Municipal Pathways in Response to COVID-19: A Strategic Management Perspective on Local Public Administration Resilience

• Author: Jessica Clement,Giovanni Esposito,Nathalie Crutzen
• DOI: http://doi.org/10.1177/00953997221100382
• Published date: 01 January 2023
• Date: 01 January 2023
• Subject Matter: Articles

https://doi.org/10.1177/00953997221100382

Administration & Society

2023, Vol. 55(1) 3 –29

© The Author(s) 2022

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DOI: 10.1177/00953997221100382

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Article

Municipal Pathways in

Response to COVID-19:

A Strategic Management

Perspective on Local

Public Administration

Resilience

Jessica Clement1, Giovanni Esposito1,2 ,

and Nathalie Crutzen1

Abstract

This paper aims to understand the different resilience pathways local

governments may take during moments of crisis, specifically focusing on the

COVID-19 pandemic. Through survey responses from local administrations

in Wallonia, Belgium, we consider how varied contexts led to different

strategic resilience pathways. These pathways range from static (i.e., no

strategy) to innovative change. Our findings highlight that digital technology

solutions may play a role in supporting resilience across the different

pathways. Therefore, we adapt strategic public management literature to

suggest propositions for future research to test the specific role that digital

technologies play in supporting resilience within local administrations.

Keywords

COVID-19, resilience, strategic management, local public administrations,

digital technology

1HEC Liège Management School at the University of Liège, Belgium

2University of Antwerp, Belgium

Corresponding Author:

Jessica Clement, Smart City Institute, HEC Liège Management School at the University of

Liège, Rue Louvrex 14, 4000 Liège, Belgium.

Email: Jessica.Clement@uliege.be

1100382AAS0010.1177/00953997221100382Administration & SocietyClement et al.

research-article2022

4 Administration & Society 55(1)

Introduction

The COVID-19 pandemic put municipalities at the forefront of containing

the virus and protecting citizens (OECD, 2020). Moreover, local public

administrations have had to confront new realities in a period of uncertainty,

such as social or physical distancing, while still maintaining services to citi-

zens (Janssen & van der Voort, 2020; Maher et al., 2020). Indeed, the COVID-

19 crisis has been cited as a “game changer for public administration” (Ansell

et al., 2021, p. 2). This context has highlighted the resilience of local public

agencies in maintaining operations during a complex time (Sakurai &

Chughtai, 2020; Sharifi et al., 2021). The COVID-19 crisis led to widespread

loss of human life and economic hardships felt worldwide, but in dealing

with this tragedy, a window of opportunity emerged to address existing weak-

nesses within local public agencies alongside the unprecedented changes

implemented to manage the crisis.

In this context, through an exploratory study, we aim to understand the

different pathways that local administrations take in the face of critical exog-

enous events, such as the COVID-19 crisis. In particular, we ask: how did

different local administration resilience strategies emerge to ensure the con-

tinuation of operations during the COVID-19 crisis? We moreover explore

the different conceptualizations of resilience, in order to understand how

resilience seen during COVID-19 may change future ways of operating by

public agencies.

To answer our research question, we conducted a survey in June 2020,

which was sent to all municipalities in the region of Wallonia in Belgium.1

The survey was constructed according to five themes: (1) the new context

created by the crisis, (2) solutions adopted in the face of this new context, (3)

factors influencing the implementation of solutions, (4) the new or innovative

character of the solutions, and (5) the enduring nature of the solutions. As a

result, we are able to characterize a diverse set of pathways taken by local

agencies of municipalities to solve given problems in order to ensure continu-

ity of administrative operations.

As a first analytical step, in this paper, we classify the survey responses

into clear categories to provide an overall snapshot of how local agencies

managed continued operations throughout the first wave of the COVID-19

pandemic. Thus, we evaluate how local public administrations seek to match

internal capacities to the new context created by the crisis. As a second step,

after pre-processing the data, we cluster survey responses to produce several

groupings of municipalities that experienced similar situations. The results

from the cluster analysis show there are four distinct groups of municipali-

ties with regards to problems faced, actors affected, solutions adopted, and