دانلود کتاب دولت محلی و همه گیری COVID-19

This introductory chapter aims to outline some of the key features of the local government response to the sanitary, social, and economic challenges raised by the Covid-19 pandemic, as well as its implications on intergovernmental relations and on multilevel governance. It is based on a review of the literature and on findings from research and policy reports and serves as a background for what follows in the other chapters of the book. It ends with an outline of the book. The outbreak of the Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome Coronavirus (SARS-CoV- 2), that causes the Coronavirus Disease 19 (COVID-19), a highly contagious disease and, so far, the most disruptive infection outbreak of the twenty first century, motivated an extraordinary response by all tiers of government, including local government. Contrary to previous epidemics in this century, which impacted mostly in less-developed countries, the Covid-19 pandemic affected all sorts of countries. The SARS-CoV-2 first reported in Wuhan, China, in December 2019, spread to different parts of China, and gradually also to other countries. Soon the main areas affected shifted from Asia to Europe, and to North and South America. In fact, the entire world was confronted in the first quarter of 2020 with unprecedented sanitary, social, and economic challenges. For the first time in this global age, a public health issue launched the world in a state of uncertainty, questioned long-held assumptions, and made more visible a whole series of inequalities in cities, in other human settlements, and in the capacity of the State and subnational tiers of government to respond to a national emergency and to a global extreme event. The policy response to this crisis was multilayer and involved institutions from local to global levels.2 The book aims to fill some of the gaps still existent in the knowledge about the response of local government to this health crisis. It is therefore focused primarily on the responses at the local level. And as will be seen in the following chapters, whatever the prevailing national political culture, local government showed once again, in the first year of the Covid-19 pandemic, the value of the local public action, based on proximity to citizens, and how important this has been to address effectively and efficiently the social and economic impacts of this global sanitary crisis. The impact of the Covid-19 pandemic on local government, the changes it forced in the organization and functioning of local government, almost everywhere, and in its relation with central government, and with community organizations, seems to be, 1 year after the OMS declared the Covid-19 a pandemic, on 11 March 2020, another mega global trend affecting local government, in addition to economic globalization, democratization, decentralization, digitalization, climate change, and ecological transition, to mention just few of the other global mega trends that have impacted in recent decades and continue to affect the development of local government around the world. Local government is unequally developed in the different regions of the world, as shown in Silva (2020), which is reflected in its rather uneven level of autonomy and capacity to intervene. This in part results from the level of administrative decentralization prevailing in each country and from the disparate degrees of financial autonomy, which vary because of specific historical processes. These structural differences are reflected in the response of local government toward the impacts of the Covid-19 pandemic, which correlates positively with the geography of local government autonomy and financial capacity. And a similar perspective emerges from the analysis of the possible response to the social and economic impacts in the postpandemic recovery process, reflecting to some extent the existent Geography of local government.