing situational reports, government policies and parliamentary debates, we map how this synchronization was achieved across expert, governmental and parliamentary domains. Our analysis identifies two core mechanisms of temporal alignment: ‘situational temporal framing’ (operationalized via the metaphor of epidemic waves) and ‘data-driven presentism’, which anchored decision-making in a continuously updated ‘now’. While these mechanisms effectively forged a synchronized present at the outset of the pandemic, they inherently marginalized long-term societal timescapes. As the crisis prolonged and its scope widened beyond a narrow epidemiological emergency, this temporal friction resulted in political contestation and the ultimate fracturing of the synchronized order. By demonstrating that crisis synchronization is not an automatic societal alignment but a linguistically mediated and highly fragile institutional effort, this article contributes to our understanding of chronopolitics and the limits of crisis governance in an era of polycrisis.