Local Actions to Combat Covid-19 Crisis: Contextual Insights into Local Institutional Responses to Covid-19 in Europe and the United States

The design of responses to global COVID-19 crisis is a multilevel policy and governance issue, which involves institutions from local to global levels. This chapter discusses the local government responses to the crisis in five Western political-administrative contexts, those of the United States, the United Kingdom, France, Germany, and Nordic countries. Our aim is to identify typical local response strategies and assess the degree to which they reflect the peculiarities of their political-administrative contexts. The chapter provides basis for assessing the nature of the variation of local COVID-19 response strategies and their converging tendencies. The results of the analysis show that local responses in different contexts indicate a fairly high degree of convergence, which can be assumed to be to a large extent the result of the EU integration and globalization.