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This research will use Pragmatism as a theory to explore and understand in political crisis management in Swedish and Dutch response to the COVID-19 crisis. Pragmatism has strong potential as an approach well-fitted to overcome the intrinsic contradiction in the concept of learning in crisis management. This thesis aims to firstly assess and illustrate the analytical value of Pragmatist crisis learning, initially through theoretical use and secondly through empirical use. It will employ constitutive principles of Pragmatism in an analytical framework to identify examples and indicators of Pragmatist learning processes during the initial COVID-19 response. Using an ideal-typical approach this thesis sets out the four building-blocks of Pragmatist crisis learning, as identified by Bartenberger (2017): anti-dualism, fallibilism, experimentalism and deliberation, and contrasts these against their ideal-typical opposites described together as ‘principled approaches’. Lastly, this research presents an explorative case-study of the initial Dutch and Swedish response to the COVID-19 crisis to illustrate the use of Pragmatist learning in crisis management. It concludes that Pragmatist crisis learning has analytical value, as it is able to improve understanding of learning processes in crisis. Prescriptively, this thesis is able to present hypotheses that suggest the ways in which Pragmatist principles could influence crisis learning.