Local Government Responses to COVID-19 Crisis in Romania

This chapter aims to fill this gap through a comparative subnational assessment of local governments in leading Romanian municipalities. We explore institutional characteristics that could have prepared the city halls for the Covid19 crisis, their specific measures and reactions during the crisis, and the extent to which they managed to exert a positive impact in their local communities. This analysis is built on an original methodology of measuring institutional resilience, and uses such empirical evidence as official records, interviews, and secondary statistical data. Our findings suggest that the level of institutional resilience during crisis at local level is linked to the extent to which internal processes and external collaborations have been deployed by subnational governments in the pre-pandemic period. In a global context in which we see large variation in the way the pandemics was managed at subnational level, our findings bring an important argument in support of continuous reform to enhance the local capabilities of subnational governments as a strategy for crisis-management.