Coping With Turbulence and Safeguarding Against Authoritarianism: Polycentric Governance as a Resilience Resource

Abstract

Crisis management during the pandemic stimulated a bulk of analyses and debates on how states and societies coped with this challenge. In many countries, authority migrated temporarily from parliaments to executives and from the subnational to the national level, involving even violations of democratic and individual rights. Such reactions are motivated by the assumption that crisis management requires prompt, decisive, and uniform responses best delivered by a strong and centralised leadership. In contrast to this widespread assumption, crisis and disaster management research compellingly stresses the virtues of polycentric governance and processes based on flexibility, decentrality, and dispersed information in coping with turbulence. In this article, a framework is proposed for analysing empirically the question of what makes states and societies resilient. Core to this framework is the notion of resilience resources. In linking resilience resources to properties of socio-ecological systems and their reactions to turbulence, the resilience concept becomes accessible to empirical analyses. The potential of the framework is illustrated by an empirical example of the coordination of decentralised pandemic management by the German Minister-Presidents' Conference. This example shows how the resilience resource of polycentric governance is put into practice. The results of the analytical, as well as the empirical part of the article, underpin the claim that resilience is fostered by coordinated decentrality, flexible adaptation, and bricolage instead of centralisation of authority. Fostering resilience in this sense provides also a safeguard against authoritarian tendencies.