Technological advancements and big data have brought many improvements to smart city infrastructure. During the COVID-19 outbreak, smart city technologies were considered one of the most effective means of fighting the pandemic. The use of technology, however, implies collecting, processing personal data, and making the collected data publicly available which may violate privacy. While some countries were able to freely use these technologies to fight the pandemic, many others were restricted by their privacy protection legislation. The literature suggests looking for an approach that will allow the effective use of smart city technologies during the pandemic, while complying with strict privacy protection legislation. This article explores the approach applied in Moscow, Russia, and demonstrates the existence of a hybrid model that might be considered a suitable tradeoff between personal privacy and public health. This study contributes to the literature on the role of smart city technologies during pandemics and other emergencies.

This paper explores whether inequities in access to COVID-19 vaccines can be attributed to governance deficits, particularly for developing and emerging countries where poor governance is widespread, but also for developed countries, where governments' performance fell short of expectations. These shared performance deficits beg questions about the impact of governance quality as well as the interplay of ethics in governance when life-or-death decisions must be made. It also explores the impact of COVID-19 on development, especially in the areas of poverty and employment. The findings of the paper show that there is a positive correlation between vaccine equity and good governance, meaning that countries with higher scores in governance rankings have more access to vaccines and have vaccinated most of their populations. Similarly, countries with relatively lower scores in governance rankings have poor access to and distribution of vaccines and have only covered a limited number of their people. The paper further points to disastrous societal impacts of COVID-19 vaccine inequity on poverty and employment, which have hindered global development.

How people make initial and collective sense under crises remains unanswered. This paper addresses this question using the control of COVID-19 in Vietnam as a case study. Our results suggest that sensemaking under crises is influenced by an institutional propensity for prevention that has developed gradually over time. Local governments play a vital role in fostering collective sensemaking which enables concerted actions in epidemic control. However, biases are inherent in sensemaking, including a delay in access to vaccine and a violation of privacy. For policy makers, this study suggests that developing specific prevention policies and programs, building large-scale coordination capacity, and promoting local initiatives are necessary for coping with epidemics. For theory development, the study explores how institutions condition sensemaking and specifies several mechanisms in which local authorities could facilitate collective sensemaking in crises.

The COVID-19 pandemic has provided an ultimate testing ground for evaluating the resilience and effectiveness of federal and decentralized systems. The article analyses how the Spanish asymmetrical system of decentralization has responded to the pandemic, focusing on the management developed by the sub-central governments (Autonomous Communities) during the first two waves of the pandemic in 2020. The research, which is both quantitative and qualitative, employs multidisciplinary tools and information sources, analyzing and linking fiscal and budgetary sources with the available statistics and information on health. Although the health, economic and social crisis caused by COVID-19 has highlighted appreciable shortcomings related to the decentralized model of territorial organization - in questions of both regional financing and health management - the research concludes that decentralization has not per se been a handicap when confronting the pandemic in Spain.

This manuscript investigates the unsuccessful case of the fiscal decentralization policy implemented by the Brazilian central government to help municipalities fight COVID-19. Based on quantitative analyses of data available on governmental websites, we identified that the transfer policy had ignored municipalities' risk patterns and income changes. It benefited municipalities regardless of their vulnerability and population infection risks, and many municipalities reduced healthcare expenditures funded by their revenues during the pandemic. Hence, some municipalities made a "pandemic surplus" in 2020 - a municipal electoral year. Indeed, COVID-19 killed 663,694 people in Brazil until 4 May 2022. Lessons from an unsuccessful case of response to COVID-19 help develop resilience for other crises by emerging market economies and developing countries. The findings have implications for policymakers and literature since they represent inadequate vertical coordination that followed a path dependence on traditional decentralization policies and took place in a year of municipal elections without clear spending and accountability rules.

Research on COVID-19 responses has largely focused on national governments. Meanwhile, the crisis management literature has noted that such "transboundary crises" require collaborative responses. What role can local governments play? How do citizen perceptions matter? We look for answers in South Korea that has been considered a model case for managing COVID-19. We use data from policy briefs, news reports, and local government websites to show that local governments successfully implemented national initiatives while modifying them to fit local needs and also actively planned and executed local initiatives to address needs that the central government did not address. Based on 2020 national survey data ( = 16,258), we find that COVID-19 cases and deaths are linked to citizen perceptions of vulnerability to COVID-19 and its effect on wellbeing, but not to evaluations of other residents' responses (e.g. following mask mandates, social distancing) or local government responses.

Outbreak of the coronavirus pandemic is testing governments' capacity. Generally, considerable attention is paid to the capacity and response of the central or national governments; however, COVID-19 pandemic is local in nature. Although central authorities have important roles to play in COVID-19 response, local governments, being closer to people, are best-positioned to form the first line of defense.

Using the decommodification and (de)familisation framework, this paper examines the two main Social Safety Net programme during the pandemic and its effect on female welfare in Indonesia. It is argued that despite expansion of decommodification measures through unemployment benefits, females tend to benefit less because the existing labour force structure is highly dominated by males. Hence, the only way of being financially secure is to have access to Conditional Cash Transfer (CCT), which means it then exposes them to greater risk of familisation. This is because to be eligible for CCT, they are (informally) required to perform unpaid caregiving. This article concludes that familial ethics has become a rationale for the state to push females to seek social support through a family relationship, resulting in social risk internalisation during the COVID-19 crisis, rather granting them citizenship rights-based welfare.

This field report explores how nonlocal grassroots organizations provided effective and quick responses during the initial stage of the COVID-19 outbreak in Wuhan and surrounding regions. Despite the lack of resources and local connections, they were able to overcome administrative failures and provide quick responses to the crisis. Built on a researcher-practitioner collaborative action research project, three strategies facilitating grassroots organizations' quick and effective responses are analyzed and discussed: putting pandemic relief as the strategic priority of their organizations, leveraging social media platforms to scale up existing organizational networks and foster cross-sector collaboration, and effective online trust-building. As COVID-19 unprecedently pushes nonprofits to transform how they deliver services and engage stakeholders, these findings have important policy and theoretical implications for an expanded view of how nonprofits may engage in disaster responses and how public and private funders may shift their funding strategies to cultivate such capacities of grassroots nonprofits.

Governments in developing countries will face serious problems in extending basic social services, public facilities, and infrastructure for their rapidly growing urban populations during the next decade. The steadily increasing concentration of the poor in cities will exacerbate already severe strains on urban services. Innovative solutions will be needed to meet the growing demands for urban services. In addition to expanding national and municipal efforts, governments in developing countries must also explore alternative policies and organizational arrangements for meeting the basic needs of their urban population. Among the potential alternatives are: using market surrogates to improve service delivery; lowering the costs of service provision through changes in regulations and controls on urban development; actively supporting self-help and service upgrading schemes by the poor; promoting public-private cooperation and private sector participation in service delivery; increasing effective demand for services by promoting employment and higher incomes; and enacting and implementing policies that attempt to redistribute migration to small and intermediate-sized cities. Each alternative has advantages and limitations that planners and policy-makers must take into consideration in forging effective urban development strategies.