Lesson-drawing for the UK Government during the COVID-19 Pandemic: a comparison of political, scientific and media lenses

This chapter brings together the literatures on policy learning and lesson-drawing on the one hand, and intra-crisis learning on the other, in order to examine the UK's response to the COVID-19 pandemic. The policy learning literature explores issues such as what lessons were learned by whom. The lesson-drawing literature examines the content and process of policy transfer, focusing on the 'fungibility' or 'transferability' of lessons. However, most existing work is based on ‘ordinary’ policy making rather than 'extraordinary' or 'crisis' policy making characterised by elements of threat, urgency and uncertainty such as that during the pandemic.