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During Disaster: Refining the Concept of Focusing Events to Better Explain Long-Duration Crises

2021; International Public Policy Association; Volume: 3; Issue: 1 Linguagem: Inglês

10.4000/irpp.1868

2706-6274

Rob A. DeLeo, Kristin Taylor, Deserai A. Crow, Thomas A. Birkland,

Policy Transfer and Learning

Potential focusing events are sudden, relatively rare events that reveal harm, or the potential for harm, are known to policymakers and the public virtually simultaneously, and work harms on a definable geographic area or community of interest.Focusing events can provide a powerful symbol of government failure, thereby allowing previously ignored issues to advance on the government agenda.We revisit this conceptualization of focusing events within the context of the COVID-19 pandemic.We show that, while the current COVID-19 pandemic has had a profound effect on both the media and government agendas, it lacks many of the elements used to differentiate focusing events from other theoretical constructs used to describe public problems.Specifically, our findings suggest that focusing event theory is ill equipped to describe slow-onset, long-duration disasters such as COVID-19.We develop a new typology for characterizing these types of events, which accounts for both the duration of the event as well as the magnitude or scale of the event's impact.