Combating COVID-19 through Collaborative Governance: Lessons from East Asia

Collaborative governance plays a significant role in crisis management and greatly contributes to the fight against COVID-19. This article demonstrates how East Asia effectively combats COVID-19 through collaboration with enterprises, nonprofit organizations, and citizens. By comparing different countries' responses, this study proposes three different types of collaborative governance models employed in combating the pandemic, namely the Chinese state-led cooperation model, South Korea's state-society synergy model, and Japan's social voluntary cooperation model. The findings demonstrate that there is no one-size-fits-all model to respond to the COVID-19 crisis. The specific response initiative that the government adopts is shaped by its state intervention and coercion capacity, as well as the social voluntary cooperation norm. Each country should take anti-pandemic measures based on its specific conditions. Achieving a balance between preventing the pandemic and maintaining social economic development is a challenge for governments. The three collaboration models drawn from the East Asian experience provide valuable lessons for combating the global pandemic and future crises.

What accounts for the different regional responses to COVID-19 in China? Exploring the role of institutional environment, governance capacity and legitimacy.

The coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19) pandemic has brought enormous challenges for public health crisis management in China. Crisis responses vary greatly among provinces. Many studies focus on the role of the central government in crisis management. However, how regional governments respond to such pandemic crises is underexplored. The existing literature lacks extensive comparative studies explaining why different regions respond differently to the crisis and how different regional institutional environments affect crisis management. By proposing an analytical framework based on governance capacity and legitimacy theory, this article seeks to address these questions. This study mainly focuses on provincial governments because they play a crucial role in coordinating various organizations and different levels of government in response to the crisis. By comparing the different COVID-19 responses of Hubei and Zhejiang provinces, this study finds that different regional institutional environments based on the triangular linkage of government, business and society influence regional crisis management by shaping different governance capacities (coordination, analytical, regulation and delivery capacity) and legitimacy (input, throughput and output legitimacy). Regional governments with strong governance capacity can promote crisis management through cross-organizational collaboration, scientific analysis and timely decision-making and effective policy implementation. Promoting citizen participation and information disclosure in the policy process and enhancing citizens' support can improve governance legitimacy, thereby facilitating crisis management. Governance capacity and legitimacy also affect each other. These findings contribute to the literature on public health crisis management. They also shed light on how regional governments in China and other countries with regional variation can effectively tackle public health crises under different institutional environments.

Political institutions, state capacity, and crisis management: A comparison of China and South Korea: IPSR

How do political institutions influence crisis management? By comparing responses to COVID-19 in China and South Korea, this article argues that different political institutions affect countries’ responses to crises by shaping state capacity. First, the article proposes a state capacity-driven crisis management framework including four types of capacity: information capacity, decision-making and implementation capacity, coercive capacity, and mobilization and cooperation capacity. Second, the article contributes to the literature by making linkages between different forms of state capacity and regime type. Combinations of state capacity are different in democracies and authoritarian regimes because state capacities are shaped by two different institutional arrangements: central–local government relations and state–society relations. Additionally, the article finds that the impacts of political institutions on crisis management through different state capacities are contingent on scenarios such as the different stages of a crisis.