TY - JOUR
A1 - Hecke, Steven van
A1 - Fuhr, Harald
A1 - Wolfs, Wouter
T1 - The politics of crisis management by regional and international organizations in fighting against a global pandemic
BT - the member states at a crossroads
JF - International review of administrative sciences : an international journal of comparative public administration
N2 - Despite new challenges like climate change and digitalization, global and regional organizations recently went through turbulent times due to a lack of support from several of their member states. Next to this crisis of multilateralism, the COVID-19 pandemic now seems to question the added value of international organizations for addressing global governance issues more specifically. This article analyses this double challenge that several organizations are facing and compares their ways of managing the crisis by looking at their institutional and political context, their governance structure, and their behaviour during the pandemic until June 2020. More specifically, it will explain the different and fragmented responses of the World Health Organization, the European Union and the International Monetary Fund/World Bank. With the aim of understanding the old and new problems that these international organizations are trying to solve, this article argues that the level of autonomy vis-a-vis the member states is crucial for understanding the politics of crisis management.
Points for practitioners
As intergovernmental bodies, international organizations require authorization by their member states. Since they also need funding for their operations, different degrees of autonomy also matter for reacting to emerging challenges, such as the COVID-19 pandemic. The potential for international organizations is limited, though through proactive and bold initiatives, they can seize the opportunity of the crisis and partly overcome institutional and political constraints.
KW - autonomy
KW - COVID-19
KW - crisis management
KW - European Union
KW - International
KW - Monetary Fund
KW - international organizations
KW - multilateralism
KW - World Bank
KW - World Health Organization
Y1 - 2021
U6 - https://doi.org/10.1177/0020852320984516
SN - 0020-8523
SN - 1461-7226
VL - 87
IS - 3
SP - 672
EP - 690
PB - Sage
CY - Los Angeles, Calif. [u.a.]
ER -
TY - JOUR
A1 - Kuhlmann, Sabine
A1 - Bouckaert, Geert
A1 - Galli, Davide
A1 - Reiter, Renate
A1 - van Hecke, Steven
T1 - Opportunity management of the COVID-19 pandemic
BT - testing the crisis from a global perspective
JF - International review of administrative sciences
N2 - 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.
KW - administrative culture
KW - comparison
KW - COVID-19
KW - crisis management
KW - governance
KW - opportunity management
KW - pandemic
KW - window of opportunity
Y1 - 2021
U6 - https://doi.org/10.1177/0020852321992102
SN - 0020-8523
SN - 1461-7226
VL - 87
IS - 3
SP - 497
EP - 517
PB - Sage
CY - Los Angeles, California
ER -
TY - JOUR
A1 - Bouckaert, Geert
A1 - Galli, Davide
A1 - Kuhlmann, Sabine
A1 - Reiter, Renate
A1 - van Hecke, Steven
T1 - European coronationalism?
BT - a hot spot governing a pandemic crisis
JF - Public administration review
N2 - The COVID-19 crisis has shown that European countries remain poorly prepared for dealing and coping with health crises and for responding in a coordinated way to a severe influenza pandemic. Within the European Union, the response to the COVID-19 pandemic has a striking diversity in its approach. By focusing on Belgium, France, Germany, and Italy—countries that represent different models of administrative systems in Europe—the analysis shows that major similarities and convergences have become apparent from a cross-country perspective. Moreover, coping with the crisis has been first and foremost an issue of the national states, whereas the European voice has been weak. Hence, the countries’ immediate responses appear to be corona-nationalistic, which we label “coronationalism.” This essay shows the extent to which the four countries adopted different crisis management strategies and which factors explain this variance, with a special focus on their institutional settings and administrative systems.
Y1 - 2020
U6 - https://doi.org/10.1111/puar.13242
SN - 0033-3352
SN - 1540-6210
VL - 80
IS - 5
SP - 765
EP - 773
PB - Wiley-Blackwell
CY - Oxford
ER -