APPAM Annual Conference Utilizing Smart Government and Big Data to Address Large-Scale Crises: Examining the Informational, Tech

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

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

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.

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.

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), and politics (politicians) in the analytical, operational, and political dimensions. A policy outcome can be analyzed and compared across countries by being taken as the sum of the interactions, including both conflicts and synergies, among the three institutions. Pivotally, the integrated framework using the dynamics of state-society configuration as the focus can tremendously enhance the ability of researchers to work across contexts in comparative policy analysis by adopting the principles of multiple configurational causality (Fisher & Maggetti

2017). Multiple configurational causality allows us to vastly expand our space of comprehension to unpack and diagnose some complex observations often encountered in comparative policy analysis by pinpointing that a policy outcome can be caused by multiple factors which may have different effects, including opposite ones, on it (multifinality) and the same outcome can be caused by different combinations of those factors (equifinality) (Fischer

& Maggetti 2017).

3. Comparing the Two City-States

Hong Kong and Singapore, which are two city-states, are useful cases in comparative policy analysis because while they are quite similar in some major aspects unrelated to the theories of public administration and policy, they adopt a divergent path of administrative and policy reforms, such as the New Public Management (NPM) reform (Cheung 2008; Lee &

Haque 2006). On the similarity side, both of them are developmental states which use an elitist and autonomous bureaucracy as the driver of economic growth and take economic growth as the basis of political legitimacy (Douglas 1994; Evans 2014; Huff 1995; Johnson 1982). In terms of national and cultural characteristics, both of them have reached an advanced level of post-industrial development, positioned themselves as international financial hubs and have

Chinese as the ethnicity of most of their population.

3.1. The Fight against SARS and COVID-19

Table 1 summarizes the general information about Hong Kong and Singapore. Both of them have previous experience of another pandemic, Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome

(SARS) of 2002-03. A substantial number of cases, including deaths, were recorded in these two city-states implying that they have been given the experience of getting prepared

7 institutionally as a government and individually as citizens for the problems and chaos brought by a pandemic.

Table One: Hong Kong and Singapore: General Information, SARS and COVID-19 Performance (as of Aug 25, 2020) Hong Kong Singapore General Information Population 7.5 million 5.8 million Size 1,106 square km 721 square km Chinese Population (%) 74.2% 93.6% GDP per capita (2019) US$48,755 US$65,233

SARS (2002-03) Cases 1755 238 Death 299 33

COVID-19 First COVID-19 Case Jan 23, 2020 Jan 23, 2020 Cases 4,736 56,495 Deaths 79 27 Case / million of population 631 9,645 Death / million of population 11 5 Test / million of population 103,967 312,903 Case / million of pop 3,122 (world average) Death / million of pop 106.4 (world average)

Sources: Complied by authors from data from websites of the governments of Hong Kong and Singapore

They encountered the first confirmed COVID-19 case on the same day of 23 January,

2020. At first glance, although the number of cases in Singapore is much higher than Hong

Kong, close to 90% of the cases in Singapore were migrant workers, not from within the community (Koh 2020). Excluding cases from this marginalized group separated from the general community would put the number of cases between Hong Kong and Singapore within a comparable range.

3.2. State-Society Configurations

Using the integrated framework of PNT and policy capacity, the main question we would like to address is whether a similar policy outcome can be caused by different sets of state- society configurations. Singapore exhibits much higher integration and congruency among politics, bureaucracy and civil society under its strong political leadership. In contrast, in Hong

Kong, there is growing tension and intense conflicts between a weak state dominated by unpopular politicians and its bureaucracy and civil society.

Table Two: Key Institutions under PNT in Hong Kong and Singapore: Politics, Bureaucracy, Civil Society Hong Kong Singapore Politics  Executive-led government  Strong political leadership with strong formal power with electoral but weak leadership and accountability accountability  Under challenge by the a  Heavily influenced by growing opposition and Beijing, legitimacy crisis civil society, especially and clash and young activism of social confrontation with society media in social movements Bureaucracy  Weakening and  Strong and effective increasingly ineffective Weberian bureaucracy Weberian bureaucracy due  Balanced and stable to politicization and poor relationship with political leadership politicians and state  Decoupling with the politicians and growing tension Civil Society  Active and autonomous  Emerging but constrained civil society civil society  From state-society  Gradually shifting from separation to state-society state-society integration to confrontation a new mode of checks and  Under suppression, balances retaliation and surveillance by the state Source: Cheung (2008) and Authors

