Opportunity management of the COVID-19 pandemic: testing the crisis from a global perspective

Abstract

This article provides a conceptual framework for the analysis of COVID-19 crisis governance in the first half of 2020 from a cross-country comparative perspective. It focuses on the issue of opportunity management, that is, how the crisis was used by relevant actors of distinctly different administrative cultures as a window of opportunity. We started from an overall interest in the factors that have influenced the national politics of crisis management to answer the question of whether and how political and administrative actors in various countries have used the crisis as an opportunity to facilitate, accelerate or prevent changes in institutional settings. The objective is to study the institutional settings and governance structures, (alleged) solutions and remedies, and constellations of actors and preferences that have influenced the mode of crisis and opportunity management. Finally, the article summarizes some major comparative findings drawn from the country studies of this Special Issue, focusing on similarities and differences in crisis responses and patterns of opportunity management. Points for practitioners With crises emerging in ever shorter sequences of time, governing turbulence and using crises for strategic institutional decisions has become an increasingly important issue for policymakers. Aiming at effective and proportionate responses, policymakers must take the institutional conditions, administrative traditions and relevant actor constellations of crisis management into account, which are key to learn from other countries’ experiences. Comparing these experiences and analyzing the politics of crisis governance from a cross-country perspective may help policymakers to identify strengths and weaknesses of their own national/regional approaches and to seize crisis-related windows of opportunity for institutional reforms at the national and international levels.

Chronicle of the International Institute of Administrative Sciences

“…As there is no status quo ante to go back to, it has become imperative to seize these opportunities or risk becoming redundant. For this, we used a combination of trust-driven and multi-level accountability-driven patterns of opportunity management (see Kuhlmann et al, 2021). More importantly, the strategy to manage these opportunities was not based on robust analysis and fact-finding, or as Kuhlman et al put it, “opportunity management was not the primarily the result of evidence-based assessments or systematic crisis analyses but reflects policymakers’ ad hoc attempts to strengthen their institutional position, to shift powers in the multi-level system and/or to gain additional influence” (p. 512).…”

“…Public administration will never be the same during and after Covid-19—if there is ever an after Covid-19. Sabine Kuhlman, International Institute of Administrative Sciences (IIAS) Vice President for Western Europe, developed along with a number of colleagues (Kuhlmann et al, 2021), a cross-country comparative analysis in the September 2021 special issue of the International Review of Administrative Sciences ( IRAS ) on “Testing the crisis: Opportunity management and governance of the Covid-19 pandemic”. The comparison shows that opportunities arise during crises and the extent of these opportunities increases with the magnitude of the crisis.…”

Public Administration and Governance for the SDGs: Navigating between Change and Stability

“…They concentrate on collective responsibility in Asian countries and on individual responsibility in the Netherlands. In the Netherlands as well as in Sweden, the relationship between citizens and public authorities is based on a high level of trust, and governments may rely on recommendations rather than needing legislation to achieve compliance of citizens with COVID-19 crisis measures [7].…”

“…This new imbalance resulted in metagovernance interventions. The aforementioned comparative study on government responses to the pandemic concludes that "the need to act resolutely may be better accommodated by using a more balanced mix of governance styles, wherein hierarchic types of governance are employed to complement the market" and "supplemented by the transparency and accountability that open network governance styles can bring about" [7].…”

Digital transformation going local: implementation, impacts and constraints from a German perspective

“…The effectiveness and quality of public service provision depend largely on the capacity of local authorities to adopt administrative structures and processes for fast-changing environments and increasing demands from citizens. Local governments all over Europe have been massively affected by various waves of crises, such as the global financial crisis, austerity policies, the refugee crisis and, most recently, Covid-19 (Franzke & Kuhlmann, 2021;Kuhlmann et al, 2021aKuhlmann et al, , 2021b. Reforms used to deal with these crises have taken a variety of trajectories-from New Public Management (NPM), to re-organization of service delivery between the local public, private and non-profit sectors, functional re-scaling, territorial consolidation, and inter-local co-operation (Bouckaert & Kuhlmann, 2016;Kuhlmann et al, 2021c).…”