Journal Review

“Fighting COVID-19 with Agility, Transparency, and Participation:

Wicked Policy Problems and New Governance Challenges”
Public Administration Review, Vol. 80. Iss. 4 by The American
Society for Public Administration

by : Safira Hanny Rizky Wasiat / 2006563303

A. Introduction
The journal that will be reviewed on the following articles titled “Fighting COVID-19
with Agility, Transparency, and Participation: Wicked Policy Problems and New Governance
Challenges” was written by M. Jae Moon, a professor of public administration and dean of
social science at Yonsei University, South Korea and published by The American Society for
Public Administration in the Public Administration Review (Volume 80, Issue 4).
This article will examine and review about many sections of the journal start from the
surface but not limited to evaluating the abstract and introduction that map out the article,
evaluating the article’s references and literature review, asses how the article present data and
results, asses the writing style, also reviewing the thesis by giving fair, thorough, and
constructive state of argument and suggestions.
This journal which was written by M. Jae Moon addresses about the approaches
implemented by South Korea Government in the initial outbreak of COVID-19 overcoming
solutions, as known as agile-adaptive approach, which the writer believe that the agile-adaptive
approach is the best overcoming solutions. This thesis was based on the success of South Korea
Government to bring down the sudden surge of COVID-19 quickly, compared to many
countries which implemented soft or passive approach and hard approach. In the abstract, we
could find that the journal has been made to give the suggestions for Western Country so that
they can manage future problems such as COVID-19 without paying too much cost and
maintaining quality of life in open and free societies.
The writer divided the journal by five sub-tittles consist of “The Outbreak of COVID-
19 in the World and South Korea”, “Learning Costly Lessons from Past Failure”, “Agile and
Adaptive Approach: Proactive and Massive Testing versus Herd Immunity”, “Public
Information and Transparency Policy for Trust Surplus”, “Citizen Participation and Citizen in
Social Distancing”, and Conclusion.

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B. The Journal Short Brief
Reported by World Health Organization (WHO), the virus as known as COVID-19 first
appeared in Wuhan, China on 31 December 2019 has quickly spread to South Korea, Iran, Italy,
Spain, France, the United Kingdom, Germany, the United State, and Japan. On the third month
of 2020, the virus was found in almost every country in the world. This virus has been
challenging government in every country to make mitigation strategy by making innovative
public policy keeping mind that this virus has been given a status as a pandemic due to its high
infection rate as well as its global scalability.
The policies set by the government is various, depends to the situation, condition and
characteristics of each its people and policy makers. The writer also has conducted the study
aim to observe the government response to the threat and dealt with challenging policy issues
in different ways, the COVID-19 outbreak.
COVID-19 has been reported similar to the Middle East Respiratory Syndrome (MERS)
and particularly Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) but more contagious and been
geographically spread wider than MERS and SARS. Not only has impact on health, this
pandemic also significantly makes the instability of economic and society. In April 2020,
COVID-19 has transmitted to more than 2.5 million people in four months meanwhile SARS
and MERS only reached 8,096 patients in eight months and 203 patients in a year (Wu and
Chow 2020).
COVID-19 first identified in South Korea on January 20 and reached a peak one month
later on February 19 with 909 new confirmed case when a church member as Patient 31 and
also known as a super spreader infected many people during worship in a Shincheonji church
in Daegu that came from Kyungbook, which suddenly became the epicenter of the COVID-19
outbreak in South Korea.
Once the sudden surge happened, the South Korean Government raised its alert to the
highest level and occurred full-scale epidemiological investigation of infected patients to
medical and economy policy packages also collecting the patients’ contact in order to identify
the possible infected patient and prevent possible future infection. What the Government has
done considered as agile and adaptive, and transparent approach in the very early stage of
outbreak.
Implementing the agile and adaptive approach, The South Korean Government has been
considered as a successful government who can launch the quick response and effective action
facing the sudden outbreak. However, behind it all, The South Korean Government had
experienced a painful failure in its initial response to and mitigation of MERS in 2015. South

