@inbook{Kerr_E-2025_219619,
title = {Preface: the organisation of irresponsibility? COVID-19 and the governance of state-society relations in Europe},
author = {Kerr, E. and Bužinkić, E. and Foley, J.},
month = {nov},
year = {2025},
abstract = {The COVID-19 pandemic cast a light upon the inherent fragility of established governance practices in the face of what has been described as a crisis of unprecedented magnitude. Whilst first and foremost experienced as a health and economic crisis, state-led responses to the pandemic brought into sharp focus state-society relations that were already under significant strain. In this sense, COVID-19 didn’t just disrupt and shake national economies and health and social care systems to their core; it revealed the limits of ‘regulatory’ approaches to governance and state-management that had accompanied the ‘hollowing-out’ of states via by privatisation, multi-level governance and alternative service delivery systems (Rhodes, 2017). As Jones &amp; Hameriri (2022) have argued, the shift from 'government’ to ‘governance’, typical of neoliberal state transformations over the last 40 years, had produced a regulatory-style system of state governance that was unsuited to solving social problems even before the arrival of COVID-19 – and the ‘pathologies’ of which often led to fundamental failures in state-led responses to the pandemic. These modes of governance meant that states across the globe were, on the whole, ill-equipped to adapt to the rapidly evolving crisis.},
pages = {1-18},
journal = {The Organisation of Irresponsibility?},
publisher = {Brill},
url = {https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004747784_002},
}
