Bringing improvisation in the policy processes of emergency management: some empirical evidence from COVID-19 emergency response in Italy

In light of the unavoidable partial unpreparedness of emergency managers facing crises and disasters, several scholars have recently pointed out the useful role of improvisation in emergency response policies (Boin and Van Eeten 2016). However, organizational, managerial and policy studies have not yet really explained how this mechanism really works in policy processes and in particular in emergency response processes. Some speak about the importance of bricolage and capacity to accept cognitive dissonance and imperfect solutions to increase flexibility and creativity (Boin and Van Eeten 2016; Ansell, Sørensen and Torfing 2021), others claim that thinking outside the box and acting beyond the instructions (Sharkansky and Zalmanovitch 2000; Capano and Toth 2022) can foster coordination and innovation. However, systematic empirical findings are still lacking and a proper analytical framework pertaining the unfolding of improvisation in emergency response processes does not exist yet. The present paper aims at contributing to better understand how improvisation works in emergency response processes. By building upon an interdisciplinary literature on improvisation (from jazz and theater improv to organizational studies), the paper aims to propose a comprehensive theoretical framework on improvisation mechanisms and to apply it to some emergency response processes in order to empirically verify their real unfolding. The exploratory research was conducted from April 2020 to February 2021 through periods of job-shadowing at the Italian Special commissioner for Emergency Management staff and semi-structured interviews with personnel from the public and private organizations involved in the response processes.