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Korean had been ranked as a runner up of infected patient number right after Saudi Arabia. At
that time The South Korean did not succeed in applying transparency such as where the patient
were hospitalized in order to avoid any unnecessary fear among citizens and potential reputation
damage to the hospitals.
This lack of transparency had been drawn public protest and tension within local and
central government, although in the end the central government agreed to disclose the
information by allowing individual citizens to identify and asses their possible exposure to
infected patient. Also reported that many managerial and policy limitations were identified in
the action of MERS mitigation.
Not later than that, Ministry of Health and Welfare 2016 had documented the key
lessons and policy recommendation from the MERS experience mitigation into useful guidance
in handling future similar cases which then became a basis of reinforcement of Korean Centers
for Disease Control by strengthened its autonomy and professional specialties by increasing the
number of epidemiological surveyors. From now on The South Korean Government has made
the painful experiences turn to very valuable lesson that can be used to overcome the sudden
outbreak.
To overcome the COVID-19 outbreak, The South Korean Government has launched the
agile response to detect any possible positive case based on thorough epidemiological surveys.
On the other hand, there were some countries that implement soft or passive approach such as
Japan which appeared to take this approach and hard approach which often requires forceful
and aggressive measures such as lockdowns, travel bans, and curfews, as was done in China.
The agile-adaptive approach taken by The South Korean Government required
comprehensive and innovative actions consist of massive testing, quarantine of infected patients
and technological support to track their movement. The massive testing ratio in the early stage
of outbreak done in South Korea was 4,099 people per million compared to other countries; the
United Kingdom, Japan, and the United States those only tested 387, 76, and 26 people per
million, respectively as of March 9, 2020. This massive testing has been considered as the only
feasible alternative in the early stages of a COVID-19 Outbreak.
The reason that the massive scale testing was possible because the South Korean
Government had been successfully strengthening the KCDC right after the past failure of
dealing with MERS. The South Korean Government was well prepared to dealing with new
possible future outbreak, as expected. The South Korean Government also apply innovative
practices such as driven-trough and walk-through resting stations which helped to shorten the
testing time.

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 The agile-adaptive approach allowed the Government to slow down the contagion speed
and ease the spike of new infected cases, which the Government was adaptive and flexible in
handling new situations and receptive to new ideas and alternative solutions.
Country that did not take the same approach as The South Korea Government later
decided to increase testing and shifted into a hard approach such as lockdown. That indicates
that South Korea’s agile and adaptive approach with massive testing was an appropriate action
to control the outbreak without extreme intervention measure such as aggressive lockdowns
that forcibly constrained citizen’s mobility.
Different from the MERS mitigation failure, at this time the South Korean Government
decided to disclose any information and be open to the public consist of all necessary
information, including up-to-date statistics on infected cases and the fatality rate. The South
Korean Government also developed an application that could track of the infected patient
movement by tracing the CCTV footage, credit card use, and GPS information. However, this
technological approach to track the infected patient movement become an trade-off between
privacy and public interest ongoing issue that is still debatable, although the recent national
survey showed that 84.4% people of South Korea preferred having transparent information
provided by the government on the details of the movement of infected patients to withholding
the information for the purpose of privacy protection (Institute of Future Government, 2020) .
While the South Korean Government implementing the openness and transparency, the
Government also faced the public fears and outrage in the initial stage, it happened when the
confirmed case began in Daegu and Kyungbook regions, citizen was extremely disturbed. But
as the time goes by, the South Korean Government also start to earn public trust and reduce
unnecessary fear in the long run. This transparency conducted by The South Korea Government
also help to reduce the communication risk by filtering fake news and rumors about COVID-
19 and helped build the credibility of KCDC. Furthermore, it should be noted that the
transparency policy and trust surplus in South Korea helped to facilitate citizens’ cooperative
participation in fighting against COVID-19.
Non-pharmaceutical Interventions (NPIs) such as social distancing and individual
sanitization are considered the best ways to slow down and prevent the spread of the virus when
no vaccines or medicines are available (CDC 2017). The South Korean Government also rely
on public information campaigns (PICs) aim to campaign the NPIs through various channels as
one of the very effective policy instruments to communicate with a large target population. In
result, it successfully enhanced the level of awareness of COVID-19 and promote voluntary
actions for personal and public health.

