Crisis Management Governance And Covid 19

Covid-19 and Governance focuses on the relationship between governance institutions and approaches to Covid-19 and health outcomes. Bringing together analyses of Covid-19 developments in countries and regions across the world with a wide-angle lens on governance, this volume asks: what works, what hasn’t and isn’t, and why? Organized by region, the book is structured to follow the spread of Covid-19 in the course of 2020, through Asia, the Middle East, Europe, the Americas, and Africa. The analyses explore a number of key themes, including public health systems, government capability, and trust in government—as well as underlying variables of social cohesion and inequality. This volume combines governance, policies, and politics to bring wide international scope and analytical depth to the study of the Covid-19 pandemic. Together the authors represent a diverse and formidable database of experience and understanding. They include sociologists, anthropologists, scholars of development studies and public administration, as well as MD specialists in public health and epidemiology. Engaged and free of jargon, this book speaks to a wide global public—including scholars, students, and policymakers—on a topic that has profound and broad appeal.

This book explores various issues and challenges emanating from the COVID-19 pandemic. It examines how governments worldwide have dealt with the pandemic. Post-COVID-19 and its disruptive impact on social and economic life as well as public and political attitudes, the world is not the same. A new normal has dawned in public management and public services, with immense implications. This volume collects the lessons drawn from the pandemic, notably how crisis leadership and public governance were used to combat the crisis, as well as which aspects were helpful in that regard. This book covers a total of 17 countries and regions, namely: Japan, South Korea, Singapore, China (Mainland), Hong Kong, Taiwan, Australia, New Zealand, Italy, The Netherlands, the Nordic Countries (Denmark, Norway, Sweden, Finland and Iceland), the UK and US. Special attention is drawn to China (Mainland) in particular, where the pandemic first broke out. Its subsequent efforts in suppressing the epidemic have been quite stunning. The range enables good international comparisons to be made in crisis leadership, response strategies and effectiveness across continents, systems, and cultures (East Asia, Oceania, Europe and North America). While the pandemic is still ongoing by the time the book is finalized, the experience gained over more than two years has provided good ground for lesson drawing.

This open access book offers unique insights into how governments and governing systems, particularly in advanced economies, have responded to the immense challenges of managing the coronavirus pandemic and the ensuing disease COVID-19. Written by three eminent scholars in the field of the politics and policy of crisis management, it offers a unique ‘bird’s eye’ view of the immense logistical and political challenges of addressing a worst-case scenario that would prove the ultimate stress test for societies, governments, governing institutions and political leaders. It examines how governments and governing systems have (i) made sense of emerging transboundary threats that have spilled across health, economic, political and social systems (ii) mobilised systems of governance and often fearful and sceptical citizens (iii) crafted narratives amid high uncertainty about the virus and its impact and (iv) are working towards closure and a return to ‘normal’ when things can never quite be the same again. The book also offers the building blocks of pathways to future resilience. Succeeding and failing in all these realms is tied in with governance structures, experts, trust, leadership capabilities and political ideologies. The book appeals to anyone seeking to understand ‘what’s going on?’, but particularly academics and students across multiple disciplines, journalists, public officials, politicians, non-governmental organisations and citizen groups.

This topical book presents a bottom-up perspective on the crisis management, policies, organisation and functioning of democracy across five Nordic countries during the COVID-19 pandemic. Based on a four-year comparative study of Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway and Sweden, it considers the divergent local and regional management strategies employed as the crisis unfolded. Chapters consider how the pandemic jeopardised the Nordic countries' high levels of decentralisation and citizen trust in government institutions, and the devolution of functions to local government. They explore the severe and restrictive measures employed to control the spread of the virus, and whether these evolving regimes respected civil rights and the principles of subsidiarity and proportionality. Brought together under the overarching perspective of institutional polycentrism, the book draws on a variety of theoretical strands, including theories of multi-level governance, crisis management, and organisational dependency. With empirical data, population and leader surveys and country case-studies, it presents the experiences of Nordic citizens and examines whether their trust in government was sustained or eroded. International in scope, this book is invaluable for students and scholars of regulation and governance, public administration, public health policy, and comparative politics. Its examinations of regulatory and legal frameworks will also prove useful for policy advisors working in public health and crisis management.

Along with its impacts on health systems, economies, and schooling, one of the lasting effects of COVID-19 has been on the civic and political sphere. From conflict in Tigray, Ethiopia, to Myanmar’s recent military coup, governance restrictions have been either a lightning rod for opposition actors or a means of justifying repression and suspension of the rule of law. We draw on IFPRI’s CPR to examine various governance restrictions that were prominent during the first 12 months of the pandemic and focus on three main policy responses: postponing elections and restricting political rallies; censorship justified as a means to discourage misinformation; and imposing states of emergency. For the latter, we examine how this near-universal policy response had substantively different components and modes of implementation.

This book presents a series of studies on organizations across Europe, displaying new perspectives on institutional resilience of affected governance structures during crisis. Such an approach to governance studies not only aims to provide readers with conceptual and practical knowledge on crisis experience of organizations, but also to equip them with necessary cognitive tools to perform well in a similar crisis context in the future. The book highlights knowledge on institutional resilience and delivers an enduring resource for researchers and students on a time of unprecedented crisis. Cross-national/sectorial interdependences in Europe are multiplying, while institutional reaction and international collaboration mechanisms are falling behind. The studies presented here aim to shape a conceptual understanding of students, academics, and practitioners considering these contemporary challenges and opportunities. They provide a valuable resource in the field of governance, sustainability, crisis management, innovation, and leadership.

This edited collection compares and analyses the most prominent political communicative responses to the outbreak and global spread of the COVID-19 strain of coronavirus within 27 nations across five continents and two supranational organisations: the EU and the WHO. The book encompasses the various governments’ communication of the crisis, the role played by opposition and the vibrancy of the information environment within each nation. The chapters analyse the communication drawing on theoretical perspectives drawn from the fields of crisis communication, political communication and political psychology. In doing so the book develops a framework to assess the extent to which state communication followed the key indicators of effective communication encapsulated in the principles of: being first; being right; being credible; expressing empathy; promoting action; and showing respect. The book also examines how communication circulated within the mass and social media environments and what impact differences in spokespersons, messages and the broader context has on the success of implementing measures likely to reduce the spread of the virus. Cumulatively, the authors develop a global analysis of the responses and how these are shaped by their specific contexts and by the flow of information, while offering lessons for future political crisis communication. This book will be of great interest to students and researchers of politics, communication and public relations, specifically on courses and modules relating to current affairs, crisis communication and strategic communication, as well as practitioners working in the field of health crisis communication. The Open Access version of this book, available at www.taylorfrancis.com, has been made available under a Creative Commons Attribution-Non Commercial-No Derivatives 4.0 license. Thanks to the support of libraries working with Knowledge Unlatched www.knowledgeunlatched.org

This book assesses the implications of the COVID-19 pandemic for the European Union (EU), as well as its response in dealing with an overarching, multidimensional crisis with consequences extending beyond public health safety to political, economic, legal, and institutional arenas. It argues the pandemic represents a symmetric crisis cutting across countries with different social, economic and political characteristics and which yet - despite favouring cooperative solutions at the supranational level - has largely been met with initial responses of a national, even local, nature. So, how well did the EU perform as a crisis manager in the pandemic crisis? This book will be of key interest to scholars, students and readers of crisis, pandemic and health management, European Union politics and governance.