Table 2 compares the state-society configuration under the integrated framework between Hong Kong and Singapore. Constitutionally, Hong Kong is designed as an executive- led government with dominant power given to its Chief Executive of the Hong Kong Special

Administrative Region (HKSAR) Government. But there is a wide gap between the formal power of politicians and reality as it has faced a huge and looming legitimacy crisis since the return of its sovereignty from the British to China in 1997 due to its undemocratic political system, poor performance and accountability of the government, and weak leadership (Lee

1999; Scott 2000). With regard to its bureaucracy, which is a typical meritocratic and autonomous Weberian bureaucracy, its power and influence have also been considerably undercut by the politicians through a continuous process of politicization by using political appointees to take over their policymaking functions (Wong 2013).

Citizens enjoyed a high level of freedom fostering an active and autonomous civil society even in its colonial era (Fong 2013). A lot of tussles occur among the central government, the

Hong Kong SAR government and lawmakers in Hong Kong (Lee & Chan 2018); civil society has continued to grow and become more assertive in recent years.

While the state-society configuration is unstable and adversarial in Hong Kong,

Singapore has a much more harmonious and integrative state-society configuration (Cheung

2008). Their politicians still exercise strong leadership with support from citizens through electoral accountability under a democratic political system (Haque 2009; Quah 2010). The

People’s Action Party (PAP), its governing party, is increasingly challenged by a growing civil society with the rise of youth activism and social media (Tan 2018). However, the integration between state and society remains strong under the reliable partnership between politicians and elitist bureaucrats. On the other hand, civil society, mainly allowed to be active in some non-political and non-sensitive policy areas, is carefully constrained by the government to avoid political instability and uncertainty (Ortmann 2015; Rodan 2003). The Singapore

10 government continues to adopt a pragmatic approach to governing though it is constantly pushed by different societal and political forces to introduce gradual and incremental reforms over time (Tan 2012).

3.3. What to Measure: Policy Responses or Community Responses?

Through the lens of the integrated framework, a broader and more inclusive definition of what constitutes a policy response is required. A policy response should not be confined to only the action by the state but also members of civil society. Under the paradigms of co- production (Howlett, Kekez, & Poocharoen 2017) and collaborative governance (Emerson,

Nabatchi, & Balogh 2012), it is becoming more common and crucial for citizens to be involved and engaged as partners in different stages of the policy cycle from policy planning to implementation and service delivery.

To measure the policy responses of governments around the world in tackling COVID-19,

Oxford University created the Oxford COVID-19 Government Response Tracker (OxCGRT) dataset (Hale et al. 2020). Table 3 shows the data of Hong Kong and Singapore in the major items of OxCGRT and the Stringency Index, one of the four policy indexes in the dataset. Only the Stringency Index is shown because the other three indexes contain some items such as economic support which are less relevant to our research question.

One major difference which stands out is that Hong Kong, unlike Singapore and many other countries or regions, reached its policy outcome without a lockdown. For Singapore, it had a major lockdown called “Circuit Breaker” in April and May of 2020. Another major discrepancy is the use of technology for contract tracing in combating COVID-19. Singapore has launched two mobile applications TraceTogether and SafeEntry for contract tracing during the COVID-19 pandemic (Wu & Zhu 2020). The absence of any extensive use of high-

11 technology applications in Hong Kong does not mean that contact tracing applications are not useful but it does show that it is not a necessary condition for the policy outcome.

Table Three: Policy Responses: Stringency and Public Health Measures in Hong Kong and Singapore Hong Kong Singapore Containment and Closure C1. School Closing Yes Yes C2. Workplace Closing Limited Yes C3. Cancel Public Events Yes Yes C4. Restrictions on Yes Yes Gathering Size C5. Close Public Transport No No C6. Stay at Home No (voluntary action) Yes (Circuit Breaker) Requirements C7. Restrictions on Internal No (voluntary action) Yes (Circuit Breaker) Movement C8. Restrictions on Yes Yes International Travel

