While both short-term and long-term crises are inevitable in public administration, management's effectiveness in handling them is critical. Surprisingly, the public tends to forget the cause of most crises. The public would hardly remember events leading to every public crisis in most situations. However, how the matter is handled remains in their memory. Besides being a memorable aspect, the intervention used determines whether an organization would bounce back to full operations (Bundy et al., 2017). Thus, the management should focus on mitigating the crisis as effectively as possible to resume normalcy. Nonetheless, during crisis management, stakeholders should be regularly updated (Bhaduri, 2019). The updates should cover the crisis progress, effectiveness of the mitigating approaches, and stakeholders' observance of the crisis-control measures.
The effectiveness of the public administration policy response depends on several factors. For instance, the magnitude of the change expected at the end of the situation. Other factors include financial and human capital, as well as the target population group. However, public participation strategies are imperative to ensure citizens are properly involved in implementing public policies (Fan et al., 2020). These include debate, dialogues, and analysis, besides other negotiation methods that allow the public to contribute their perspectives and promote an effective relationship between citizens and other stakeholders such as the government. Notably, it is important to note that the change implementation during a calamity such as the Covid-19 pandemic is a process. It entails problem definition, identification, and analysis of alternatives, policy adoption, execution, and evaluation.
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Although public administration is central to governance structure, poor policies, and ineffective leadership influence how a crisis is handled negatively (Abd-Aziz et al., 2015). In this case, policies should be flexible, and leaders should be effectively decisive. Leaders should be updated on current leadership trends on calamities. Lakshman (2006) presents that regular training programs should be formulated to build quality leadership. According to the author, regular training ensures evaluation and review of bureaucratic strategies and old public policies that could impede the swift responses needed during a pandemic. Furthermore, quality performance indicators and standards should be set to assess and evaluate the efficiency of the public administration's response system (Iacovino et al., 2017).
A major uptake from the current Covid-19 pandemic is that while the impact of some challenges might be minimal, for others, it could be relatively massive. The Covid-19 pandemic's effects cut across different spheres of human life, including economics, work, social culture, public health, and public administration's capacity to manage crises. The Covid-19 pandemic has shown that citizens may opt to defy government measures against a calamity. For instance, in the United States, 4 out of 10 Americans observe the state governments' social distancing directives (Moore et al., 2020). This defiance does not imply public arrogance but wanting governance capacity and low governance legitimacy.
Following the lessons illustrated in the applied project, focusing on citizen participation will be integral in mitigating public crises. The public involvement will ensure the creation of idea databases to identify the most effective alternatives. It will also boost the people's ownership of the policy strategies formulated, thus enhancing compliance. Another way forward is regular training for public administrators to ensure they are well equipped with modern crisis management methods. Formulation of flexible policies to accommodate public views and situational changes will also be integrated into the management of a public crisis. The necessity for flexible policies and regular training is informed by the need to discard ineffective ways to impede the swift response required during crisis management. Finally, building public trust in the government would be promoted, and resource mobilization was conducted to enhance governance legitimacy and capacity.
References
Abd-Aziz, M. A., Ab-Rahman, H., Alam, M. M., & Said, J. (2015). Enhancement of the accountability of public sectors through integrity system, internal control system and leadership practices: A review study. Procedia Economics and Finance, 28 , 163-169.
Bhaduri, R. M. (2019). Leveraging culture and leadership in crisis management. European Journal of Training and Development .
Bundy, J., Pfarrer, M. D., Short, C. E., & Coombs, W. T. (2017). Crises and crisis management: Integration, interpretation, and research development. Journal of Management , 43 (6), 1661-92.
Fan, D., Li, Y., Liu, W., Yue, X. G., & Boustras, G. (2020). Weaving public health and safety nets to respond the COVID-19 pandemic. Safety Science , 34 , 105058.
Iacovino, N. M., Barsanti, S., & Cinquini, L. (2017). Public organizations between old public administration, new public management and public governance: the case of the Tuscany region. Public Organization Review, 17 (1), 61-82.
Lakshman, C. (2006). A theory of leadership for quality: Lessons from TQM for leadership theory. Total Quality Management & Business Excellence, 17 (1), 41-60.
Moore, R. C., Lee, A., Hancock, J. T., Halley, M., & Linos, E. (2020). Experience with social distancing early in the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States: Implications for Public Health Messaging. medRxiv . doi: https://doi.org/10.1101/2020.04.08.20057067
