How Do Intercrisis Learning Outcomes Affect Intracrisis Learning? “Learning in the Making” in the Case of South Korea’s COVID-19 Response

This study explores the processes of intercrisis and intracrisis learning and the link between them, drawing on South Korea’s responses to the COVID-19 pandemic as an example. The crisis management literature suggests that intracrisis learning is less likely to occur than intercrisis learning due to inherent barriers that hinder learning and adaptation in the heat of crisis. Based on the conceptual framework of problem-oriented governance and crisis learning, we unpack how prominent outcomes of intercrisis learning facilitate intracrisis learning during the acute phase of an emerging crisis. We postulate that learning after 2015 MERS crisis developed the core capabilities for problem-oriented governance which, in turn, have facilitated learning during the COVID-19 pandemic. We also posit that these capabilities continue to be enhanced through ongoing intracrisis learning processes. Our findings indicate that, in South Korea, such capabilities—reflective-improvement capability, collaborative capability, and data-analytic capability—have been substantially developed after 2015 MERS crisis and are getting more sophisticated as a result of on-going intracrisis learning during the COVID-19 pandemic. Theorical and practical implications for crisis learning are discussed.