Tempest in a teapot? Toward new collaborations between mainstream policy process studies and interpretive policy studies.

"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.

COVID-19 and the policy sciences: initial reactions and perspectives.

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.

From engaging publics to engaging knowledges: Enacting "appropriateness" in the Austrian biobank infrastructure.

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 formats of public engagement, without delving into the ways these concerns are constituted. In this article, we summarize recent research on public engagement in order to describe the constitution of respective concerns as "engagement of knowledges." By shifting the focus of analysis 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 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."