Sweden was well equipped to prevent the pandemic of COVID-19 from becoming serious. Over 280 years of collaboration between political bodies, authorities, and the scientific community had yielded many successes in preventive medicine. Sweden’s population is literate and has a high level of trust in authorities and those in power. During 2020, however, Sweden had ten times higher COVID-19 death rates compared with neighbouring Norway. In this report, we try to understand why, using a narrative approach to evaluate the Swedish COVID-19 policy and the role of scientific evidence and integrity. We argue that that scientific methodology was not followed by the major figures in the acting authorities—or the responsible politicians—with alternative narratives being considered as valid, resulting in arbitrary policy decisions. In 2014, the Public Health Agency merged with the Institute for Infectious Disease Control; the first decision by its new head (Johan Carlson) was to dismiss and move the authority’s six professors to Karolinska Institute. With this setup, the authority lacked expertise and could disregard scientific facts. The Swedish pandemic strategy seemed targeted towards “natural” herd-immunity and avoiding a societal shutdown. The Public Health Agency labelled advice from national scientists and international authorities as extreme positions, resulting in media and political bodies to accept their own policy instead. The Swedish people were kept in ignorance of basic facts such as the airborne SARS-CoV-2 transmission, that asymptomatic individuals can be contagious and that face masks protect both the carrier and others. Mandatory legislation was seldom used; recommendations relying upon personal responsibility and without any sanctions were the norm. Many elderly people were administered morphine instead of oxygen despite available supplies, effectively ending their lives. If Sweden wants to do better in future pandemics, the scientific method must be re-established, not least within the Public Health Agency. It would likely make a large difference if a separate, independent Institute for Infectious Disease Control is recreated. We recommend Sweden begins a self-critical process about its political culture and the lack of accountability of decision-makers to avoid future failures, as occurred with the COVID-19 pandemic.
The COVID-19 pandemic is an unprecedented global crisis in which governments had to act in a situation of rapid change and substantial uncertainty. The governments of Germany, Sweden and the UK have taken different paths allowing learning for future pandemic preparedness. To help inform discussions on preparedness, inspired by resilience frameworks, this paper reviews governance structures, and the role of science and the media in the COVID-19 response of Germany, Sweden and the UK in 2020. We mapped legitimacy, interdependence, knowledge generation and the capacity to deal with uncertainty.Our analysis revealed stark differences which were linked to pre-existing governing structures, the traditional role of academia, experience of crisis management and the communication of uncertainty—all of which impacted on how much people trusted their government. Germany leveraged diversity and inclusiveness, a ‘patchwork quilt’, for which it was heavily criticised during the second wave. The Swedish approach avoided plurality and largely excluded academia, while in the UK’s academia played an important role in knowledge generation and in forcing the government to review its strategies. However, the vivant debate left the public with confusing and rapidly changing public health messages. Uncertainty and the lack of evidence on how best to manage the COVID-19 pandemic—the main feature during the first wave—was only communicated explicitly in Germany. All country governments lost trust of their populations during the epidemic due to a mix of communication and transparency failures, and increased questioning of government legitimacy and technical capacity by the public.
This article analyses the development and consolidation of an illiberal (or shadow) economy and its connection to political projects in Serbia and Kosovo. Here, some comparative remarks are made over the form of economy and its political connections and implications. In spite of methodological problems with sources being scarce or of varying quality, the phenomenon of illiberal economy and its coupling with political projects is too important to be neglected by researchers. To some extent 'soft sources' have been accepted here, where hard evidence is lacking. The article argues that the considerable consolidation of illiberal economies in Serbia and Kosovo (as elsewhere in the post-Yugoslav space) have been intimately connected to politics, political violence and conflict in the region, and produced a transformation of wealth and resources. In this manner the conflicts in the region can be analysed from the perspective of social transformation. The latter concept emphasises that the trajectory of social and political change is not necessarily linear, towards liberal democracy and market economy, which is implied in the concepts transition (where the end stage is assumed to be liberal democracy and market economy) or social breakdown (which assumes a possible reconstruction to the norm of a harmonious state). Instead we may see fairly sustainable alternative political and economic projects, capable in their own (illiberal) way of integration into global networks and structures. Whereas the formal economy in these areas is marginalised in the global economy, these illiberal forms of economy may be both relatively longterm sustainable and provide the basis for alternative ways of social protection as well as exclusion. They are in certain regards political, and integral to political projects, but they should be viewed in terms of emergence rather than causation. Conflict cannot be reduced to an understanding of illiberal economy, but the latter provides for redistribution of resources and power, which is of direct relevance to conflict and its dynamics. The relationship is of a dialectical, rather than causative, nature. The level of political violence may vary and the illiberal economy expresses considerable capacity for adaptation. These arguments are not only of theoretical relevance, i.e. for how to conceptualise social and political change in the region, but highly policy-relevant as well, especially with regard to international aid policy and the governing in international protectorates.
We argue that the neoliberal tradition and new public management reforms of the public sector effectively erode the core (liberal) democratic values of the rule of law and transparency. The tension between public law and managerially-influenced governmental policy is in practice resolved by the emergence of what we call “shadow management” in public administration, whereby managerial decisions that clash with constitutional and administrative law are dealt with in internal memos or consultancy reports and hidden from public view. The consequence is a duality in the public sector, which potentially reduces public trust in institutions and undermines their democratic legitimacy. Finally, we argue that when governmental neoliberal policy clashes with legal requirements, the likely effect is that the popular institution of the (governmental or parliamentary) ombudsman, originally introduced for legal supervision over civil servants, takes on the new deceptive role of providing pseudo-legal justification for neoliberal reform, making neoliberalism and ombudsmen a particularly problematic combination from a democratic and legal perspective. We support our contentions by a case study of Swedish higher education and hypothesize that the mechanisms we highlight are general in nature.
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