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.

This paper investigates the beliefs and framing strategies of interest groups during a period of policy

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Policy scholarship has long sought to understand the role of knowledge and information in the policy process. Of the actors, institutions, and resources involved in shaping policy processes and outcomes, media and narratives have been incorporated into empirical policy scholarship and theories with varying success. The Narrative Policy Framework (NPF) is a framework through which scholars can bring analysis of narratives into studies of policy making. The NPF moves the field forward in understanding the role of narratives, communication, and stakeholder beliefs in the policy process, while at the same time striving for theoretical rigor. We embed the discussion of frames and narratives in the NPF to provide an empirical and theoretical cohesion to our understanding of media and public policy and then provide a brief empirical example of how such an integration may prove fruitful for policy scholars.The media and public policy scholarship has long wrestled with the problem of how much influence to accord to media as an actor in the policy process. Media interact with and influence the policy process in two paramount ways: (1) by selecting issues of importance to highlight to the public and policy makers (agenda-setting), and (2) by problematizing policy in a way that attaches meaning to it in a manner that is comprehensible (framing and constructing narratives). Policy scholars from many disciplines struggle with integration of communication-related concepts within our policy theories and empirical traditions. While agenda setting has a robust theoretical core with ample empirical validation, the theories underlying framing and narrative research are often used interchangeably, even though they may be informed by vastly different ontological assumptions. This paper integrates these seminal concepts from mass communication and political communication to better understand how media use framing and narratives to influence policy making. To do so, we embed the discussion of frames and narratives in the NPF to empirically and theoretically ground our discussion of the role of media and public policy, while simultaneously contributing to the emerging discussion on the value of incorporating narrative aspects into public policy analysis. Through this paper, we attempt to more clearly articulate some of the ways in which the scholarship from mass communication can improve our own discipline's approach to communication concepts that are crucial to policy processes and outcomes, most specifically: the use of framing and narrative and the definition of media actors.Lasswell's description of the then-emerging field of the policy sciences, wherein he focused on "knowledge of the policy process; knowledge in the process" (1970,

The core goal of the science communicator is to convey accurate scientific information-to help people update existing understandings of the world and to change those understandings when necessary. However, science communicators, with their often extensive scientific training and educations, are often socialized into educating with information derived from scientific works in a way that mirrors the values of science itself. They do this by primarily relying on an approach termed the Knowledge Deficit Model, a model of communicating that emphasizes the repetition of emotionless objectively sterile information to increase understanding. The problem with this approach is that people do not actually make decisions or process information based on only objective scientific evidence. Their personal beliefs and emotional understandings of the world also play a powerful role. In this article we argue that to better connect with audiences communicators would do well to recognize themselves as storytellers-not to distort the truth, but to help people to connect with problems and issues on a more human level in terms of what matters to them. We reference extant narrative persuasion scholarship in public policy and elsewhere to offer a step-by-step guide to narrating scientific evidence. We argue that through understanding the structure of a narrative, science communicators can engage in the policy process, remaining true to the tenets of science and maintaining the integrity of the evidence, but doing so in a way that is compelling and thus also effective in helping solve problems.

Policy entrepreneurs can influence policy changes and decisions. These people invest their time, knowledge, and skills into promoting policies with which they agree. This paper investigates the influence that entrepreneurs had in the case of recreational water rights policy in Colorado to build a model of policy entrepreneurship. Almost 20 Colorado communities have constructed white-water kayak courses to boost their local economies. In twelve of these communities, construction was followed by community pursuit of a new form of water right-the recreational in-channel diversion. This case study is relevant to many areas of environmental policy and management where policies are transitioning from traditional consumptive uses of the resource to nonconsumptive uses. This policy change was not a given in Colorado communities, with recreational water rights requiring significant investments of community resources. These research findings conclude that policy entrepreneurs were influential to policy change, but the most important actors were expert entrepreneurs who hold expertise in water resource matters. Copyright 2010 by The Policy Studies Organization.

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a b s t r a c tIn early fall of 2013 in the Front Range of Colorado, several communities experienced intense rainfall over a three-day period, exceeding annual average precipitation rates. Extensive damage occurred to roads, infrastructure, parks, river corridors, homes and business throughout the region. Across the U.S. and in other nations, as population increases in flood-prone areas, flood risks and vulnerability are increasing as well. Successful response to extreme events may be due to policy learning-changes of beliefs, attitudes, behaviors, and goals -in response to new information and experiences. This learning can at times lead to adaptation of local policies to increase the resilience of communities faced with risk from extreme events. The extent of policy learning may depend on how communities engage with stakeholders and the public in post-disaster recovery. Using a comparative in-depth case study approach of seven Colorado communities, this study examines how communities actively engage stakeholders and the public in decision processes after an extreme event.