Beyond COVID-19: Five commentaries on reimagining governance for future crises and resilience

Several Canadian and international scholars offer commentaries on the implications of the COVID-19 pandemic for governments and public service institutions, and fruitful directions for public administration research and practice. This second suite of commentaries considers the challenges confronting governments as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic and in the decades to come with an increasingly broad lens: the need to understand and rethink the architecture of the state given recent and future challenges awaiting governments; the need to rethink government-civil society relations and policies to deliver services for increasingly diverse citizens and communities; the need for new repertoires and sensibilities on the part of governments for recognizing, anticipating, and engaging on governance risks despite imperfect expert knowledge and public skepticism; how the COVID-19 crisis has caused us to reconceive international and sub-national borders where new “borders” are being drawn; and the need to anticipate a steady stream of crises similar to the COVID-19 pandemic arising from climate change and related challenges, and develop new national and international governance strategies for fostering population and community resilience.     

Does Ownership Matter for the Delivery of Professionalized Public Services? Cost‐efficiency and Effectiveness in Private and Public Dental Care for Children in Denmark

Recent decades have witnessed considerable interest in the cost‐efficiency and effectiveness of public services. Private provision is often claimed to be more cost‐efficient than public provision, but these efficiency gains are accused of being at the expense of effectiveness. Most of the evidence comes from relatively simple, technical services, because effectiveness is often difficult to define and measure for services produced by professionals. In addition, type of ownership might very well affect services produced by professionals differently as a result of professional standards and other regulation. The case in question, child dental care in Denmark, is a professionalized service which is remarkable for its clear and quantifiable measure of effectiveness. The findings show that neither cost‐efficiency nor effectiveness of public and private producers differs. The data represent cost and outcome measures controlled for structural variables for the 275 Danish municipalities between 1996 and 2002.     

Denmark: Environmental Conflict and the 'Greening' of the Labour Movement

In Denmark, environmentalism has not generated significant political division between the working class and the new middle class; rather, it has reinforced the cleavage between the wage-earning classes and the self-employed, as well as the political cleavage between left and right. This is a warning against deterministic approaches, ignoring the importance of political articulation. The successfulness of the Danish Social Democrats in reinforcing the environmental consciousness of its adherents furthermore indicates that the conventional picture of the political weakness of the Danish Social Democrats, as compared to the Norwegian and Swedish sister parties, should perhaps be reconsidered when evaluating the parties' adaptability to the demands of post-industrial society.     

The liberal dilemmas of a people-centred approach to state-building

The article explores the dilemmas of providing security assistance to post-conflict states. It argues that when used as a strategy for intervention, SSR exposes the inherent contradictions of liberal peace-building. The article focuses on the Weberian state monopoly versus other—hybrid or non-state—forms of security and justice provision. It presents the background for the discussion and suggests that as a strategy for intervention, the choice is not simply between a top-down ‘imposition’ of a universal state model and a bottom-up ‘working with what is there’ approach. It is also a choice between direct and indirect forms of rule. This makes the dilemma real for liberal-minded practitioners and observers.     

Public–Private Partnerships: Organisational Hybrids as Channels for Local Mobilisation and Participation?1

The article focuses on new forms of governance involving partnerships between public and private actors. As several scholars have noticed, organisational hybrids at the intersection of the public and private sectors play an important part in the implementation of collective action. Local economic development in particular has provided a fertile ground for building coalitions across traditional divisions, and encouraging partnerships. This applies to Norway as well as to other liberal Western democracies.
Obviously, the formation of partnerships reflects efforts to design more efficient and flexible instruments for founding new firms and for supporting local entrepreneurs. The article, however, raises the question of whether these arrangements may entail a far more expanded role and domain, opening up new channels for participation and mobilisation. By expanding their agenda and integrating new segments of the local community, public–private partnerships appear to be an innovation in local democracy.
Analytically, the article utilises elements of regime theory. Although the partnerships studied hardly constitute stable coalitions dominating local politics, they nevertheless illustrate how the building of coalitions including both private and public actors is crucial to coping with the problems and challenges of local restructuring and revitalisation. Case studies carried out in Norwegian municipalities provide the main empirical source. The article does, however, build on experience from other European countries.