Coordination, Response and Networked Resilience

The word "crisis" is usually used for dramatic events that occur suddenly, such as major accidents, natural disasters or terrorist attacks. Although such events can have catastrophic consequences, they are usually confined to a specific location and last for a short period of time. The COVID-19 pandemic has been something else entirely - a creeping crisis with an unclear beginning and end. The starting point for CORNER was that effective handling of a pandemic is created at the intersection between political-administrative leadership on the one hand, and reactions and responses from the population on the other. This means that the project has two main tracks - the authorities' management exercise, and how the situation and decisions are interpreted by the population. In the first main track, we have studied management at national, regional and local level in Norway, Sweden and Italy. The starting point for all the countries was a serious lack of basic infection control equipment and supply chains with such a small degree of buffer that there was a shortage of absolutely essential input factors. This was an important context for management and adaptability in the pandemic. In Norway, we have had the opportunity to observe management practices from the inside, while the crisis was going on. We have seen management and decision-making that have at times been characterized by extreme uncertainty in the knowledge base, particularly in those periods where new mutations created reason to ask questions about contagiousness and mortality. Situations with a combination of low infection rates, fatigue and the need for new precautionary measures created demanding dilemmas for management and risk communication. In the data material we naturally find examples of coordination problems, misunderstandings, conflicts, challenges in prioritizing operational and strategic tasks and, not least, frustration over a lack of personnel and infection control equipment. Anything else would be surprising, given the complexity of the situation and the organizational landscape in which it has been handled. The data material is just as much characterized by examples of collaboration and adaptability at local level. We have observed new structures for cooperatives which relatively quickly filled structural gaps between sectors, but which were not always as closely linked to the contingency planning that had been done in advance. We have seen collaborative structures that existed for completely different purposes than crisis management, but were reconfigured during the pandemic. We have seen the emergence of completely new organizational and technical solutions that were essential to adapt to the ever-changing challenges that emerged during the pandemic. In this sense, the crisis has provided invaluable lessons about an ability to adapt that could hardly have been imagined in advance. The preliminary conclusion is that the biggest difference between the three countries lies at the national level. At national level, in March 2020, a decision dilemma was faced between speed and precision in the introduction of measures. Where Norway prioritized speed through a precautionary principle, Sweden chose a strategy based on precision and expertise. This is linked to differences in regulatory and administrative systems, but can also be seen as more cultural differences in "policy style" and institutional logic. Italy's response was characterized by the fact that they were the first epicenter in Europe and thus had less time to compensate for shortcomings in preparedness. The Italian response has been described by other researchers as initially characterized by denial, weak central management capacity and a complex regional structure (Capaldi 2020). The response was eventually strongly characterized by an expertise orientation, where a small selection of medical experts was given very large decision-making authority. All the countries' choice of strategy appears to be as much a result of historical conditions and administrative tradition as an analytically chosen strategy. The second main track in CORNER has been to understand how the population in Norway, Sweden and Italy interpret the seriousness of the situation and the proportionality of the measures decided upon. The starting point for this part of the analysis was that large amounts of text have been produced on social media throughout the pandemic, and that this can tell something important about the social construction of risk and legitimacy. By studying large amounts of information from social media, we have gained an insight into people's interpretation and negotiation around legitimacy, proportionality, moral positions in the relationship between individual and collective action, as well as various authorities' risk communication. We find particularly important information in the controversies that arose around measures that approached a limit for what was considered proportionate and democratically acceptable, for example the face mask mandate. In addition, these analyzes have provided the opportunity to study changes in discourses over time. The project runs until 2024 and results from the analyzes are published continuously.