Abstract

This paper analyses the characteristics of the Italian policy dynamics in managing the pandemic during the first year of the outbreak. By assuming that the Covid-19 crisis must be defined as a creeping crisis, the analytical focus sheds light on how the characteristics of the recurrent cycles of agenda setting, decision-making and implementation, and their intersections with the political, institutional, organizational, and digital capacities have shaped the Italian response to the pandemic. What emerges is that decision-makers have reiterated the same cognitive and behavioral schemes both in defining the problem and in taking the decisions, while implementation has been deeply affected by weak institutional capacity, marginal consideration of digital tools, and conflictual inter-governmental relations. Thus, since the beginning, the Italian response policy has always been a step behind in relation to the pandemic, and has never shown any attempt at learning from the experience.