Abstract
How do governments address complex, cross-sectoral problems, like the COVID-19 pandemic? Why were some Latin American countries more successful at containing the pandemic's most devastating health outcomes? We argue that national governments that were more collaborative in their response to COVID-19 were more successful in reducing death rates. Our original dataset offers a novel attempt to operationalise collaborative governance (CG). We undertake simple statistical tests to measure the relationship between CG and COVID-19-related mortality rates in Latin America. We then choose three case studies to assess whether collaboration was meaningful in practice. Initial evidence suggests governments that pursued CG were more effective at containing mortality rates early on in the pandemic. The collaboration helped to foster cooperation over resources; buy time to prepare for a potential case surge; and produce a unified message regarding what citizens should do to prevent viral spread.
Highlights
COVID-19 has spread like wildfire across the globe, impacting national health systems, the economy, a country’s fiscal solvency, and its social safety nets
El Salvador has a low collaborative governance index (CGI) score and a comparatively low death rate. These results suggest that there is only a weak relationship between the CGI and the number of deaths attributed to COVID-19.11 The correlation between the variables is low and statistically insignificant, but it is negative (r = −0.10)
We sought to examine the impact collaboration has on COVID-19-related deaths
Summary
COVID-19 has spread like wildfire across the globe, impacting national health systems, the economy, a country’s fiscal solvency, and its social safety nets. We test the following hypothesis: Hypothesis 1: In countries where national governments collaborate more with different actors, the negative health impacts of COVID-19 will be reduced. For each type of collaboration, we sought to answer a series of questions (see Appendix 1) corresponding to a set of implications that should be observed if collaboration took place These questions examine whether the national government consulted with each stakeholder on different economic, social, and health policies associated with the pandemic. We collected data on the national executive’s collaboration with five different stakeholders during the first year of the pandemic (March 2020–end of January 2021) in eighteen Latin American countries, including Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Dominican Republic, Ecuador, El Salvador, Guatemala, Honduras, Mexico, Nicaragua, Panama, Paraguay, Peru, Uruguay, and Venezuela. We excluded it from the statistical analyses, we maintain it in the descriptive statistics
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