Health Systems H1. Public Information Yes (also done by the civil Yes Campaign society) H2. Testing Policy Limited Extensive H3. Contract Tracing Low (with low level of High (high level of contract tracing technology) technology application by GovTech) H4. Emergency Investment Limited Yes in Healthcare H5. Investment in COVID- No Yes 19 Vaccines

Others Wearing Masks in Public Done by Civil Society (no Limited at the early stage Places law until mid-July) (until the mask law passed in April) High Risk Facilities Closure Yes Yes and Restricted Hours (e.g., Bar, gyms, beauty shops)

Highest Score of Stringency 62 85 Index (out of 100) Source: Oxford COVID-19 Government Response Tracker (OxCGRT) (Hale et al. 2020) and Authors

The level of Stringency Index is higher for Singapore than Hong Kong. Out of 100, the highest index recorded for Hong Kong is only 62 but it is 85 for Singapore. This does not make sense unless we can accept the conclusion that fewer actions is better. As the index captures mostly government actions than voluntary collective actions by civil society, this adds more weight to the argument that Hong Kong’s performance in COVID-19 is attributed much more to its civil society. Since the very beginning of the pandemic, citizens in Hong Kong have taken many measures including wearing masks, maintaining social distancing and personal hygiene which can be as simple as washing one’s hands regularly on a completely voluntary basis to prevent the spread of COVID-19. It refers to the situation in which when the state fails or refuses to act, civil society will step up.

4. Different Configurations, Similar Outcome

The characteristics of the different state-society configurations in Hong Kong and

Singapore are reflected throughout the process of their combat against the COVID-19 Crisis reinforcing the argument of multiple configuration causality.

4.1. Hong Kong: Strong Society but Weak State

Figure 1 shows the number and the 7-day moving average of COVID-19 cases in Hong

Kong. There have been a total of three waves in the COVID-19 outbreak in Hong Kong. The first wave was from late Jan to early March in which Hong Kong was very successful in preventing the outbreak as the number of total cases was kept at around 120 only. This was mainly attributed to the effort of civil society in which a huge and historical 5-day strike was launched by a union of medical workers in Hong Kong, the Hospital Authority Employees

Alliance. The strike, together with strong pressure from the public, forced the government to

13 back down and close most of the border entry points on Feb 5.1 Border closure, especially to visitors from mainland China, has been shown to be a very effective measure to control the spread of the pandemic to Hong Kong.

Figure One: Daily Cases in Hong Kong

Source: https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus

The second wave was from mid-March to late June in which cases rose to over 1,000.

Despite that, society and most citizens were not affected by it since most of those cases were not community outbreaks but imported cases of Hong Kong citizens returning home from overseas. Since all returnees would be required to be quarantined by law, the COVID-19 outbreak was still well under control during the second wave. The large number of Hong Kong citizens returning to Hong Kong to escape the global pandemic, including many students studying in overseas institutions, was actually a vote of public confidence in Hong Kong of

1 https://fortune.com/2020/02/04/coronavirus-hong-kong-strike/

14 doing a good job in combating the pandemic when compared to many advanced Western and advanced countries.

What is problematic is the third wave which started in early July. The number of cases increased sharply within a very short period and reached over 4,000. The misjudgment and incompetence of politicians was widely regarded by both citizens and experts as the root source of this third wave outbreak. The government loosened the control over vessel and flight crews in early June to allow them to enter Hong Kong without medical proof and quarantine requirement.2 Although this triggered a huge public outcry, civil society was weak in fighting against the state in this round. After the second wave, the government launched many new policies and initiatives to jeopardize any social movements and weaken civil society as well.

For example, the Hospital Authority of the HKSAR government threatened to fire any employee who joins a strike again.

In reviewing the success in combating COVID-19 in the first two waves, the partnership between bureaucracy and civil society led to strong accountability and freedom of information in the fight against COVID-19. The provision of accurate and timely information by a professional bureaucracy to the public is widely regarded as one of the effective and essential solutions to combat pandemics, such as SARS of 2003 and the latest COVID-19 crisis (Larson

2020; Moon, 2020). In a pandemic, “speaking truth to citizens” is no less important than

“speaking truth to power”. The valuable information can be utilized by medical professionals to formulate the appropriate treatment of the disease and contain its spread, while citizens take necessary preventive measures which can be as simple as wearing a surgical mask and maintaining social distancing.

