Several Canadian and international scholars offer commentaries on the implications of the COVID‐19 pandemic for governments and public service institutions, and fruitful directions for public administration research and practice. This second suite of commentaries considers the challenges confronting governments as a result of the COVID‐19 pandemic and in the decades to come with an increasingly broad lens: the need to understand and rethink the architecture of the state given recent and future challenges awaiting governments; the need to rethink government‐civil society relations and policies to deliver services for increasingly diverse citizens and communities; the need for new repertoires and sensibilities on the part of governments for recognizing, anticipating, and engaging on governance risks despite imperfect expert knowledge and public skepticism; how the COVID‐19 crisis has caused us to reconceive international and sub‐national borders where new “borders” are being drawn; and the need to anticipate a steady stream of crises similar to the COVID‐19 pandemic arising from climate change and related challenges, and develop new national and international governance strategies for fostering population and community resilience.