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Two routes to precarious success: Australia, New Zealand, COVID-19 and the politics of crisis governance by Nicholas Bromfield; Allan McConnell is a Social Sciences article available to read on EtoBox.

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Australia and New Zealand are routinely presented as sharing more in common than the federal and unitary systems separating them. As two modernising Antipodean settler societies, their governing trajectories have embraced waves of public administration/management reform. Shared pathways seem matched by their relative, although precarious and fragile, early successes in the crisis challenges of COVID-19. This article contextualises and examines one crucial point of separation: two very different crisis governance routes to such outcomes. Australia’s federal variant of multi-level governance, more used to addressing diverse regional challenges than shared national threats, has been characterised by an evolving balancing act of multi-jurisdictional agendas and bureaucratic–political conflicts. By contrast, New Zealand’s unitary system of governance, well-versed in the centralisation of power, has produced lower levels of intergovernmental conflict. Our analysis of these differing pathways also makes a contribution to our conceptual understanding of successful crisis governance. ## Points for practitioners Administrative arrangements based around federal or unitary systems are both qui

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Author

Nicholas Bromfield; Allan McConnell

Publisher

SAGE Publications (ISSN 0020-8523)

Published

2020

Language

EN

Field

Social Sciences