PERISCOPE partners recently published a report titled “Best Practice in Multi-Level Governance During Pandemics: A Case Study Report”, as part of the deliverables of the project.

The work was led by the London School of Economics (LSE) and included the contributions of the Karolinska Institute (KI), the Federation of European Academies of Medicine (FEAM) and the Centre for European Policy Studies (CEPS).

The report is an experiment that brings together a broad range of disciplines, actors from a range of national backgrounds, and diverse types of data and evidence in a comparative conversation. This layered evidence base is considered necessary because of the lack of comprehensive data generated at national or EU level on issues related to pandemic policy, and especially to health inequalities in Covid-19 transmission, morbidity and mortality.

In order to understand best practice in pandemic governance, a shift is proposed that moves away from the dominant focus on resilience, and highlights instead a novel approach to multi-level governance, based on the combination of three frameworks: social infrastructures, public authority, and One Health.

Some of the key findings point at the benefits brought by decentralised governance as well as innovative forms of collaboration and mutuality formed at different levels of government. The report also finds Communities and Community Sector Organisations (CSOs) as having a key role in closing the gap between statutory services and community needs, especially for vulnerable groups, in a context where pandemic policies and governance approaches generated new forms of stigma, exclusion and inequality and exacerbated existing forms.

Building on such conclusions, the report poses some criteria for best practice in pandemic governance aimed at empowering CSOs and better link decentralised governance structures through strong communication channels and coordination mechanisms. It also advocates for innovative funding and legal structures that allow for rapid redistribution of funds and investments in social listening mechanisms that allow governments to understand, adapt and co-design their policies with communities, as well as it states the need for a broad and diverse evidence base to inform policy making. Finally, the evidence suggests that attention must be paid to the structural barriers created by pandemic bureaucracy that exclude certain groups from uptake of vaccination, economic measures or healthcare but also to non-human factors, including a broad engagement with the needs of non-humans (animals and plant-life) and the impact of built environments on health outcomes through a One Health framework.

This comprehensive work can be found in its full length in the Resources section (Category: PERISCOPE Deliverables) of PERISCOPE website.