Lightnews — Scholar-powered news

Nicholas Bromfield

@nicholasbromfi1.bsky.social

960 followers 680 following 1.1K posts

Academic. Political scientist researching public policy / admin & occasionally foreign policy via auspol + comparative analyses.

Settler living on unceded Dharug country.

Posts Replies Media Videos

Nicholas Bromfield

@nicholasbromfi1.bsky.social

Thanks Daniel and Al for a great panel and presentations! I presented on work in progress with Neil Mortimer 👇

This builds upon our recent @ausjpa.bsky.social paper and new framework for understanding crisis policy learning: doi.org/10.1111/1467...

A title slide: Designing coherent policy learning: evidence from the UK and Australia during COVID19 by Neil Mortimer and Nicholas Bromfield

November 27, 2025 at 11:06 PM

Nicholas Bromfield

@nicholasbromfi1.bsky.social

November 17, 2025 at 4:10 AM

Nicholas Bromfield

@nicholasbromfi1.bsky.social

Uh, I guess I liked these ones (mostly at the time, some I came to later)?

November 17, 2025 at 4:10 AM

Nicholas Bromfield

@nicholasbromfi1.bsky.social

Jayzuz this is real weekend at bernies stuff

November 6, 2025 at 3:59 AM

Nicholas Bromfield

@nicholasbromfi1.bsky.social

Everything’s fine!

November 3, 2025 at 9:31 AM

Nicholas Bromfield

@nicholasbromfi1.bsky.social

In particular, a focus on health -> a lack of focus on other important knowledge areas. This, interacting with Western policy transfer and the Morrison gov's noted 'woman problem', limited learning inputs as the pandemic progressed

But Australian learning also came from abroad. A positively noted subtheme was the way insider actors actively reached out to international organisations and alliances for learning, especially the Five Eyes intelligence alliance, comprising Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the United Kingdom, and the United States. Morrison also noted his learning relationship with other countries, naming several Western states:
I was part of a group of other prime ministers from around the world that we were linking up on regular sort of calls… [Morrison named Austria, Norway, New Zealand, Israel, Czechia, France]… And we were swapping notes on how we were managing it.

This suggests that learning from abroad was especially from culturally similar Western countries (An et al. 2024). This Western learning, in combination with the success Australia had in controlling case numbers in the first half of 2020, reinforced the health-focused consensus among learning insiders—in comparison to much of the West, Australia had successfully controlled COVID-19.

However, health-led consensus-making also produced problem definitions and a learning process centred on health data, modelling, and advice, to the detriment of other forms of important knowledge (Dunlop et al., 2024, p. 1988):
Obviously, the evidence and the mathematical model… was really the kind of primary go-to in terms of informing the implementation of the programme (Public Health and Vaccine Policy Academic).

At the Doherty level, we didn't really give a lot of thought to the different populations affected. We thought more about the science, but less about inequalities (Public Health Researcher and Academic).

Another notable subtheme identified unprompted by several women, and tacitly acknowledged by several men, was that this epistemic community was also highly gendered, reflecting wider controversies about gender relations under the Morrison government (Bromfield et al., 2024; Palmieri et al., 2021). One interviewee described …

October 26, 2025 at 9:03 PM

Nicholas Bromfield

@nicholasbromfi1.bsky.social

In Aus, early success was enabled by learning from Black Summer, listening to (health) experts and by adaptive institutions, like National Cabinet.

But this set a path, that became hard to diverge from.

In this learning practice stage, a mixed picture emerged of the governance and implementation practices to achieve comprehension of the crisis and understanding of the means to address it. In the first half of 2020, the insider health-focused epistemic community learnt effectively, demonstrating trust between actors, iterating learning and processes, coordinating inter-governmental action based on expert advice to National Cabinet, and, consequently, achieving comparatively successful outcomes regarding containment of COVID-19. But the critical junctures set in earlier stages continued to interact with the domains of actors, process, and institutions in this practice stage, flowing and accreting in a further narrowing of the range of potential learning possibilities and creating path dependencies that hindered the incorporation of diverse advice and adaptation of policies. This interacted with context factors like containment failures, lockdowns, and governance fatigue, and the predominant mode of learning consequently shifted from epistemic learning to bargaining learning in National Cabinet, as states and the Commonwealth contested and brokered agreement on policy action. These learning hindrances and failures highlight several crisis micro-learning implications, as outlined in the discussion section.

October 26, 2025 at 9:03 PM

Nicholas Bromfield

@nicholasbromfi1.bsky.social

When crisis learning unfolds, it interacts with context, actors, process and institutions. As it does so, it narrows uncertainty into solutions and action. This can be more or less effective.

COVID-19 has intensified interest in crisis policy learning, yet the micro-level interactions among political, bureaucratic, and expert actors remain underexplored. We conceptualise an ideal-type framework for the micro-flow of crisis learning, an ordinarily epistemic and context-specific process of individual-level interactions, where lessons co-constitute with the spaces of actors, processes, and institutions, travel across them, and iteratively build as they flow over time. We additionally introduce a matrix to trace the ideal micro-flow of crisis learning and identify challenges to this ideal. We demonstrate the framework's analytical utility by applying it to Australia's COVID-19 acute phase (2020–2021), mobilising qualitative evidence from semi-structured interviews with 34 Australian politicians, senior public servants, and policy experts, including former Prime Minister Scott Morrison, Health Minister Greg Hunt, and Chief Medical Officers Brendan Murphy and Paul Kelly. We find that Australia's initial COVID-19 micro-learning was open and effective, facilitated by adaptive institutions like National Cabinet and informed by inter-crisis lessons from the Black Summer bushfires. However, as the pandemic progressed, learning became increasingly politicised and path dependent, impacting policy effectiveness. We therefore highlight how this micro-flow of crisis learning impacts broader policy outcomes and provide insight into what enhances and hinders crisis learning for future crisis management.

October 26, 2025 at 9:03 PM

Nicholas Bromfield

@nicholasbromfi1.bsky.social

Heard you were making sandwiches for the kid

Barrel the Aussie bulldog, hopefully hanging around the kitchen for snacks

October 23, 2025 at 9:20 PM

Nicholas Bromfield

@nicholasbromfi1.bsky.social

Earnest posting for a second - all my love and appreciation to Beatdisc for 30(!!) yrs of western Sydney support of music ❤️

Been buying music there for, not quite all, but damn close to all that time 🫶