Why sharing power is critical to any Covid-19 recovery strategy
How can governments ease restrictions and still keep a grip on a national recovery? A mixture of letting go, trusting and assessing where power should sit to meet a common goal; here are some inspiring ideas from around the world.
The world is watching as governments everywhere are developing plans to exit the lockdown phases and gradually restart their economies. We at CPI call this the ‘recovery’ phase. It comes after the ‘fight’ stage, and while it’s often made to sound like the dream we await, in reality, it is as tough as the fight and easy to get wrong. Things won’t be going ‘back to normal’ and the possibility of suddenly going back to ‘fight’ mode will always hang over us.
In the recovery phase, the temptation to hold on to centralised power may be strong for national governments attempting to exercise control over the situation. But, pushing ideas without considering local contexts, and expecting local leaders on the ground to unquestioningly own and implement these ideas, could be risky. Lessons from previous public health epidemics such as ebola tell us loud and clear that locally developed and community-level actions such as neighbourhood groups, local charities and institutions, were key to turning the tide on preventing spread.
This is all the more true given that the virus manifests itself in different ways in different places. This is the case between regions of a country and even within cities themselves, as we have seen in New York where neighbourhoods in Queens and Bronx have been hit harder than other areas. In a way, we are experiencing hundreds of small local pandemics rather than a single national one. And while these places are interconnected and co-dependent — and therefore require some degree of central coordination — each has different requirements for effective recovery.
National governments therefore should be more comfortable with sharing power and giving local communities the agency and ownership of what comes next, joining up in their desire to achieve a shared goal. After all, the knowledge of who is most in need, of local assets and of how to build trust, is much more likely to lie in local hands than in national governments.
But how can you let go of power while keeping a grip on national recovery? How can you instil confidence in people that the best steps are being taken to exit lockdown while protecting public health? Here are some ways countries around the world are approaching power-sharing at this time, including decentralising resource mobilisation, trusting local governments to make decisions, pushing authority to information and sharing power with people directly.
Decentralising resource mobilisation
While certainly too early to make a full assessment, countries with decentralised systems of power appear to have been more effective at mobilising resources.
Germany — one of the most decentralised countries in Europe — achieved significant success in making widespread testing available. By relying on a network of 132 laboratories across the country, it has been sustaining an average of 116,655 swab tests per day. In contrast, the UK has reached the target of 100,000 tests a day by the end of April, but numbers declined again in the days after the goal was met. The UK response, which has been considered slow by many including a former UK Chief Scientific Officer, could be attributed to the fact that Public Health England opted for a centralised response. By relying on a small number of testing centres rather than on the dozens of local labs that exist in the public, private and third sectors like Germany has done, resource diffusion was made more difficult.
Similarly, for contract tracing, South Korea’s success has relied on ramping up local government’s capacity to contain the virus by giving them the responsibility to monitor local patients, anonymise data and lead the local communication response. Despite the controversy around privacy, tracing wouldn’t have been as successful without the active role of local governments and their understanding of local communities. Equally, the fact that in many countries such as the US and the UK people tend to trust local governments more than their national governments, makes the former best place to navigate this difficult issue of privacy.
Devolving power and capacity to local governments
Beyond resource mobilisation, local governments have played a critical role everywhere in creating compliance and finding local solutions. From Italian mayors taking things in their own hands to urge residents to stay home, to US mayors and governors displaying humble human leadership; they have been key in building trust with people and drawing us together in vital moments.
When local actors are empowered to make decisions, it becomes easier to tailor responses based on local need. For example, the Canadian province of British Columbia was relatively successful compared to the rest of the country at containing the spread despite its vicinity to one of the American outbreak hotspots in Washington state. Part of the reason for this is that the provincial government adopted strict physical distancing measures instantly without waiting for national government guidelines.
When local actors are empowered to make decisions, it becomes easier to tailor responses based on local need.
Power cannot come without resources of course. In Sweden, the government is compensating municipalities and regions that have been disproportionately hit by COVID-19 to ensure that they can cover emergency health care and social services costs.
Tailoring responses to local needs will be as crucial for recovery as it was in the fight, as different areas in a country often have varying economic and social needs. While it is easier to empower local governments in places where there is already a decentralised system of power in place, this can be an opportunity for countries that have more centralised systems, such as the UK and France, to build greater local capacity to ensure that exit and recovery strategies are suited to local contexts.
Pushing authority to information
Regardless of whether power is decentralised or not, the effective sharing of information between local, regional and national governments seem to have been key to quickly sharing knowledge of local conditions and generating appropriate responses. In Switzerland, the already highly consultative political culture has been accelerated during the crisis, creating a constant flow of information from the municipal and cantonal level, to the federal government. This has informed central decision-making and facilitated the creation of a joint strategy.
Conversely, the lack of effective communication channels between regions and the national government in Italy (also a relatively decentralised country albeit not to the extent of Switzerland), coupled with confusion about the roles of different levels of government, meant that the initial response in the northern regions was slower than it could have been.
As we transition to recovery, it is important to create mechanisms for national governments to access reliable local information, without placing a bureaucratic burden on local areas and delaying action. This involves pushing authority to information, rather than pushing information to authority.
Empowering people to shape the future
Ramping up engagement with people is also a form of sharing power that is more necessary now than ever. How to restart economic and social recovery while preventing further outbreaks is an inherently complex task that will hit some groups harder than others. As such, it is crucial that the visions for recovery and rebuild are co-created with people, especially those that have fallen the hardest from the crisis.
It is crucial that the visions for recovery and rebuild are co-created with people, especially those that have fallen the hardest from the crisis.
While there are certainly worries about the suppression of democracy in the name of fighting the virus, the recovery phase is an opportunity for governments to really listen to people and empower them to shape the future. The recent ramp-up of digital infrastructure can help facilitate this. In a matter of weeks, local government committees and entire parliaments have moved online, and a huge number of collaborative civic tech projects between civil society, the private and public sector have sprung up, as shown by Civic Hall Coronavirus Civic Tech Guide.
In Germany, more than 40 thousand people have taken part in an online hackathon to find innovative solutions to acute challenges of the pandemic. It resulted in over 800 ideas on topics such as shopping, childcare and symptom monitoring, and a jury, as well as a survey of participants who will decide which projects are to receive government funding. In Taiwan, the government has relied on what a Bloomberg commentator has referred to as ‘participatory surveillance’, where citizens can choose to collaborate with the government on developing online and offline tools to fight the virus and brainstorming solutions.
People everywhere want to engage and be part of the solution and they are already doing so by creating mutual aid groups, volunteering and finding creative ways of donating money. There’s no doubt that they will continue to play a vital role as we rise from the COVID-19 crisis. But governments can choose to pave the way for a more legitimate recovery by lifting their voices and making them active agents of their nation’s future.
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Sharing power as a way of achieving national recovery is possible and many countries are already doing it. Crises like this make the implications of power distribution more visible and give governments the chance to reassess where power should sit to create the conditions for long-lasting wellbeing and resilience. Recovery doesn’t have to be a divisive, blanket approach owned by the few. It can be a participatory pursuit that acknowledges the diverse needs of our nations and is truly co-created by people.
Next week, we’ll be sharing our research on how governments have shared power in response to the 2007–08 financial crisis. Watch this space!
