Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic has exposed massive failures of governance at the global and national levels. Global health governance failed rapidly, with action quickly becoming nationally based, uncoordinated, and often zero-sum. However, domestic health governance also often fared very poorly, even in some of the wealthiest countries, which were ostensibly best-prepared to deal with a pandemic. Why? We argue that this reflects the inherent pathologies of the shift from ‘government to governance’ and of the ‘regulatory state’ it had spawned. This has resulted in the hollowing-out of effective state capacities, the dangerous diffusion of responsibility, and de facto reliance on ad hoc emergency measures to contain crises. We demonstrate this through a detailed case study of Britain, where regulatory governance and corporate outsourcing failed miserably, contrasting this with the experience of South Korea, where the regulatory state form was less well established and even partially reversed.

摘要

COVID-19 大流行暴露了全球和国家层面治理的巨大失败。全球卫生治理迅速失败，行动迅速变成以国家为基础的、不协调的，而且往往是零和的。然而，国内的卫生治理也常常表现得很糟糕，即使是在一些表面上为应对大流行病做好了最充分准备的最富裕国家也是如此。为什么？我们认为，这反映了从“政府向治理”转变以及由此产生的“监管国家”的内在病态。这导致了有效的国家能力的空心化、责任的危险分散以及对临时性的事实上的依赖遏制危机的紧急措施。我们通过对英国的详细案例研究证明了这一点，英国的监管治理和企业外包惨遭失败，这与韩国的经验形成对比，韩国的监管国家形式不太完善，甚至部分逆转。