By Dr Neil Mortimer, Institute for Diplomacy and International Affairs, Loughborough University London

I am delighted to share that my first peer-reviewed article, Crisis Micro-Learning: A Framework for Understanding the Micro-Flow of Policy Learning and Australia’s COVID-19 Response, has been published in the Australian Journal of Public Administration (AJPA).

The article draws on my PhD at the Institute for Diplomacy and International Affairs (IDIA), where I examined how governments learn and adapt during times of crisis under the supervision of Professor Helen Drake, Dr Tim Oliver, and Dr Nicola Chelotti. The paper was co-authored with Dr Nicholas Bromfield from the University of New South Wales (UNSW), whose expertise in Australian public administration added valuable depth and perspective to the study.

Much of the research behind this paper was carried out during my Visiting Fellowship at the Australian National University (ANU) in Canberra. This opportunity was supported by Loughborough University’s Doctoral Researcher Support Fund, which helps doctoral researchers extend their training, build collaborations, and enhance their future career prospects. The fellowship allowed me to conduct extensive fieldwork, interviewing senior political decision-makers, civil servants, and expert advisers across Australia, including a former Prime Minister and Chief Medical Officer. These conversations offered a rare, first-hand view of how learning and decision-making took place within government during one of the most complex crises in recent history.

The COVID-19 pandemic required governments to make rapid, high-stakes decisions amid extraordinary uncertainty. My research asked a simple but revealing question: how do political leaders, officials, and experts actually learn in these moments? Drawing on more than fifty elite interviews, the study focuses on the micro-level of crisis learning, the small but critical interactions through which knowledge is exchanged, interpreted, and transformed inside government.

In the paper, we present a new framework called crisis micro-learning, which traces how learning evolves through three connected stages: context setting, learning needs, and learning practice. By following these stages, we show that early in the pandemic, learning in Australia was highly collaborative and adaptive. Expert advice flowed efficiently through institutions such as the Australian Health Protection Principal Committee (AHPPC) and the National Cabinet, enabling coordinated and timely action across federal and state levels.

Over time, however, these same structures that initially supported effective coordination began to limit flexibility. Decision-making became more politicised, and opportunities for adaptation narrowed. As the crisis evolved, certain forms of expertise were also sidelined, particularly those relating to children’s wellbeing, education, and mental health. This narrowing of advisory input meant that some societal impacts of the pandemic were not fully accounted for in real time. This pattern, known as path dependency, occurs when systems find it difficult to adjust even as new information becomes available. The finding serves as a reminder that learning mechanisms must remain open, inclusive, and adaptable if governments are to sustain responsiveness during prolonged crises.

Beyond the Australian case, my PhD also examined how similar processes unfolded in the United Kingdom’s COVID-19 response, revealing contrasting modes of learning and the different ways expertise was used within government. I am now developing this part of the research into a companion article that will extend the comparative analysis and deepen our understanding of how learning operates in different political contexts.

The full article is open access and available to read online, supported by the University’s commitment to facilitating open access research.

Read the article here – https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10.1111/1467-8500.70025