COVINFORM - Analysis: Government responses to COVID-19 and impact assessment – update M32
Creators: name: Mehdi, Zainab
name: Aspell, Niamh
name: Anson, Su
Publisher: name: Zenodo
Year: 2023

description: This report provides an update of D4.3 “Analysis: Government responses to COVID-19 and impact assessment,” which focused on describing and assessing government response to the COVID-19 pandemic. The report has extracted key findings from the D4.1, “Baseline Report Governmental responses,” D4.5, “Baseline Report Government Responses Update,” and the complete cohort of WP4 expert interviews conducted by COVINFORM target countries until May 2023. As stated in D4.3, additional insights regarding COVID-19 responses measures, the consequences of the implemented measures, and the legal aspects pertaining to the pandemic responses would offer a more comprehensive government level analysis. Details regarding the updated expert interview guidelines can be found in D4.6, “Research Design: Governmental Responses – update M26”. Like D4.3, this report has explored the following five dimensions of government response:



Pandemic planning and preparedness;

Economic and social welfare responses to COVID-19;

COVID-19 responses on multiple levels of governance;

Socio-political, legal, and ethical factors influencing government preparedness andresponse;

Governmental approaches to defining and addressing vulnerability;


To provide a holistic and temporal understanding of these dimensions, COVINFORM partners identified relevant data within D4.1, D4.5, and WP4 expert interviews with Government Experts and Stakeholders. COVINFORM partners followed a standardised questionnaire to guide the extraction of relevant data within the five dimensions across all the target countries. The countries under study are Austria, Germany, Greece, Belgium, Italy, England, Wales, Portugal, Spain, and Sweden. To explore the government responses overtime, the following time points were considered:

T0: Baseline pre-COVID-19 pandemic up until January 2020

T1: COVID-19 beginning and first lockdown until vaccination influenced measures

T2: Omicron until now (November 2021) up until September 2022

The information included in this deliverable is complimented by country frameworks which employ Ostrom’s Social-Ecological System framework1 (Annex 2). The SES framework is an empirically applied conceptual framework for analysing complex social systems.2 The analysis approach does not have a methodological guide; therefore, this allows flexibility in how it may be adapted to diverse contexts. The frameworks consist of nested systems (Resource Systems and Units, Governance Systems, Actor Systems/Users; a description of the Interaction Area and Outcomes). This is connected to social, economic, and political settings and related ecosystems. Therefore, it ‘provides governance solutions to social-ecological problems’ (ibid). More details on the methodology can be found in D4.2, “Research Design: GovernmentResponses.”

The current report studies 10 COVINFORM countries: Austria, Belgium, Greece, Germany, Sweden, Italy, Spain, Portugal, Wales, and Austria. The report starts off with an introductory chapter (Chapter 1), followed by an overview of the methods used to carry out the empirical research (Chapter 2). Here, particular attention will be paid to the country reports completed by COVINFORM partners, and the governance framework (Ostrom’s SES framework) adopted to accompany the country reports across all countries. In chapter 3, the country reports will be presented. The penultimate chapter (Chapter 4) will provide an analysis of the country reports in terms of commonalities identified across the COVINFORM countries. The commonalities will be reported within the five dimensions presented in this report. Finally, the concluding chapter (Chapter 5) presents a summary of the key findings in relation to the five dimensions under study. The key findings will be explored in further detail in the D4.8 deliverable “Synthesis and lessons learnt on governmental responses and impacts” due in M33.