Social policy responses to COVID-19: New issues, old solutions?

Analysing a pandemic quintessentially requires a global lens. With COVID-19, a global public health crisis has been coupled with devastating economic and social impacts – what some are calling a ‘syndemic’ (GSP Digest, 2021; Schmidt-Sane et al., 2021), none of which can be addressed solely within national borders. International organisations (IOs) and other institutions of global governance inevitably play a critical role – in defining and measuring the problem, sharing information and technical capacities, making policy recommendations, guiding and advising national governments, and where necessary holding governments and other actors to account. National governments across the world have reacted in varying ways to the pandemic, considering both recommendations and lessons learned from previous crises and across different contexts, as well as by assessing their own conditions. Local and national responses and actions in turn shape regional and global knowledge and policy, including through various channels of engagement with international organisations. The contributions in this special issue highlight some of these dynamics between the national, regional and global levels. The articles provide new empirical analyses, drawn from particular national (sometimes regional) contexts, and address or compare national level policies and responses and their impacts on particular groups; several explicitly examine whether and how regional, international or transnational actors and policies shape responses to the pandemic at different scales. The discussion in this Introduction is structured along the following two main axes: first, we examine new or previously neglected issues that have been made visible or attracted significant policy or public attention during the pandemic, particularly as they 1055645 GSP0010.1177/14680181211055645Global Social PolicySpecial Issue Introduction research-article2021