Who provides power with evidence? Policy capacity and expert councils in grand health challenges

• Academy of European Law
• Department of Economics
• Department of History
• Department of Law
• Robert Schuman Centre for Advanced Studies
• Department of Political and Social Sciences
• Florence School of Transnational Governance
• Development and External Relations Service

This event, organised by the Expert Knowledge and Authority in Transformative Times Interdisciplinary Research Cluster, features a talk by Gaia Taffoni (EUI Research Fellow), Nils Bandelow (Technische Universität Braunschweig), and Ilana Schröder (Institute of Comparative Politics and Public Policy, Technische Universität Braunschweig).

This event focuses on COVID-19 as an ad-hoc crisis within the health policy subsystem and examine to what extent the composition of COVID expert councils in Germany and Italy reflected the countries’ policy capacity. In their work, the authors argue that informed policymaking and the adequate reaction to grand challenges is hindered by structural policy incapacities that are related to a uniform, biased perception of evidence.

Author: Gaia Taffoni is a lecturer and researcher in public policy. At the Florence School of Transnational Governance (STG) she teaches Policy Evaluation in the CIVICA’s joint master course and works to create innovative teaching and learning methodologies as part of the leadership and governance hub of the Florence STG. Gaia holds a PhD in Political Science from Università Statale of Milano (2019) and has previously worked as a post-doc at University College London (2019-2020) in the ERC project Protego. She has been adjunct professor at University of Genova (2020) and Università Statale of Milano (2021-2022) teaching public administration and comparative public policy and teaching assistant at King’s College London (2018). Her research focuses on regulatory governance, looking at the role and use of evidence in public policy and public administration.