Governing the Pandemic The Politics of Navigating a Mega-Crisis Arjen Boin · Allan McConnell · Paul ’t Hart Governing the Pandemic Arjen Boin · Allan McConnell · Paul ‘t Hart Governing the Pandemic The Politics of Navigating a Mega-Crisis Arjen Boin Allan McConnell Department of Political Science Department of Government and Leiden University International Relations Leiden, The Netherlands University of Sydney Darlington, NSW, Australia Paul ‘t Hart School of Governance Utrecht University Driebergen-Rijsenburg, Utrecht The Netherlands ISBN 978-3-030-72679-9 ISBN 978-3-030-72680-5 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-72680-5 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2021. This book is an open access publication. Open Access This book is licensed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits use, sharing, adaptation, distribution and reproduction in any medium or format, as long as you give appropriate credit to the original author(s) and the source, provide a link to the Creative Commons license and indicate if changes were made. The images or other third party material in this book are included in the book’s Creative Commons license, unless indicated otherwise in a credit line to the material. If material is not included in the book’s Creative Commons license and your intended use is not permitted by statutory regulation or exceeds the permitted use, you will need to obtain permission directly from the copyright holder. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and informa- tion in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. Cover illustration: © Melisa Hasan This Palgrave Pivot imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland Preface For long-time students of crisis management, COVID-19 is ‘the big one’—the scary Future Crisis so often announced and discussed in the literature: truly global, arriving slowly and lasting for a very long time, with devastating impacts. COVID-19 was the ultimate stress test for plans and preparations, for political and administrative leadership, for societal and institutional resilience. In this book, we wield the tools of crisis studies to understand and explain the dynamics of governmental and societal responses during the first twelve months of this crisis. This is not a detailed case study with timelines and statistics. Our focus is on how governments, particularly those of the advanced economies (that we are most familiar with) have responded to the pandemic, to the complex, transboundary multi-crises it has generated, and the ways publics reacted to the various responses. To write a book about COVID-19 while it is still unfolding is an inherently premature endeavour. The pandemic is still with us. The long shadow it will cast on our societies is only beginning to form. Much about what has happened behind the scenes of political decision-making and public sector performance remains unknown. It is therefore inevitable that some of our findings and interpretations in this book will need to be nuanced or revised as new information emerges. Yet, we think it is important to take a good look—‘from the balcony’— at the governance of this crisis while it is unfolding. Governments and scholars cannot afford to begin the work of reflecting and learning until v vi PREFACE this crisis is truly ‘over’, which may be years from now. Future crises are in the making. We need to get ready. We need to learn what we can, as soon as we can. This book is intended to provide fuel for such a discussion. We offer a synthesis of what we believe to be the four main challenges that all governments face in a crisis of this magnitude: they must make sense of a highly uncertain and dynamic threat; get things done in the face of collective action problems; craft credible narratives about deeply unsettling events; and work towards closure of a crisis that has the poten- tial of destabilizing our societies and their political systems. In the final chapter, we offer some preliminary directions for the deep institutional learning required to make our communities and our governance systems more resilient when the next ‘big one’ comes along. We have made liberal use of the quick-response analyses published by social science colleagues around the world. Together, they covered most all dimensions of the responses of governments, political systems and societies. These scholars have provided a strong evidence base, while addressing a swathe of crisis management and public governance themes. We thankfully build on this body of work. We are particularly thankful to our research assistants, Marte Luesink and Friso Welten, who have done excellent work (ranging from desk research to the final commas in the bibliography). Leiden, The Netherlands Arjen Boin Sydney, Australia Allan McConnell Utrecht, The Netherlands Paul ‘t Hart January 2021 Contents 1 The Year of the Unthinkable 1 Annus Horribilis 2 A Crisis Perspective on Pandemic Governance 4 The Unique Characteristics of the COVID-19 Crisis 6 How Did It Go? First Impressions 11 A Preview of the Book 13 Bibliography 14 2 What’s Going On? 19 A Sense-Making Nightmare 20 Detecting COVID-19: Common Challenges 22 The Role of Experts 27 Navigating Uncertainty: Science-Policy Interface at Knife’s Edge 33 The Precarious Politics of Sense-Making 36 Bibliography 37 3 Getting Things Done 43 When the Rule Book No Longer Works 43 Governance Challenges 46 First Responses 48 Governance Capacity and Legitimacy 52 The Politics of Crisis Governance 58 Bibliography 60 vii viii CONTENTS 4 Crafting Crisis Narratives 65 Constructing the Meaning of the COVID-19 Crisis 66 The Rise and Fall of Crisis Narratives 67 The Power of Words 70 Framing Contests 71 Making Meaning of COVID-19 76 A Long Rollercoaster Ride 79 Bibliography 80 5 Towards Closure 87 The Need for Closure 88 The Politics of Accountability 89 The Politics of Learning 95 COVID’s Long Shadow and the Politics of Memory 100 Bibliography 101 6 Pathways to Resilience 107 Pivoting Forward 107 Overcoming Organized Blindness 108 Vigilant Decision-Making 110 Managing Fragmentation 112 Credible Crisis Narratives 114 Managing Collective Stress 115 What Matters Now 116 Bibliography 118 Index 121 List of Tables Table 2.1 Warning signals of the impending pandemic 23 Table 2.2 Periods between first infection and first measure in four European countries 23 Table 4.1 Meaning making in disruptive times: a roadmap 72 ix CHAPTER 1 The Year of the Unthinkable Abstract COVID-19 brought the ‘unthinkable’ to our doorstep. The pandemic caused a series of global, and interconnected, health, economic, social, institutional and political crises that are unprecedented in living memory. Political leaders struggled to contain the virus and persuade anxious, weary citizens to behave this or that way in order to overcome a giant collective action problem. This chapter is a primer for the detailed examination of political and policy responses to this impossible challenge. It describes pivotal governance challenges and the constraints operating on the crisis response. Keywords Transboundary crises · Pandemic · COVID-19 · Crisis politics · Crisis management Nobody wanted 2020 to be this way—Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau. (Lum, 2020) Pandemics and plagues have a way of shifting the course of history, and not always in a manner immediately evident to the survivors. The COVID pandemic will be remembered as such a moment in history, a seminal event whose significance will unfold only in the wake of the crisis.—Anthropologist Wave Davis (2020) © The Author(s) 2021 1 A. Boin et al., Governing the Pandemic, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-72680-5_1 2 A. BOIN ET AL. Annus Horribilis The year 2020 will be remembered for the global pandemic—a ‘sem- inal event’ (Davis, 2020)—that dwarfed all other global crises in living memory. By the year’s end, COVID-19 had directly caused the deaths of nearly two million people, jeopardizing the health, well-being and livelihoods of hundreds of millions more.1 It was also an unwanted event, as Trudeau said (see opening quote). Pandemic control measures have pushed economies around the world abruptly into recession while emptying government coffers at astonishing rates. Global debt incurred as a result of COVID-19 has been estimated at $10 trillion in 2020, rising up to $30 trillion by 2023 (Assi et al., 2020). Statistics alone cannot capture the human toll of the crisis. Families were separated from loved ones who died alone. One survivor, who had been hospitalized in the UK for several weeks, said that “I must have seen at least eight people die…… And the fear in people’s eyes is shocking. …. It’s like a nightmare with your eyes open” (Murray, 2020). A physician in New York described how his hospital was “… just getting destroyed. It’s very, very gruesome…. I have one face shield that I have to keep rewashing after seeing every patient…It’s pretty common to see [staff] crying in the hallway… The morale among ER people is extremely low.