Successful Government Responses to the Pandemic (original) (raw)
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International Journal of E-Planning Research, 2021
This article discusses national and local strategies for confronting COVID-19 pandemic. The analysis sheds light on how societal context, institutional arrangements, knowledge culture, and technology deployment manifest in national responses to the pandemic. Discussion describes country cases from East and South East Asia, on the one hand, and from Europe and Asia-Pacific, on the other. The overall impression is that Asian cases reflect proactivity and diligence, while Western responses are reactive and more often than not slightly delayed. Both country groups include successes, while the overwhelming majority of global benchmarks are Asian. As the management of COVID-19 crisis is essentially a multi-level governance issue, discussion about national strategies is supplemented with a glance at the role of cities. The COVID-19-related urban challenges revolve around increased interest in urban safety, creative approaches to and the uses of urban space, the rise of digital urban platforms, and deeper insights on citizen engagement.
Review of World Planning Practice. Volume 18: Towards Healthy Cities: Urban Governance, Planning and Design for Human Well-being, 2022
The aim of this research is to go beyond the reading of vulnerability based on indicators. This study seeks to explore the ‘embedded’ components that are ignored in Covid-19 process management and related indices/indicators and discuss healthy city policies through these components, by harnessing good practices and collective actions. The research sample (see Figure 4) comprises good practices in countries with high vulnerability in the Global South, namely Brazil, Turkey, India, South Africa, and China. A number of countries, including these, were firstly examined for their responses to the Covid-19 process in pandemic regions within the framework of urban resilience (Aygün Oğur et al., 2021). In addition to this elaboration, some parameters, including socio-economic structure, social, economic and spatial vulnerability of the countries, extent of social inequality, virus transmission rate in the population, data availability, and existence of alternative management approaches to Covid-19, singled out these countries for analysis. The role of different socio-spatial components in creating and governing healthy cities, which will be analyzed qualitatively, will be considered through an examination of collective actions in these practices, rather than stereotyped vulnerability indicators.
POST-COVID-19: HOW LOCAL GOVERNMENT GOVERNING THE NEW NORMAL?
2020
The Covid-19 pandemic brought the world's bustling cities to a screeching halt. The outbreak has revealed how urban centres are the front and last lines of defence against infectious disease outbreaks. They are also the key to leading national and global recovery. The pandemic hit some cities harder than others. It is exposing the fault lines that stratify our societies, especially inequalities in income, gender, race and opportunity. Decisions made in the coming months not just by national leaders, but governors and mayors, will have generational consequences. Some cities will flourish, emerging more resilient than before. Most will suffer and others will collapse. The severity of the pandemic is connected fundamentally to governance. Where there is leadership and coordination, as in Copenhagen, Seoul or Taipei, the virus is more rapidly contained. Where there is competition and dysfunction, fatality rates are higher. The coronavirus has exposed the tattered state of the social contract in nations rich and poor. These failures will have consequential knock-on effects. We are about to start one of the greatest experiments in recent history as cities everywhere emerge from lockdown. The stakes could not be higher. A staggering 81% of the global workforce is affected by full or partial shutdown measures. Most people live paycheck to paycheck and cannot afford to stay isolated. But this is just the beginning: We can expect waves of infectious disease outbreaks for years until we have a vaccine and strong antiviral options. Everyone agrees that cities cannot stay in lockdown indefinitely. So how are they expected to cope? In the short-term, face masks, test kits, digital contact tracing, social distancing and other restrictions will be ubiquitous. Measures will vary in intensity and invasiveness from city to city. In China, cell phone-based contact tracing is already the norm with people color-coded according to their risk of infectiousness. Residential management committees are also keeping villagers from moving to cities. A number of European cities that implemented stringent social distancing measures are now cautiously opening day cares, schools, universities and businesses. States across the U.S. are considering steps to open back up. Cities across Africa, Asia and Latin America are facing hard choices given that, in many areas, social distancing measures were a virtual impossibility to begin with. After saving lives, an important question facing every mayor is what does a city look like in the Covid-19 era? We identified nine trends that are likely to play out in the months and years ahead. While countries around the world are grappling with the response to the pandemic, we must start visioning and preparing for our new normal. Recovery can be steered toward more sustainable and inclusive pathways that demonstrate very tangible economic, social and environmental gains, and help countries realize a future that is fully aligned with the aspirations of SDGs.
Governmental responses to COVID-19 Pandemic
Revista de Administração Pública, 2021
In response to the challenges imposed by the COVID-19 pandemic, governments worldwide adopted a variety of strategies that include not just preventive or mitigation strategies adopted to “flatten the curve”, but also interventions aiming to mitigate economic and social impacts of the pandemic. RAP`s special issue gathered 17 reflexive, timely and relevant contributions of different governmental approaches to the COVID-19 pandemic. In this paper we highlight similarities and differences in governmental responses across countries and regions. We uncover and discuss broad themes covered in the symposium, focusing on: (a) impacts of social distancing strategies; (b) economic-relief responses; c) the role of bargaining, collaboration and coordination across levels of governance; (d) key actors and their role in the pandemic response; (e) pandemic and socio-economic inequalities; and (f) context, policy responses and effectiveness. The symposium adds to an extensive body of knowledge that...
