Governance modes during the Covid-19 crisis: a literature review

The Covid-19 pandemic has presented a significant challenge for governments across the world, prompting various governance modes to tackle the crisis. These modes of governance have ranged from top-down command-and-control approaches to more decentralized, participatory and collaborative models. The academic community was swift in trying to make sense of this unprecedented crisis governance, by exponentially increasing the literature on the modes of governance adopted by different countries and different levels of government. However, large N comparative studies are scarce, and the majority of articles were single case studies with a normative approach. This literature review provides an overview of how different governance modes during the Covid-19 crisis were dealt with in literature in political science and public administration streams. The analysis of the literature will be twofold. First, the modes of governance will be analyzed as a dependent variable in the context of various factors that influence their adoption and effectiveness. These factors include political systems, institutional capacity and the level of intergovernmental coordination, among others. Second, modes of governance can be analyzed as an independent variable, where they are used to explain or predict other phenomena, including variations in the response to the Covid-19 pandemic, the impact of government policies on mortality, timing of measures, as well as stringency. Almost at the end of the pandemic, it is necessary to select, organize and make sense of the most relevant works and findings of the prolific scholarly literature on Covid-19 crisis governance. The goal of this exercise is to systematize and integrate the existing knowledge, as well as to find gaps in the literature that may guide future research and learning on crisis governance.