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GOOD PUBLIC GOVERNANCE IN A GLOBAL PANDEMIC - IIAS Special Report
Managing Global Pandemics: Public governance matters
The IIAS Special Report, to be published this autumn, furnishes an overview of the different national approaches to fighting the COVID-19 pandemic. At its core are the country reports centered on the national experiences and focusing mainly on the governmental responses. The country reports contain descriptions of the key measures implemented by the governments.
The introduction by the Editorial Team underlines the key challenges to be faced by the Government and provides the framework to analyze the current crisis and the governmental responses. This framework included the following elements: institutional and organizational arrangements, the preparedness of the governance system to respond to the crisis (especially, the health care system), the need for better coordination between the different sectors and levels of governance, the interaction (including trust) between the different actors, the role of scientists and medical experts as advisers to governments, the communications with the public, and implementation issues.
In the first section of the report (PART I), the two themes are the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) and Trust. The decision to include something on SDGs and something on the trust of citizens in government is partly justified on the grounds that these are important matters and should not be neglected as a result of focusing hard on what governments have done in response to COVID-19.
In the second section (PART II), there are eyewitness reports from civil servants and public managers. They present their point of view on the challenges of COVID-19. They identify the problems faced by the authorities in developing an effective response to the pandemic and the lasting lessons for ensuring the adequacy of actions, measures, and innovations.
In the third section, (PART III) national experiences from the different regions are reported. Contributions address the national experiences of countries in Africa, Asia, Europe, North America, Latin America, and the Middle East and North Africa. This collection of country reports offers a ‘first reading’ of the responses of governments during the first phase of the COVID-19 pandemic and an overview of the various ‘logics’ behind the measures taken in response to COVID-19.
The last section (PART IV) offers two comparative studies (Austria/Germany and Italy/ Switzerland) and a study providing a perspective on the role of ideological factors in the response to COVID-19.
In the concluding chapter, the co-authors summarise the main elements of this challenging early period of the pandemic. They present the lessons identified by practitioners and use the country reports to cast some light on the role of governance capabilities of effective governments, on the agility that learning, evaluation, and adaptability may have conferred on governments that succeeded in maintaining the virus under relative control, and the way in which leaders may compensate for a lack of agility or cause agility to be compromised by political decision making.
The Editorial Team
Paul Joyce, Fabienne Maron and Purshottama Sivanarain Reddy
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