新冠肺炎危機促進了政策變革嗎?世紀大疫中政策科學研究的國際視野

新冠肺炎疫情蔓延全球超過兩年，對各國的經濟和民生造成巨大衝擊，客觀上也為政策科學研究者觀察特大型危機事件對政策變遷的影響創造了有如自然實驗般的研究場景。公共政策是否變遷，因何變遷,如何變遷？這些一直都是主流政策科學理論致力於回答的重要理論問題。本文精選2022年在國際著名學術期刊Policy and Society: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Policy Research（簡稱Policy and Society）發表的幾篇重要學術論文，結合自身的理論思考，總結近兩年來國際政策科學學術界許多學者試圖回答的重要問題：這場新冠肺炎危機作為史無前例的外生性衝擊是否促進了政策變革?近兩年湧現出的一系列政策科學研究發現，這場危機雖然尚未帶來既有公共政策的範式性變革，但確實發揮了“政策加速器”的強大功能,使很多疫情之前的重要改革得以掃清障礙，伴隨滾雪球效應,未來可能出現深遠的政策變革。本文還對2020—2022年春國際主流公共政策與公共管理學術期刊的新冠肺炎疫情相關研究做了文獻概括與趨勢解讀，並向廣大讀者推介三位歐美學者對路徑依賴理論與危機事件研究的新成果。
The spread of the COVID-19 pandemic has brought about tremendous shocks to
the world’s economy and welfare since 2020. In the meantime, it has also offered a
“natural experiment-like” setting to examine how mega crises affect policy change, a key topic of interest in mainstream policy sciences. This essay selects several important contributions from Policy and Society: An Interdisciplinary Journal of Policy Research, one of the premier international journals in the field, and attempts to answer a critical question: has this current pandemic, as an unprecedented exogenous shock, fueled policy change? This essay suggests that although COVID-19 has not yet yielded a paradigm shift in public policy worldwide, it has indeed been serving as a powerful “policy accelerator” that clears hurdles for many important policy reforms that began prior to the pandemic. This “acceleration” paves the way for profound policy changes in the future through a snowball effect. This essay also offers a brief literature overview of the research contributions in mainstream international journals on public policy and administration that were published between 2020 and spring 2022. A new theoretical perspective on path dependency and crises in this essay is introduced to Chinese-speaking readers. Copyright © 2022 清華大學.