High-stakes crisis management in the Low Countries: Comparing government responses to COVID-19

Abstract

Like many Western European countries, Belgium and the Netherlands have been strongly hit by COVID-19. Almost simultaneously, the virus spread, caused a relatively high number of infections and severe lockdown measures were imposed; however, at the same time, the crisis management response has been sufficiently different to justify a systematic comparative analysis. We start with the premise that decisions made on the basis of incomplete information show the true nature of governments’ response to a crisis, which is conditioned by legacies arising from the past and organizational cultures, existing and new governance structures, and strategies used by specific actors. We show that the difference in crisis management echoes the countries’ different types of consociationalism, though also that Belgian federalism and Dutch decentralism impeded a truly coherent response. The cost of coordinating different government levels made a uniform approach difficult too. Actor strategies attempting to exploit the crisis seem to have influenced the response the least but did have an impact on perceptions of the response. Points for practitioners The article unravels how the governments in the Low Countries responded to the COVID-19 challenge in the first half of 2020. It allows practitioners to better understand that under circumstances of an imminent crisis, specific governance structures matter. It also reveals that the cost of coordination between the federated and the federal level turned out to be quite high in Belgium. In the Netherlands, a lot of autonomy was left to federated and local authorities. This too impeded a more coherent approach. COVID-19 certainly offers possibilities for policymakers to exploit the crisis but opportunities are not always taken.

Government capacity, societal trust or party preferences: what accounts for the variety of national policy responses to the COVID-19 pandemic in Europe?

“…Hartley et al, 2021;Hegele & Schnabel, 2021;Yan et al, 2020). At the political level, federal countries might require political compromises between the federal and regional-level authorities (Pattyn et al, 2020). Competences over different aspects of handling the crisis (health care, education, police, etc.)…”

Crisis management in public institutions

“…In one of the rarely published papers, Janssen and van der Voort (2020) analyze agility and adaptability in corona-crisis governance and emphasize that the decision-making speed that characterizes the agile approach sometimes contradicts the adaptive approach applied to complex problems such as pandemics which involves the interaction of all important stakeholders. By comparing the reactions of public institutions to the corona crisis in Belgium and the Netherlands, Pattyn et al (2020) indicate that reactions in a particular country are also influenced by past experiences, the existing institutional structure and governance methods of organizational culture and the like, which is expected given that close cooperation between public institutions is implied, and a similar conclusion can be drawn based on the Croatian example. This paper presents actions, taken by the two most important regulators of the Croatian financial system -the Croatian National Bank (CNB) and the Croatian Financial Services Supervisory Agency (HANFA), aimed at mitigating the effects of the coronavirus pandemic crisis.…”

The Role of Scientific Expertise in COVID-19 Policy-making: Evidence from Four European Countries

“…The approach was abandoned in both the UK and the Netherlands before the end of March 2020 (Farrar, 2021 , pp. 94–96; Pattyn et al, 2021 pp. 596, 603).…”

“…This is reflected in the governmental approach to the pandemic: regionalisation supplemented with central coordination and control. The Dutch health care system went through serious cost reduction measures since the mid-2000s, which decreased the number of hospital beds and intensive care units, also in comparison with other countries (Pattyn et al, 2021 , pp. 599–600).…”