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 The citizen was extremely cooperative by demonstrating the NPIs consist of social
distancing, self-quarantine, doing a personal sanitization such as hand washing and wearing
masks in public places. Voluntary self-quarantine done by infected patient in Daegu and
Kyungbook has been proven as a significant factor for the South Korea Government
successfully managed and control the surge of the outbreak. So that, Citizen’s engagement and
mature citizenship is as important as agile and adaptive actions of the government to the
successful management of COVID-19.

C. Discussion
After reviewing the journal titled “Fighting COVID-19 with Agility, Transparency, and
Participation: Wicked Policy Problems and New Governance Challenges”, there are several
things that need to be noted both in the formal and substantial perspective.

C.1 Sufficient Information of Abstract but Less Able to Elaborate to the Body
To consider whether the abstract is good or not, the abstract should offer the
reader a sufficient information contained without reading the article fully. How well
does the abstract summarize the article, the problem it addresses, its techniques, results
and significance? 1
The writer has managed to write the abstract by fulfilling the element needed to
be good abstract. The urgency of publishing the journal is well declared by explaining
the situation of COVID-19 that has been spreading throughout the world as the
government of many countries is still finding the suitable approach to overcome this
outbreak by doing trial and error and shifting from one to another approached. The
writer in this journal tried to show us that the agile-adaptive approach implemented by
the South Korea Government is the best approached compared to soft or passive
approach and hard approach that has been execute by many Western Countries by
positioning South Korea as a successful country who could control the sudden surge of
COVID-19 outbreak quickly.
While the information is sufficient enough for the reader, there is still something
that need to be noted. In the abstract was mentioned that the journal is supposed to be
a suggestion for Western Countries in handling future similar problem such ash COVID-

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Hall, George M. How to Write a Paper. Wiley-Blackwell, 2013

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 19, but in the introduction last sentence we also could fine that the discussion was aimed
to draws some lessons and policy implications for other countries that have been
experiencing the same challenges as the pandemic situation continues.
The incompatibilities between those two phrases made the direction and purpose
of the journal is not clear. Whether this journal was published for the future outbreak
that similar to the COVID-19 or to deal with the COVID-19 itself which is still likely
to continue. Despite the fact that both of them still can be used as lessons, the abstract
is supposed to be written clearly and linked to the body without raising any doubts.

C.2 Flexible Writing Style: Personal Words Use

In writing this journal, the writer is more likely to choose the writing style that
is flexible or not to academically formal. The wordings that has been chosen to write
this journal also considered simple, modern, and easy to understand. So that we can
assume that the target audience of this journal is not limited to professional from
particular discipline but more general and broadly.
Subsequently, the writer chose to use personal words such as “I” and “we” that
can be found in the bodies. According to some sources, the use of personal word is not
appropriate for academic writing, but in many cases using the first person can improve
the writing by offering benefits such as assertiveness, clarity, and self-positioning in the
articles. 2(University of North Carolina, 2020).
Furthermore, the journal also provided the not too rigid language style so that
the journal is more attracting and more attached to the audience. For example, “thanks
to agile-adaptive and transparent actions by the South Korean Government” also “This
was made possible thanks to many technological and legal supports that permitted…”.
However, despite the flexible writing style chosen, the journal was able to avoid
wordiness. It focused on being concise, straight forward, and developing a narrative that
does not have confusing language.

C.3 Data Presentation: Well Explained

2
The Writing Center. “Should I Use ‘I’?” University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 1 Oct. 2018,
writingcenter.unc.edu/tips-and-tools/should-i-use-i/.

