Opportunity management of the COVID-19 pandemic: testing the crisis from a global perspective
| Author | Renate Reiter,Davide Galli,Sabine Kuhlmann,Geert Bouckaert,Steven Van Hecke |
| DOI | 10.1177/0020852321992102 |
| Published date | 01 September 2021 |
| Date | 01 September 2021 |
Article
International
Review of
Administrative
Sciences
Opportunity
management of the
COVID-19 pandemic:
testing the crisis from
a global perspective
Sabine Kuhlmann
University of Potsdam, Germany
Geert Bouckaert
KU Leuven Public Governance Institute, Belgium
Davide Galli
Universita
`Cattolica del Sacro Cuore, Italy
Renate Reiter
FernUniversit€
at in Hagen, Germany
Steven Van Hecke
KU Leuven Public Governance Institute, Belgium
Abstract
This article provides a conceptual framework for the analysis of COVID-19 crisis gov-
ernance 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 distinctlydifferent administrative cultures as a windowof oppor-
tunity. 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
Corresponding author:
Sabine Kuhlmann, Universit€
at Potsdam Wirtschafts- und Sozialwissenschaftliche Fakult€
at, August-Bebel-Str.
89, 14482 Potsdam, Germany.
Email: Sabine.Kuhlmann@uni-potsdam.de
International Review of Administrative
Sciences
!The Author(s) 2021
Article reuse guidelines:
sagepub.com/journals-permissions
DOI: 10.1177/0020852321992102
journals.sagepub.com/home/ras
2021, Vol. 87(3) 497–517
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 influ-
enced the mode of crisis and opportunity management. Finally, the article summarizes
some major comparative findings drawn from the country studiesof this Special Issue,
focusing on similarities and differences in crisis responses and patterns of opportunity
management.
Points for practitioners
With crises emerging in ever shorter sequences of time, governing turbulence and
using crises for strategic institutional decisions has become an increasingly important
issue for policymakers. Aiming at effective and proportionate responses, policymakers
must take the institutional conditions, administrative traditions and relevant actor
constellations of crisis management into account, which are key to learn from other
countries’ experiences. Comparing these experiences and analyzing the politics of crisis
governance from a cross-country perspective may help policymakers to identify
strengths and weaknesses of their own national/regional approaches and to seize
crisis-related windows of opportunity for institutional reforms at the national and
international levels.
Keywords
administrative culture, comparison, COVID-19, crisis management, governance, oppor-
tunity management, pandemic, window of opportunity
Introduction
‘The corona pandemic will forever alter the world order’, stated former US
Secretary of State Henry Kissinger (Wall Street Journal, 2020). Within only a
couple of months, COVID-19 affected 209 countries and triggered governments
all over the globe to take containment measures of unprecedented severity in order
to handle this exceptional situation. The crisis forced political and administrative
actors to take drastic decisions, such as lockdowns, shutdowns and other measures
to restrict (temporarily or permanently) fundamental freedoms, and to act rapidly
under great uncertainty, in some cases, accompanied by further contingencies like
national elections (e.g. Poland) or mass events (e.g. Japan). At the same time, the
crisis opened a window of opportunity for politicians and leaders to change the
rules of the game and transform institutional settings.
In view of this unique situation, this Special Issue analyzes crisis governance in
the first semester (January–June 2020) of the COVID-19 pandemic from a cross-
country comparative perspective, taking a global approach. It focuses on the
‘usage’ of the crisis as a window of opportunity by actors of distinctly different
498 International Review of Administrative Sciences 87(3)
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