The world is in the grip of a crisis that stands unprecedented in living memory. The COVID-19 pandemic is urgent, global in scale, and massive in impacts. Following Harold D. Lasswell's goal for the policy sciences to offer insights into unfolding phenomena, this commentary draws on the lessons of the policy sciences literature to understand the dynamics related to COVID-19. We explore the ways in which scientific and technical expertise, emotions, and narratives influence policy decisions and shape relationships among citizens, organizations, and governments. We discuss varied processes of adaptation and change, including learning, surges in policy responses, alterations in networks (locally and globally), implementing policies across transboundary issues, and assessing policy success and failure. We conclude by identifying understudied aspects of the policy sciences that deserve attention in the pandemic's aftermath.

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While there is consensus on the essential importance of public engagement in further developments of biobanking, the related investigation of public views predominantly focused on the concerns expressed by the publics, and the concrete format of public engagement, without delving into the ways these concerns are constituted. In this paper, we synthetize recent research on public engagement in order to describe the constitution of respective concerns as 'engagement of knowledges'. By shifting from 'publics' to 'knowledges', we draw attention to the interaction dynamic through which citizens embed the new knowledge they receive during expert interactions into the stock of knowledge they already possess. Analyzing our recent investigation of public views on biobanking in the form of citizen-expert panels (CEPs) in the Austrian infrastructure of biobanks (BBMRI.at), we trace this dynamic through citizens' recurrent concerns that the research and consent practices related to biobanking should be "appropriate".

ISBN 978 1 78347 234 5 (cased) ISBN 978 1 78347 235 2 (eBook)

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Biobanks have evolved, and their governance procedures have undergone important transformations. Our paper examines this issue by focusing on the perspective of the professionals working in management or scientific roles in research-based biobanks, who have an important impact on shaping these transformations. In particular, it highlights that recent advances in molecular medicine and genomic research have raised a range of ethical, legal and societal implications (ELSI) related to biobank-based research, impacting directly on regulations and local practices of informed consent (IC), private-public partnerships (PPPs), and engagement of participants. In our study, we investigate the ways that these concerns influence biobanking practices and assess the level of satisfaction of the cross-national biobanking research communities with the ELSI related procedures that are currently in place. We conducted an online survey among biobankers and researchers to investigate secondary use of data, informing and/or re-contacting participants, sharing of data with third parties from industry, participant engagement, and collaboration with industrial partners. Findings highlight the need for a more inclusive and transparent biobanking practice where biobanks are seen in a more active role in providing information and communicating with participants; the need to improve the current IC procedures and the role of biobanks in sharing of samples and data with industry partners and different countries, and the need for practical, tangible and hands-on ethical and legal guidance.

“Tempest in a teapot” is an idiom that refers to a problem that has been blown out of proportion, which is how we see the supposedly divisive relationship between two research traditions: mainstream policy process studies and interpretive policy studies. In this commentary, we explore both research traditions, comparing and contrasting their views of public policy and policy processes, uses of theories, and approaches to research. Our aim is not to unite them or reject points of debate. Instead, we offer strategies for more productive collaborations, including side-by-side research, integrative research, engagement in constructive discussions of research techniques, and applied research.

The article suggests that we can develop a better understanding of the dynamic of governing in social policies through the lens of ‘intimacy’. Intimacy – a deep personal knowledge about body and mind which changes during the dying process – encompasses validation of one’s emotional experience. In that way, intimacy links the emotional content of dying to discursive dimensions of dignity usually associated with end-of-life care. The analysis describes how the Czech organization Homecoming has constructed its concept of end-of-life care on intimacy, and in so doing, steers specific meanings in the policy field. Hence, intimacy suggests paying more attention to modes of ‘sharing a meaning’, through which policies come to be. The article mediates between psychosocial theorizing of emotions, poststructuralist policy analysis, and current debates on governing in health care and social policies in order to uncover the role of intimacy in the dynamics of governing.