ABSTRACT
On a global scale, one of the major issues which the Covid-19 crisis reveals is the fragility of governance systems. Different approaches to this topic have been proposed. To analyze the Italian case, one of the most fruitful entry points is the relation between science and government. The first section provides a brief outline of science-government relations in Italy. Then, a tentative phenomenology of how these relations developed in the Covid-19 crisis is presented, including the lack of institutional and technical preparedness, the ambiguous role allocated to scientists and experts, the excessive visibility of science in the public arena, the deterioration of the image of science during the crisis and the poor understanding of science by political leaders. What happened in Italy reflects general tendencies that can be detected across many national contexts. Therefore, in the last section, two general interpretive frameworks are proposed, that is, the declining capacity of governance systems to manage contemporary societies and the under-socialization of science, which manifests itself in, for example, the decline of its authority and the increasing tendency of laypeople to question its results. All of which further limits the development of long-term public policies based on an anticipatory perspective.