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 The journal provided many data that is considered support the argument it tried
to convinced. It clearly offers number, place, date by using descriptive sentence that is
directly follow the argument or graphic which then the writer managed to explain and
describe very well. Not a single data is unnecessary to be put in the journal.
Nonetheless, there are still some arguments those are not followed by related
data, such as in the section titled “Learning Costly Lessons Past Failure”. In this section,
discussed about how the Government of South Korea learned about the failure in its
initial response to and mitigation of MERS in 2015 and turned it into valuable lessons
by correcting the failure in the past.
Based on those failures, the South Korea Government now adapts transparency
and disclose any information needed towards citizen without revealing the identity of
infected patient. In this condition, the writer has been trying to convince us that the
agile-adaptive approach with massive testing was more appropriate compared to another
approach which execute aggressive lockdowns and forcibly constrained the mobility.
Following this argument, the writer added supporting data which is not considered
correlated to the argument he tried to convinced before. The data was about the survey
that had been conducted in national scale where the citizen felt positive about the South
Korean Government’s action and preferred it than other countries.
The data that should be presented to support the argument is about the
comparison between MERS and COVID-19 that it can be the start from citizens’
satisfaction until government action result in handling with both of those outbreaks.

C.4 Clear and Well-Organized Narrative Flow

The narrative flow of the journal is clear and well organized. The discussion
started from when the sudden outbreak of COVID-19 happened in South Korea and the
government instantly raised its alert into highest level by tracing and collecting the data
of infected patient in Daegu and Kyungbook in order to calculate the speed of contagion
of the virus.
After that The South Korea Government immediately conducted a massive
testing towards its citizen with the ratio 4,099 people per million which no other
countries were able to do that at the early stage of the COVID-19 outbreak. The journal
also explaining about the background of the massive test was possible to be held in
South Korea by telling about the history of past failure in handling MERS in 2016 so
that the Government has taken a valuable lesson from that.

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 The massive testing was conducted by adapt innovative strategies in order to
shorten the time and reduce the potential infections in medical facilities. Learning from
the past mistake, The South Korean Government also adapt the transparency and
disclose any information needed by their citizen. All that has been described above is
called agile-adaptive approach.
By implementing this approach, The South Korean Government earned the
citizen trust and awareness to be voluntary active to stop the chain of transmission by
doing Non-Pharmaceutical Intervention by themselves as the best way when there is
still no vaccine or cure that could be find.
Lastly, this journal concluded that success of The South Korean Government
was made of important factors that consist of agile and adaptive government and also
citizen participation.

C. 5 Lack of The Past Failure in Handling MERS Information

In this “Learning Costly Lessons from the Past Failure” section address that The
Government initially did not disclose any necessary information and decided to be not
transparent to public about where the infected patient was hospitalized in order to avoid
public fear and potential reputation damage to the hospital.
The writer did officially mention about what kind of the failures were made, but
did not explain about how those actions has been considered as a failure which should
be avoided to be done again at this time. The writer was only explaining about the
situation caused by the position of non-transparency which resulting public outcry and
tension between local and central government.
The journal shows that those two conditions are a measure of the failure of
handling MERS outbreak, where on other sections was convincing about the success of
The South Korean Government in dealing with COVID-19 by the ability to control the
surge happened.
Furthermore, several times mentioned that the MERS experience was costly, but
the reason also were not explained. Why it can be considered costly? This matter really
needs to be explained considering that the MERS failure became the foundation for the
current policy actions against COVID-19 as discussed in this journal (Normile, 2020).

C.6 Lack of Approach Comparison Explanation

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 This journal convinced about how well the agile-adaptive approach
implemented by The South Korea Government compared to soft or passive approach
and hard approach. The attempt to compare between those approaches was clear, so that
the section was titled “Agile and Adaptive Approach: Proactive and Massive Testing
versus Herd Immunity.
Unfortunately, not as expected. This section only discussed that limited to give
the example of countries who implement of each approach. Such as Japan who had taken
Soft Approach and Hard Approach as was done in China. In addition, this journal also
mentioned that there are countries who positioned themselves somewhere between two
approaches.
Looks unfair, if this journal was published to convinced that the approach taken
by The South Korea Government is the best compared to others just by telling that there
are countries that shifted rom soft toward hard approach, and countries that were
positioning themselves in between those approaches also shift as the situation worsened.

