The COVID-19 pandemic is not the first global crisis to challenge humankind's future and its place in the ecosystem. The 18 th and 19 th centuries are filled with pandemics records that killed thousands, from the bubonic plague to the Spanish Flu. Relatively modern examples include SARS, MERS, and Ebola (Moloney & Moloney, 2020). COVID-19 is different because it has impacted every other aspect of human society, from changing social and work culture to economics and public health. Furthermore, another aspect that is currently under challenge is public administration, especially in crisis management. For instance, the first response to limiting the spread of the virus has been to implement policies on social distancing measures. Most government policies are backed by an incentive, such as the threat of punishment or fines for non-compliance. However, the government can't punish its citizens for failing to comply. This is a challenge because the government has been forced to rely on individuals' behavior and social norms. In the US, for instance, there have been notable differences in with agency is driven compliance with social distancing measures. According to Moore et al. (2020), four out of 10 Americans were found to violate social distancing measures. The reasons provided for non-non compliance vary from work requirements to a desire to resume life pre-COVID-19, beliefs that everyone is overreacting, and that other measures (like handwashing) are enough (Pedersen & Favero, 2020). This applied project is not about compliance with social distancing policies but the underlying challenges to public administration they reveal. It is about finding answers to two fundamental questions. The first question is about governance capacity, which relates to the preparedness, coordination, regulation, and delivery of policies for the public good ( Christensen & Lægreid, 2020). This question also relates to the role of public administrators in responding to and managing crises and extreme events. So far, public administrators' role has been focused on responding to natural crises and hazards using the incident command system ICS; Zhang et al., 2018). The ICS is a centralized and hierarchical governance model for managing crises. However, the COVID-19 pandemic has revealed gaps in this model (Greer et al., 2020). Instead of a centralized system under a centralized government, the response to the pandemic has shown that the governance and public administration networks closely resemble decentralized and isolated networks. The second question that explains what this applied project is about is governance legitimacy. The question relates to the citizen's trust in their government and how it translates to compliance with regulations and policies that deal with crises and pandemics. Compliance with social distancing regulations, for instance, would fall under this question. Trust and governance legitimacy can be increased by communication, formal or informal, between all stakeholders. Alon-Barkat (2020) conducted a survey and discovered that public trust in government policies, even unpopular policies, could be increased by symbolic communication. Note that if citizens trust their government, this legitimizes its authority, they are more likely to comply with its policies at the individual and societal levels without the need for external incentives like fines and threats of legal action. Note that the relationship between the two questions is not only complex but also dynamic. For instance, when dealing with the pandemic, it is difficult to determine the trade-off between legitimacy and capacity from the perspective of public administration ( Christensen & Lægreid, 2020). Capacity is essential because it shows the government's readiness to tackle challenges, especially in public health, such as the COVID19 pandemic. However, the capacity is useless if the government lacks the legitimacy to motivate and inspire its citizens to comply with its regulations and policies.
References
Alon-Barkat, S. (2020). Can government public communications elicit undue trust? Exploring the interaction between symbols and substantive information in communications. Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory, 30 (1), 77-95.
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Christensen, T., & Lægreid, P. (2020). Balancing governance capacity and legitimacy‐how the Norwegian government handled the COVID‐19 crisis as a high performer. Public Administration Review.
Greer, S. L., King, E. J., da Fonseca, E. M., & Peralta-Santos, A. (2020). The comparative politics of COVID-19: The need to understand government responses. Global public health, 15 (9), 1413-1416.
Moloney, K., & Moloney, S. (2020). Australian Quarantine Policy: From centralization to coordination with mid‐Pandemic COVID‐19 shifts. Public Administration Review.
Moore, R. C., Lee, A., Hancock, J. T., Halley, M., & Linos, E. (2020). Experience with social distancing early in the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States: Implications for Public Health Messaging. medRxiv.
Pedersen, M. J., & Favero, N. (2020). Social Distancing During the COVID‐19 Pandemic: Who Are the Present and Future Non‐compliers?. Public Administration Review.
Zhang, F., Welch, E. W., & Miao, Q. (2018). Public organization adaptation to extreme events: Mediating role of risk perception. Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory, 28 (3), 371-387.
