Preface: the organisation of irresponsibility? COVID-19 and the governance of state-society relations in Europe

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 & 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.

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DOI

https://doi.org/10.1163/9789004747784_002

Repository URI

https://eprints.gla.ac.uk/373350/