C.7 Literature References That Is Not Correlated to The Substance

Found in the same section of “Agile and Adaptive Approach: Proactive and
Massive Testing versus Herd Immunity” that is still discussing about how well the agile-
adaptive approach implemented by The South Korea Government to control the sudden
COVID-19 outbreak. The journal showed us that The South Korea Government was
adaptive and flexible in handling new situations by being open to innovation and new
ideas such as transform public institution facilities become accommodation for lights
symptom patient.
To support this argument, the writer add more information this adaptive
approach was largely possible because The South Korea Government attempted to put
science over policy (Comfort 2007). The odd thing is this information was taken from
the literature that had been published even eight years before MERS outbreak, when
The South Korea Government had been considered failed to overcome this problem.

C.8 Material Substances

It is undebatable that The South Korean Government has been successfully
controlling the sudden surge of COVID-19 outbreak amongst many countries in the
world. The agile-adaptive approach that has been introduced in the journal considered
as the most proportional action that every government of each countries should have

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 done. In times of crisis, the government responsiveness is urgently needed. Relates to
this case, a quick response of government is necessary to save lives and minimize the
contagion. (Otto Lerbinger)3 Similar to the notion agile government, agile actions often
require flexible organization structure, increasing involvement of stakeholders and
resources and efficient decision-making processes for timely and transparent results.
(Deloitte 2017; DeSeve2020; Moon 2017).
The transparency that has been many times emphasized in this journal is not
only limited applicable and required in the effort of COVID-19 outbreak mitigation.
The transparency the key to the success of public policy, so that the Government can
earn the public trust and participation in dealing with any possible problem in the future.
Subsequently in implementing this approach, South Korea has advantages that
all countries have. That is high-trust and mature citizen which cannot be instantaneously
established. In this case, the high-trust and mature are the most important variables so
that the approach can be run smoothly. So that it cannot be that easy to convince and
suggest other countries to adapt and implement the same approach as The South Korea
Government does. The policies set by the government is various, depends to the
situation, condition and characteristics of each its people and policy makers.

D. Conclusion
The COVID-19 outbreak has been challenging government in every country. This
journal was published in a state of need of finding the best approach that suitable to each
country. The journal addressed and explained how The South Korea could overcome the sudden
surge of COVID-19 outbreak by implementing their innovative approach as known as agile-
adaptive approach where citizens’ participation and matureness is required to achieve the
objective. This is what becomes a challenge for other countries, because of every country have
a various policy maker and citizen characteristic that can affect the policies set to fight this
COVID-19 outbreak.
This journal has been reviewed and resulting a few points that need to be take notes that was
elaborated into many subsections titled; 1) Sufficient Information of Abstract but Less Able to
Elaborate to the Body, 2) Flexible Writing Style: Personal Words Use, 3) Data Presentation:
Well Explained, 4) Clear and Well-Organized Narrative Flow, 5) Lack of The Past Failure in

3 Lerbinger, Otto. The Crisis Manager: Facing Disasters, Conflicts, and Failures. Routledge, 2012.

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Handling MERS Information, 6) Lack of Approach Comparison Explanation, 7) Literature
References That Is Not Correlated to The Substance, also 8) Material Substances.

References

Comfort, Louise K. 2007. Crisis Management in Hindsight: Cognition, Communication,

Coordination, and Control. Special issue. Public Administration Review 67: 189–97.
Deloitte. 2017. Agile in Government: A Playbook from the Deloitte Center for Government
Insights. https://www2.deloitte.com/content/dam/insights/us/articles/3897_Agile-in-
government/DUP_Agile-in-Government-series.pdf[accessed October 1, 2020].

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DeSeve, G. Edward. 2020. Agile Government and Agile Governance: We Need Both. Agile
Government Center. National Academy of Public Administration.
https://www.napawash.org/grandchallenges/blog/agile-government-and-agile-
governance-we-need-both [accessed Okt 1, 2020]
Hall, George M. How to Write a Paper. Wiley Blackwell, 2013
Lerbinger, Otto. The Crisis Manager: Facing Disasters, Conflicts, and Failures. Routledge,
2012.
The Writing Center. “Should I Use “I”? University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, 1 Oct
2019, writingcenter.unc.edu. [accessed on 4 oct 2020[

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