Urban Governance, Re-Nationalisation and Rescaling

The COVID-19 crisis has rebalanced and reshaped the relationship between levels of governance in many countries. The need to improvise measures for containing the virus and managing its impacts solicited public interventions at different scales, and thus created a unique opportunity to re-negotiate the administrative, political, and symbolic role of central, regional and local/urban governments, with ambivalent and sometimes paradoxical outcomes. A critical analysis of these re-negotiations, we believe, is not only useful to highlight the effects the pandemic will potentially have on multi-level governance arrangements and the distribution of power between levels of government, but also illustrative of the ongoing struggle to mediate between the rationalities of decentralisation and recentralisation in the face of such an unprecedented and highly peculiar crisis.