The third wave was a major turning point in the fight against COVID-19 in Hong Kong since the state has struck back to reduce the power and influence of civil society. Under the

2 https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-china-53596299

15 constitutional setting in Hong Kong, civil society has little institutional means including elections to hold their politicians accountable which explains why non-institutional means such as protests have become a more popular and effective means for civil society in Hong Kong to put pressure on the government to make changes. For bureaucrats, their autonomy and professionalism were also undermined and threatened by the politicians through various reforms and structural changes. An intact civil service system always play a leading role in determining the ability of civil servants and officials to speak the truth to the public (Peters &

Pierre 2004). But it is gradually replaced by political accountability under the politicization of the civil service that emphasizes obedience to rule and order, undermining their upholding of freedom of information and public interest in society for handling crises and emergencies

(Romzek & Dubnick 1987).

4.2. Singapore: Strong State and Constrained Civil Society

Singapore has been praised as one of the countries that has got its COVID-19 response right but unlike Hong Kong’s society-driven response, Singapore’s precautions are mostly driven by the government. Figure 2 shows the number and 7-day moving average of COVID-

19 cases in Singapore. The peak passed after Singapore adopted the “Circuit Breaker” lockdown in April and May. The majority of daily cases are now confined to the migrant workers group. Better public health and medical systems were put in place after the haunting experience of the SARS epidemic in 2003. In early January, the Ministry of Health (MOH) alerted all medical practitioners to look out for suspected cases of pneumonia who had recently returned from Wuhan and implemented temperature screening at Changi Airport for inbound travellers arriving on flights from Wuhan. The country also promptly enacted contact tracing for all confirmed cases.

Figure Two: Daily Cases in Singapore

Source: https://www.worldometers.info/coronavirus

Another key feature of Singapore’s response is the government’s efforts in overcoming the ‘fear factor’ in society through timely communications. Individuals are uncertainty-averse; when the DORSCON turned Orange, some Singaporeans over-reacted and started panic- buying. Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong calmed the nation with an open address to explain the government’s strategy in three different languages. In mid-February, Minister of Health Mr.

Gan Kim Yong and Minister for Culture, Community & Youth Ms. Grace Fu met with church leaders to update them on the COVID-19 situation, and to provide guidance on precautionary measures that churches can take to reduce the risk of transmission of the virus.3 Besides, the

Singapore government strictly enforced laws and restrictions to ensure that all travellers and citizens follow the quarantine order to contain the first wave of the outbreak. In addition, the

3 https://www.moh.gov.sg/news-highlights/details/minister-for-health-and-minister-for-culture-community- youth-meet-church-leaders-on-covid-19

Singaporean government also put in place measures to detect the spread of false news with the

Infectious Diseases Act for False Information and Obstruction of Contact Tracing.4

With its ‘all-government approach’5, Singapore was able to maintain a sense of normalcy and at the same time contain the outbreak. In March, the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and the

Ministry of Education began to encourage Singaporeans to return home. At that time,

Singapore remained relatively relaxed and insisted on keeping most public services and social activities normal. However, the number of daily cases has increased quickly since April and massive outbreaks happened among foreign worker dormitories. In late March, the authority started advising citizens to keep a safe distance in public places. On 7 April, when the accumulated cases reached 1,481 (of which 62.5% were locally transmitted cases, including the cases in dormitories), Singapore’s Multi-Ministry Taskforce implemented an elevated set of safe distancing measures, described as a ‘circuit breaker’, (de facto lockdown) to pre-empt the trend of increasing local transmission of COVID-19.

The wearing of masks is an interesting example highlighting the difference in the role and attitudes of civil society between Hong Kong and Singapore. For Hong Kong, with little trust in the government and the strong memory of the SARS experience in people’s minds, citizens ignored any government advice or comments to wear masks by themselves right from the beginning of the COVID-19 outbreak but there was a learning and guiding process led by the government in Singapore. For months, the Singaporean government advised citizens ‘not to wear a mask if you are well’, following the World Health Organization’s (WHO) advice. The authority emphasized that masks were not necessary when people practise good personal

4 https://www.moh.gov.sg/news-highlights/details/two-charged-under-infectious-diseases-act-for-false- information-and-obstruction-of-contact-tracing 5 WHO chief Tedros Adhanom Ghebreyesus has praised Singapore's "all-of-society, all-government approach" in the containment of Covid-19.