Harnessing Covid-19 Experiences in Pandemic Regions for a Tentative Framework of Urban Resilience
RSA Regions, 2021
This article examines the practices and approaches taken by different countries with a high number of cases and distinctive responses to the Covid-19 outbreak within six World Health Organization (WHO) regions (Figure 2) from the perspective of urban resilience. The six regions in question represent the WHO’s organizational-purpose grouping with geographical terms, which is the way the WHO publishes its statistics. Pandemic resilience literature takes a fragmented approach to specific management areas or adaptation strategies. Findings suggest the need for a comprehensive approach that covers the different perspectives of resilience. Thus, this paper offers a tentative conceptual framework consisting of prominent factors including a strategy map, which might enable a broader perspective to guide recovery from future pandemics.
PLOS Global Public Health
The COVID-19 pandemic suggests that there are opportunities to improve preparedness for infectious disease outbreaks. While much attention has been given to understanding national-level preparedness, relatively little attention has been given to understanding preparedness at the local-level. We, therefore, aim to describe (1) how local governments in urban environments were engaged in epidemic preparedness efforts before the COVID-19 pandemic and (2) how they were coordinating with authorities at higher levels of governance before COVID-19. We developed a survey and distributed it to 50 cities around the world involved in the Partnership for Healthy Cities. The survey included several question formats including free-response, matrices, and multiple-choice questions. RACI matrices, a project management tool that helps explain coordination structures, were used to understand the level of government responsible, accountable, consulted, and informed regarding select preparedness activit...
How Do Local Governments cope with COVID-19? Comparative Experiences in Three Southeast Asian Cities
Journal of Governance and Public Policy, 2022
This paper is aimed to investigate strategies of Southeast Asian local governments in addressing the COVID-19 situation by applying the framework of good governance principles and, in turn, to figure out the determinant factor of the successful strategy in each country. It is qualitative research by applying multiple cases of three cities in Southeast Asian countries, i.e., Indonesia, Malaysia, and Thailand. For data gathering, it takes relevant sources of News channels, whether in English or local languages of those countries. The finding demonstrates that Indonesia, Malaysia, and Thailand can adopt all principles of good governance in addressing the COVID-19 pandemic situation. Nevertheless, each country has its determinant factor of the successful strategy in handling a such situation. Indonesia is more excellent in the implementation of transparency, Malaysia has a well performance in the operation of participation, while Thailand is more successful in the application of account...
Pandemic in a smart city: Singapore's COVID-19 management through technology & society
Urban Geography, 2020
On 23 January 2020, Singapore announced its first COVID-19 case, becoming one of the first countries to be affected by the virus outside China. The government acted swiftly, closed its borders, introduced circuit-breaking measures, and deployed public health and medical expertise in tackling the virus. Both technology and human resources were used extensively for contact tracing, quarantining, and pathogenic management. While all these measures helped in a successful containment initially, the second wave of COVID-19 cases emerged at the foreign worker dormitories, affecting thousands of workers. Singapore’s approach in tackling the situation shifted rapidly and began to involve civil society organizations and individuals in the fight against the virus. In this paper, we argue that while state-led technologies such as TraceTogether and Safe Entry helped in the techno-governance of bodies on the move, bottom-up digital solutions, and innovative engagement of individuals are equally crucial in building a smart and resilient Singapore.
The enabling conditions of post-pandemic city government
Environment and Planning B: Urban Analytics and City Science, 2020
Most visions of the post-COVID-19 city concentrate on opportunities and expectations of the urban future, rather than why cities across the world have managed this and previous pandemics so badly or how an alternative pandemic-proofed city might be achieved. Perhaps we are an inherently optimistic species, or more likely, issues of public administration, institutional reform and state systems are boring to most people and even to many urban scholars. Yet, over the last year, widespread failure of effective government preparation and response to a predicted outbreak of disease is a stark warning that, for even a very basic post-pandemic recovery, all cities (big and small, rich or poor, progressive or conservative, old or new) have to be governed better and governed with very different outcomes in mind. We will need to reset the parameters and expectations of urban government, refocusing on issues of bureaucracy, state craft, public administration, planning and urban public policy. Central to making cities, where COVID-19 and many other pandemics have concentrated, safe from diseases is the imperative to protect the public good as a foundational principle of all state action, including at the city scale where local understandings of the built environment, social protection, environmental and economic dynamics underpin the deep contestations that mark out local from national political practice. The normative positioning of (local) states will require scrutiny but the point of this intervention is more pragmatic-I argue that building capable states that can action the urban commitments of the global body politic is essential. Paradoxically for some, the question of post-pandemic urban government emerges not only as a purely local concern but goes to the heart of international problems of government in the twenty-first century. For COVID-19 reconstruction to work, all of government has to become more active and visible not just in rolling out stimulus packages but in making the much long-term commitment to reshaping how urban systems function for the public-good and how money and power are distributed at the sub-national scale to provide protection to the vulnerable and uphold safety and security for all. Pandemic proofing cities, like urban climate proofing or