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The global reach of COVID-19 presents opportunities to compare policy responses to the pandemic and the role of knowledge across political contexts. This article examines the case of Vietnam's COVID-19 response. Recognized for its early effectiveness, Vietnam exhibits the standard characteristics of unitary states but has also engaged communities, strengthening the legitimacy of and buy-in to response efforts. This article identifies six factors that shaped Vietnam's response to the pandemic: (i) command-and-control governance, (ii) extensive preparation, (iii) fostering cooperative sentiment and solidarity, (iv) political readiness and communication, (v) policy coordination, and (vi) adaptation. The article contributes to practical discussions about country-specific responses to the pandemic, and to scholarship on policy effectiveness and success within the policy sciences and public management.

Singapore’s healthcare system ranks among the best in the world in terms of infant mortality rate, longevity, disability adjusted years, and so on. What is most remarkable, however, is that it achieved these fine outcomes at less than half the costs in comparable countries. The achievement of high healthcare outcomes at low costs is what constitutes ‘success’ in the case of Singapore. While the factors underlying the success are wide-ranging, a lot of the credit must be attributed to the government’s policy. In this chapter, the evolution of the policy measures since Independence will be tracked, along with their impact on improving healthcare services while containing costs. The measures have evolved with epidemiological and technological shifts as well as the rising expectations of a more prosperous and contestable society. The future continuation of the salutary trajectory will depend on the technical merits of the policy measures in the face of changing circumstances as much as their political legitimacy.

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Students of public policy have spent considerable effort setting out the types of policy instruments or tools available to policymakers in different stages of the policy process. A nascent strand of this important work concerns the agend-asetting phase, where scholars aim to understand the instruments -procedural and substantivethat government uses to shape the issues that it has to address. There is however limited engagement between scholarship on interest groups and this ongoing discussion around agendasetting tools. This paper aims to fill this gap by identifying different types of agenda-setting tools deployed by government which are used to shape engagement from organised interests. These tools are classified as those which governments use to routinise demands, regularise demands, generate demands, and impose issues onto the agenda. The paper refocuses attention of policy scholars onto the means and strategies that policymakers deploy to manage government agendas, a process which has clear implications for what becomes a policy problem and thereafter potentially subject to governmental action.

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