Building health system resilience in and through governance: lessons from the Danish response to the first phase of the Covid-19 pandemic

Governance is a critical building block for health systems and good governance practices are crucial for resilience capacity. But governance is a headline for many tasks and dimensions. This chapter presents a set of key governance tasks and argues that traditional governance perspectives must be expanded to also include governance configurations and meta-governance, which in turn can be subdivided into constitutive and reflexive meta-governance. Both types of governance must be applied before, during and after a crisis occurs, and there are key issues related to each of these three phases. It is argued that governance for resilience should be evaluated in terms of traditional health system outcomes such as population health and in terms of governance related public values including transparency, participation, accountability, integrity and capacity. The Danish governance during Covid-19 is used to illustrate the theoretical governance framework.