Crisis Management in a Polycentric Nordic Local Democracy: Different Governance Structures - Different Results?

The Nordic municipalities are important for handling crises in society. The strategies may be adopted centrally, but they are implemented locally. The POLYGOV project is a comparative study of crisis management, organization and the functioning of the local democracies in Iceland, Norway, Sweden, Finland and Denmark with a background in the different handling of the COVID-19 pandemic. The thesis that guides the project is that the countries' institutional choices with regard to local and regional governance are important factors in understanding their ability to organize, coordinate and manage the COVID-19 pandemic. The project compares the local and regional coordination and management strategies used as the pandemic unfolded from March 2020 to date, including vaccination strategies. The unique thing about the project is that it utilizes the exceptional learning potential that lies in a comparative analysis of institutional data and data on actual crisis behavior in the Nordic governance systems. The overall aim is to identify the differences in the Nordic countries' handling of the pandemic, the results thereof, and to link these differences to public policy, governance, organization and management. The outcome variables include local inequality in health (disease, death and vaccination) and social security (economic and social measures). The research team consists of researchers from nine Nordic universities in the five Nordic countries, including the Faroe Islands, Greenland and Åland. The handling of the pandemic is studied through four perspectives: legal, public health, governance and organisation. The empirical basis is Nordic legal sources, several quantitative data collections (surveys and register data) as well as strategic case studies. The project will provide knowledge on how to properly maintain and further develop sustainable democratic local and regional governance in crises.