Towards Place-Sensitive Crisis Management? Pandemic Policies in Five Nordic Countries

Abstract

The policy issue in focus in this chapter is the local implementation of covid management policies during the pandemic 2020–2022 in the five Nordic countries. More specifically, we seek to determine the extent to which national policies were shaped and implemented in ways that took account of variations in local contexts, such as, for example, varying levels of contagion, different demographic structures, economic needs, access to medical treatment, et cetera. The analysis is based on data on how 411 mayors experienced the Covid policies of the Nordic countries and thus presents a bottom-up perspective on IGR in times of uncertainty and turbulence. The main hypothesis is that the mayors’ experiences of IGR significantly depend upon their access to national levels of decision-making. The hypothesis was largely confirmed, but the analysis also demonstrated that a series of other factors influenced IGRs as experienced by mayors, such as political affiliation or centre–periphery contrasts, while formal institutional variations did not matter as much as expected.