Research On Central Policy Tools For COVID-19 Prevention And Control From The Perspective Of Grounded Theory

At present,public health crises occur frequently.It has become an important task for modern governments to manage public health crises scientifically and effectively.As a means to achieve government policy goals,policy tools play an important role in the management of public health crises.Most of the existing studies regard public health crisis as a type of public crisis and discuss it as a whole,ignoring the particularity of public health crisis.The typology analysis of policy tools in the management of public health crisis is relatively weak.At the beginning of 2020,the sudden outbreak of COVID-19 had a huge impact on China’s national health and economic and social development.As a means to achieve the policy objectives of epidemic prevention and control,policy tools for epidemic prevention and control have played a vital role in achieving phased success in China in a short period of time.From the perspective of policy tools,this paper takes the 346 policy texts at the central level of COVID-19 as the research object,and adopts the grounded theory methodology to encoding and analyzing the policy text content.So as to reveal the types,application characteristics and selection logic of policy tools in COVID-19 prevention and control at the central level.It is found that there are four types of policy tools in the central government’s policy tools for COVID-19 governance:regulatory tools,economic promotion tools,professional technology tools,propaganda and mobilization tools.Among them,the tools of economic promotion and professional technology are used more,while the tools of regulation and publicity and mobilization are relatively less used,but they play an important role;It is easy to have conflicts between regulatory tools and economic promotion tools in the combination interaction,but this kind of conflict is not absolute.They can also play an effective role in cooperating with other tools,propaganda and mobilization tools play an important coordinating role in the combination of tools.Professional technology tools are the core variables in the governance of major public health crisis.The emergence of a new professional technology tool may change the combination of policy tools.The choice of policy tools is mainly affected by situation identification,policy subject,policy tools themselves and policy objectives.Among them,the more serious the crisis itself is,the easier the government is to take regulatory measures to control the development trend of the crisis in time.The higher the level of economic development,the more inclined the government is to take economic promotion tools to restore economic development.By identifying the environment of policies and regulations,the government can choose the legitimate policy tools.Policy subjects with strong self-competence tend to use regulatory tools.Different phases of the epidemic have different policy objectives.Different objectives make the government choose different combinations of policy tools,and different combinations of policy tools achieve better policy results.As a major public health crisis,these findings not only supplement the relevant theoretical research on the governance of major public health crisis,but also have important guiding significance for the governance practice of major public health crisis.