Assessing the Role of Collaboration in Mitigating the Impacts of COVID-19

• In Event: The Politics of the COVID-19 Pandemic

Abstract

COVID-19 represents a “wicked” problem that governments throughout the world have sought to address in a variety of ways and with varying degrees of success. In this paper, we look specifically at government responses to vulnerable urban populations—that is, citizens who typically lack regular access to basic health and sanitary services and therefore are particularly susceptible to the spread of COVID-19 and its detrimental health consequences—in an effort to understand the best strategies for addressing these at-risk populations.

We argue that governments that adopt collaborative strategies to the COVID-19 crisis are better equipped to address the needs of those citizens who sit just outside the reach of a country’s standard welfare system. Collaborative governance involves crafting government policy in conjunction with diverse governmental and non-governmental actors as a way to take advantage of their different knowledge bases and expertise. Specifically, those national governments that work directly with (a) local governments and/or (b) the scientific community will be more successful at creating policies that mitigate the impacts of COVID for the urban poor. We suspect, too, that collaboration as an approach to policy-building was under-utilized early on by national governments but became increasingly viable as the pandemic went on. Consequently, and given that collaboration should increase policy effectiveness, we expect to find that COVID policy designed to help at-risk populations improved over time in those countries whose strategies to policy create became increasingly collaborative.

To test these arguments we, first, identify and measure government responses to COVID with respect to health and economic policy oriented toward the urban poor. We collect these data during the first 12 months of the pandemic in Latin America—a region where the impact of COVID-19 in terms of cases and especially deaths has been disproportionately high. We develop a proxy for collaboration, utilizing monthly analyses of media coverage of government policymaking, to ascertain the impact of collaborative policies, both cross-nationally and across time in each country, on the number of COVID deaths amongst each country’s urban poor. To assess the validity of our quantitative findings, we utilize data collected via interviews and focus groups with Argentine government officials, both at the national and local level, and community members living in shantytowns on the outskirts of Buenos Aires, Argentina. As such our project adopts an integrative, mixed methods approach to understanding the impact of government collaboration on COVID-19 policies aimed at the urban poor.

Authors

• Matías Bianchi, University of Arizona

• Jennifer Cyr, Universidad Torcuato di Tella

• Lucas I. Gonzalez, CONICET/UCA-UNSAM