APPAM Annual Conference Utilizing Smart Government and Big Data to Address Large-Scale Crises: Examining the Informational, Tech
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APPAM Annual Conference Utilizing Smart Government and Big Data to Address Large-Scale Crises: Examining the Informational, Technological, and Social Dimensions What Matters in the Fight against COVID-19: Data, State or Civil Society? A Comparative Analysis of Hong Kong and Singapore Wilson Wong Associate Professor* Data Science and Policy Studies (DSPS) Programme Faculty of Social Science The Chinese University of Hong Kong Hong Kong Email: [email protected] Tel: 852-3943-7489 Fax: 852-2603-5229 Nov 12-14, 2020 1 What Matters in the Fight against COVID-19: Data, State or Civil Society? A Comparative Analysis of Hong Kong and Singapore Abstract This article examines the interactive role of data, state, and civil society in the fight against COVID-19 through a comparative policy study of Hong Kong and Singapore with an integrated framework of policy capacity and Political Nexus Triads (PNT). Hong Kong and Singapore provide a natural experiment of two contrasting cases of state-society configurations. It is argued in the paper that the role of state, civil society, and their interaction has significantly shape the way data is used and interpreted in the fight against COVID-19. Hong Kong combats COVID-19 mainly with a resilient civil society with little trust of government data while Singapore relies more on a strong government and state-led data strategies. They together support the existence of multiple configurational causality in effectively responding to COVID- 19 and question the existence of a single one-best model. Keywords: COVID-19, Comparative Policy Analysis, Policy Capacity, Political Nexus Triads, Multiple Configurational Causality, Hong Kong, Singapore 2 1. Introduction This article examines the interactive role of state and civil society in the fight against the COVID-19 crisis through a comparative case study of Hong Kong and Singapore with an integrated framework of policy capacity and Political Nexus Triads (PNT). As COVID-19 develops into a global pandemic, there has been an active search for transferable lessons and generalizable formulas to combat COVID-19 effectively. As experiences of both successful and less successful countries are becoming more visible and abundant, they provide a valuable opportunity for research and lesson-drawing. A natural experiment has been set up for finding out the capacity and incapacity across governments by explaining the variations in their responses despite the presence of a common crisis (Capano et al. 2020). In this regard, this article has a twofold objective. First of all, we would like to examine the policy responses of Hong Kong and Singapore, two city-states in East Asia, to identify some good practices and useful lessons. Second and importantly, we would like to take advantage of the natural experiment to study how two comparable but contrasting cases of state-society configurations can reach a similar policy outcome. In the analysis, we would introduce an integrated framework of Political Nexus Triads (PNT) (Moon & Ingraham 1998) and policy capacity (Xu, Ramesh, & Howlett 2015). These two analytical frameworks complement each other well in comparative policy analysis. Policy capacity refers to the set of skills and resources—or competences and capabilities—necessary to perform policy functions, whereas PNT identifies the three main actors (and their respective institutions) of policy-shaping power in society: politicians (politics), bureaucrats (bureaucracy), and citizens (civil society). The integrated framework enables us to answer the research question of what actors and institutions we can still rely on and what capacities do they possess for overcoming a crisis as serious as COVID-19 under various state-society configurations. 3 Through the analysis of the integrated framework, although both Hong Kong and Singapore are developmental states (Perry & Yeoh 1997; Weiss & Hobson 1995; Woo- Cumings 1999) and share many similarities in their development trajectories (Woo 2018), they are different in their approach to tackling COVID-19, with the former taking a more society- oriented approach and the latter adopting a more government-centred approach. For Hong Kong, as it has a weak state amidst its severe social and political crises (Lam 2017), its accomplishment in fighting the COVID-19 crisis is mainly attributed to a strong, autonomous, resilient civil society. In contrast, Singapore relies more on governmental leadership such as the use of high technology under its close guidance in its policy responses. In alignment with the principle of multiple causality configuration, our study highlights the possibility of multiple state-society configurations as equivalent paths towards capacity-building and challenges the assumption of the existence or domination of any single one-best model in combating COVID- 19. 2. An Integrated Framework: Political Nexus Triad (PNT) and Policy Capacity The COVID-19 pandemic can be viewed as a natural experiment to understand the differences in policy capacity across countries and regions in terms of their state-society configuration (Skocpol & Fingold 1982; Wong & Welch 1998). There are at least two major approaches of studying the policy responses of governments towards COVID-19. The first approach is to study a specific policy response or a meaningful group or subset of policy responses, such as economic stimulation package, and evaluate their effects and impacts. A second approach is to adopt an institutional perspective to examine the institutions responsible for addressing COVID-19 and assess their strengths and weaknesses. Although both approaches are investigated in this study, we place a heavier emphasis on the second approach. 4 Policy responses are made by institutions either independently or collectively as compromises and interactions among them and therefore are institutional responses (Capano et al. 2020; Fukuyama 2013; Wong & Welch 1998). Taking this wider perspective, this study takes a step back to ask a more fundamental question of what pillars or institutions of governance could step up for mobilizing, formulating, and producing the appropriate and necessary policy responses to fight a major crisis. In setting a manageable scope but seminal framework of analysis, it combines the theories of Policy Nexus Triads (PNT) (Moon & Ingraham 1998) and policy capacity (Wu, Ramesh, & Howlett 2015). These two frameworks complement each other well in that the PNT identifies the macro institutions of governance while the policy capacity literature elaborates on their strengths and influences. Essentially, an integrated framework enables us to identify both the major institutions and specify what capacities they have in impacting on a policy outcome. Although PNT was originally developed to study the dynamic trajectory of the three major building blocks (politics, bureaucracy and civil society) in a comparative study of Asian administrative reforms, it is an embracive and overarching framework with multiple applications and broad explanatory power as it pinpoints the macro institutions of governance, outlines their major characteristics, and lays out their patterns of interactions. As a dynamic model, under PNT, each institution has its own rationale to communicate with each other and attempt to protect and increase their political and administrative power based on that rationale. PNT is an extended model which adds civil society as the third dimension to the classic politics-administration model in which politicians and bureaucrats traditionally serve the functions of the state (Aberbach, Putnam, & Rockman 1981). Civil society refers to the non- government social forces other than politicians and bureaucrats in a society. It is defined as “the self-organization of society through the creation of autonomous, voluntary, nongovernmental organizations such as economic enterprises, religious and cultural 5 organizations, occupational and professional associations, independent news media and political organizations” (Keane 1988). With the inclusion of civil society, PNT has become not just an extension of a traditional “politics–administration nexus” but a more comprehensive and reliable framework to study the state-society configurations consisting of these three major institutions of governance and their interactions. In PNT, any government action including policy can be understood as a product of interactions among politicians, bureaucrats and civil society (Moon & Ingraham 1998). Policy capacity refers to the set of skills and resources or competences and capabilities necessary to perform policy functions (Xu, Ramesh, & Howlett 2015). Under the conceptual framework of policy capacity, capacities can be assessed at multiple levels: individual, organizational, and systemic (Moore 1995) as it highlights the multifaceted nature and multiple layers of capacity. At the same time, competences and skills are categorized into three general types of skills essential for policy success—analytical, operational and political. As a widely adopted conceptual framework, subsequent studies propose expanding the types of skills and competences to include legal power (Van de Walle & Brans 2018), legitimization power (Hartley & Darryl 2020), and fiscal power (Woo 2020). As a macro analytical framework, PNT should match the systemic level of policy capacity. The integration of PNT and policy capacity enables us to identify the skills and capacities of the three institutions (and their actors): bureaucracy (bureaucrats), civil society (citizens),