Decentralization, intergovernmental coordination, and emergency response in East and Southeast Asia: lessons from combatting the COVID-19 pandemic

Despite region-wide lessons learned from the SARS pandemic in 2003, country responses to the Covid-19 pandemic in East and Southeast Asia have been very diverse. Outcomes have also varied widely, with some of the world’s lowest per capita case and death rates in Taiwan and Vietnam and extremely high per capita case and death rates in Indonesia, the Philippines, and Malaysia. A common feature of many of these countries is their decentralized governance systems, most of which lack clear channels for coordination among different levels of government. I consider how government structure and political centralization shaped emergency response to the Covid-19 pandemic in East and Southeast Asia. While the quantitative analysis shows that weak coordination may actually exacerbate problems in executing decentralization when responding to the pandemic, a paired comparison of Indonesia and the Philippines suggests the drawbacks of a decentralized but uncoordinated system.