Surviving the Crisis: Making Intergovernmental Relations Strong for Fighting the Pandemic, Case from Nepal

Abstract

The aftermath of the COVID-19 pandemic is still scary for many countries. Despite having a relatively lower number of casualties compared to some advanced countries, the developing and transitional countries witnessed social and economic impacts. Nepal, an emerging economy, has been accelerating to institutionalize the recent constitutional and political transformation implemented through the 2015 Constitution. The recently adopted federal form of governance has shared state authorities among the federal, provincial, and local governments including management of health services and other emergencies. This new set of governance arrangements has been expected to deliver public services and protect people’s fundamental rights in an efficient, coordinated, and economic way. For a disaster-prone country like Nepal, the COVID-19 crisis exposed its weary and transitional crisis governance. Several gaps have been identified in the ways the government took initiatives. The major challenges were about the defined leadership roles, intergovernmental coordination, indicator-based financial allocation, and capacity of crisis management institutions, including the health care facilities.  This paper analyzes Nepal's efforts to manage COVID-19 in the broader landscape of political governanceand disaster risk profiles and offers insights on intergovernmental relations drawing from three rounds of surveys conducted between 2020 and 2021 among Nepal’s local governments. 
The studies record a positive response to the functions of local governments as they felt accountable for addressing public concerns. It further reports a number of critical gaps in intergovernmental relations for dealing with COVID-19. Discrete leadership and poor vertical and horizontal coordination and communication, mismatch in funding and COVID-19 caseload and lack of post-recovery plan at all levels of the government made the crisis governance inefficient, increasing the burden on people. Extensive interactions and engagement, organized and collaborative leadership among the orders of the government and strengthening the capacity of the sub-national governments would be instrumental in dealing with such crises in the future.