High-stakes crisis management in the Low Countries: Comparing government responses to COVID-19
| Author | Steven Van Hecke,Valérie Pattyn,Joery Matthys |
| DOI | 10.1177/0020852320972472 |
| Published date | 01 September 2021 |
| Date | 01 September 2021 |
High-stakes crisis
management in the Low
Countries: Comparing
government responses to
COVID-19
Valérie Pattyn
Leiden University, The Netherlands
Joery Matthys
Leiden University, The Netherlands
Steven Van Hecke
KU Leuven, Belgium
Abstract
Like many Western European countries, Belgium and the Netherlands have been
strongly hit by COVID-19. Almost simultaneously, thevirus spread, caused a relatively
high number of infections and severe lockdown measures were imposed;however, at
the same time, the crisis management response has been sufficiently different to justify
a systematic comparative analysis. We start with the premise that decisions made on the
basis of incomplete information show the true nature of governments’response to a
crisis, which is conditioned by legacies arising from the past and organizational cultures,
existing and new governance structures, and strategies used by specific actors. We show
that the difference in crisis management echoes the countries’different types of conso-
ciationalism, though also that Belgian federalism and Dutch decentralism impeded a truly
coherent response. The cost of coordinating different government levels made a
uniform approach difficult too. Actor strategies attempting to exploit the crisis seem
to have influenced the response the least but did have an impact on perceptions of
the response.
Corresponding author:
Valérie Pattyn, Leiden University, Faculty Governance and Global Affairs, Institute of Public Administration,
PO Box 13228, 2501 EE The Hague, The Netherlands.
Email: v.e.pattyn@fgga.leidenuniv.nl
Article
International
Review of
Administrative
Sciences
International Review of Administrative
Sciences
2021, Vol. 87(3) 593–611
© The Author(s) 2020
Article reuse guidelines:
sagepub.com/journals-permissions
DOI: 10.1177/0020852320972472
journals.sagepub.com/home/ras
Points for practitioners
The article unravels how the governments in the Low Countries responded to the
COVID-19 challenge in the first half of 2020. It allows practitioners to better understand
that under circumstances of an imminent crisis, specific governance structures matter. It
also reveals that the cost of coordination between the federated and the federal level
turned out to be quite high in Belgium. In the Netherlands, a lot of autonomy was
left to federated and local authorities. This too impeded a more coherentapproach.
COVID-19 certainly offers possibilities for policymakers to exploit the crisis but oppor-
tunities are not always taken.
Keywords
Belgium, COVID-19, crisis exploitation, crisis management, pandemic, The Netherlands
Introduction
1
Although COVID-19 has been described on multiple occasions as a virus that does
not respect borders and threatens us all, the claim that it is a great equalizer rings
hollow. Not only did it affect the population within a country differently
(Laurencin and McClinton, 2020), but the responses of countries have also signifi-
cantly varied, even within the European Union (EU), and certainly in the initial
phase of the outbreak during March and April 2020 (see, for instance, Bouckaert
et al., 2020). To be able to trace the causes of these various responses, a comparison
between Belgium and the Netherlands provides an interesting case study. Belgium
and the Netherlands are neighbouring, relatively small Western European countries,
with economic and political ties reaching far back (Blom and Lamberts, 2014;
Hellema et al., 2011). Both can be situated within the Napoleonic civil law tradition,
though legal historians do agree that Belgium has remained more faithful to (or,
depending on whom one asks, has more rigidly adhered to) it (Heirbaut, 2007).
The political model of the Low Countries relies mostly on majoritarian coalition
governments (Brans and Maes, 2001; Peters, 2006; Timmermans, 2006); however,
at the same time, neither of them takes the majoritarian system very far, relying
rather on consociational democracy (Lijphart, 1969), or, as it is often called in
the Netherlands, a ‘poldermodel’(Prak and van Zanden, 2013). In COVID-19
times, this can prove to be advantageous since this particular model has been described
as more suited than simple majority rule given that ‘it is an accepted practice in times of
emergency for opposition parties to sink their differences and join together in forming a
national government’(Nyerere, 1963, quoted in Lijphart, 1969: 214). This being said,
and while faced with the same incomplete data, at first sight, the two neighbouring
594 International Review of Administrative Sciences 87(3)
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