18 hygiene and wash their hands regularly.6 However, in early April, in view of the intractable cases, Prime Minister Lee Hsien Loong finally announced that his government would no longer discourage the general public from wearing masks. The government distributed reusable masks from 5 April to all residents. On 14 April, the government tightened up the Circuit Breaker measures and required all to wear a mask in public, a U-turn in policy.7

The state-led integrative model of state-society configuration in Singapore also has its weakness and blind spots. The large outbreak of COVID-19 cases among migrant workers was a signal about the weak position of civil society (Woo 2020). The sharp increase in COVID-19 cases among the foreign worker population revealed Singapore’s ‘two very different realities’.8

Although groups and associations in civil society have repeatedly raised the issue of the poor living conditions of migrant workers, this was not taken seriously by the politicians and bureaucrats due to the weak and constrained influence of civil society in setting policy directions in major areas, making the issue difficult to reach the formal policy agenda before the COVID-19 Crisis (Woo 2020). In Singapore, civil society is still regarded more as an actor cooperating with the state rather than a co-decision maker or partner formulating key policy responses. It should be noted that in recent years, the importance of civil society has been recognized by the government and opinion leaders in Singapore.

5. Implications for Policy and Research

This article examines the interactive role of state and civil society in the fight against

COVID-19 through a comparative study of Hong Kong and Singapore. By analyzing the

6 https://www.gov.sg/article/covid-19-resources (Advisory on Wearing Masks – 5 Feb 2020; Practise Good Personal Hygiene (updated) – 12 Feb 2020) 7 https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-04-03/singapore-u-turns-on-wearing-masks-as-local-virus- cases-climb 8 https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2020/04/16/singapores-new-covid-19-cases-reveal-countrys- two-very-different-realities/

19 approach of policy responses of Hong Kong within the integrated framework of policy capacity and Political Nexus Triads (PNT), the aim is to answer the research question of what actors and institutions we can rely on amid a crisis as serious as COVID-19.

The analysis provides implications for both research and policy. In terms of research, the experiences of these two city-states support the usefulness of multiple configuration causality in comparative policy analysis. In comparative policy analysis, we should avoid the trap of oversimplification and over-generalization to assume the existence of one best solution or the most superior model to look up to. These two cases show convincingly that all three key institutions under PNT – politics, bureaucracy, and civil society, are capable of making policy responses for the purpose of addressing a crisis as severe as COVID-19. The overall effect of a policy response should be taken as the sum of all actions and reactions, which can be conflicts or synergy, cooperative or confrontational, rejecting the traditional view that state-society relations are necessarily a zero-sum trade-off (Evans, Rueschemeyer, & Skocpol 1985; Migdal

1988). Singapore is a case of a cooperative state-society configuration and Hong Kong belongs to the confrontational category. Different state-society configurations reaching the same or similar outcomes dismisses any ethnocentric and parochial approaches by raising the possibility of multiple models of equivalent competence.

Policymakers and citizens should change their mindset and vastly expand their policy toolkit by understanding the interactions and dynamics among all three institutions under PNT in formulating effective and impactful responses. A policy response should not be confined to only the action by the state but include members of civil society. With co-production and collaborative governance, it is becoming more common and crucial for citizens to be engaged as partners in public policies. As shown in the COVID-19 experience of the two city-states, many effective measures and responses can be as simple and low-cost as wearing masks, maintaining social distance, and washing hands. All of these can be accomplished effectually

20 and forcibly by the voluntary actions of civil society. Furthermore, recognizing that the government can be a solution but also a problem in a crisis highlights the interchangeability and complementarity of state-society interactions in co-producing policy responses and outcomes. As the state fails, the remaining pillars of governance are able to step up to carry out actions and decisions.

Looking at the long run, in further enhancing comparative policy research, one of the major lessons is recognizing the potential of multiple configurational causality as a theoretical and methodological lens for studying how different configurations of factors can lead to the same outcome. Its use would immensely increase the ability of researchers to cut across contextuality in comparing cases of different countries (Brans & Pattyn 2017), improve the level of external validity (Radin & Weimer 2018) of the cases and therefore the ability to integrate research and practice by drawing actionable lessons for policy transfer.

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