The Year of the Unthinkable

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.

Pathways to Resilience

The COVID-19 crisis has tested public institutions, crisis leadership and societal solidarity to the core. Fault lines have come to the fore; unsuspected strengths have been noted. But will this be enough to initiate the necessary steps to prepare our societies for the future crises that will come? In this chapter, we offer the building blocks for an action agenda. We identify various pathways to enhanced resilience.

Crafting Crisis Narratives

Communication is pivotal when a society faces a sudden, disruptive and disturbing event. People want to know what is going on, why it is happening, what is done to safeguard them and what they can to protect themselves. During COVID-19, governments were the main sources of that information, at least initially. Governments tried to shape the attitudes, emotions and behaviours of citizens in accordance with their policies. Over time, alternative crisis narratives emerged and influenced citizen behaviour. This chapter examines crisis communication in the COVID-19 crisis: how did leaders try to ‘make making’ of this unprecedented threat? How did they deal with the alternative crisis frames that emerged over time?

Getting Things Done

This chapter reviews the main governance challenges policymakers faced during the COVID-19 crisis. It examines how governments mobilized institutional capacity to tackle these challenges. We focus on attempts to centralize crisis decision-making and discuss whether centralization contributed to government effectiveness and legitimacy.

Towards Closure

How will societies emerge from the COVID-19 crisis? Will there be a reckoning with failing institutions and crisis leaders? Will valuable lessons be learned? These are the perennial questions that dominate the transitional phase between crisis and a new normal. In this chapter, we discuss how lessons from previous crises help to understand the many challenges that lie ahead of us.

What’s Going On?

For a crisis to be effectively governed, it must first be noticed, interpreted, understood and assessed. This chapter explores how policymakers ‘made sense’ of the emerging COVID-19 pandemic. We focus on: (1) how policymakers around the world detected the developing threat as it emerged first in China and then in Italy; (2) the prominent involvement of scientific expertise in government sense-making processes (and in narratives about those processes). We discuss the complex dynamics between experts, decision-makers and publics that ensued.