Why a ‘new global-local’ is an important dimension of post-pandemic local government

This article is part of our Post-Covid councils work on Place and Community.

This longread by David Marlow sets out an explicitly provocative narrative to stimulate the thinking of local authorities and partners about whether there is and should be a ‘think global – act local’ dimension to their place-based recovery strategies and priorities. It makes the case that some national governments – and possibly the UK in particular – have been so severely exposed by the pandemic that relying on them to secure future resilience and prosperity for all our cities, towns and communities is recklessly optimistic.

The views are those of the author.

It is easy to treat the Covid-19 pandemic as an unexpected, exogenous crisis, that has stimulated and required strong national government leadership response, with local government playing instrumental supportive roles. However, wide diversity of national strategies, and huge variation in outcomes – even in this intermediate stage of pandemic – can also exemplify fundamental questions about the character of nation states and national-local relations with their cities, towns and communities.

This is probably as true in the UK as anywhere. The UK is highly centralised, its crisis management performance and outcomes has been, at best, patchy, and the pandemic runs concurrently with UK repositioning itself in the world, post-brexit.

This long-read presents an explicitly personal perspective from the author of some key global issues that may influence local authorities and partners as they undertake post-pandemic recovery planning. Our places will be shaped by these global tensions, but how do places set about managing them?

Although focused on England, this paper will be of some interest across all LGIU geographies. Centralisation-decentralisation-devolution pressures are an important consideration for achieving future central-local equilibriums that can manage crisis turnaround effectively for the benefit of all communities of interest and place.

In the midst of a global pandemic, crisis management strategy and policy has been largely determined by government, with local authorities discharging assigned roles as one of several tiers of sub-national field administration. However, as we move from crisis to turnaround, recovery and some sort of ‘new normal’, we can anticipate local differentiation re-emerging as an increasing determinant of outcomes against top-down, ‘one size fits all’, national propensities.

This paper explores two primary questions from a global trends and relevance perspective. ‘What can places do in the medium-term to deliver success?’ and ‘How can place-based leadership teams set about determining what success should look like in the shadow and aftermath of Covid-19?’

It does this by explicitly attempting to redefine and reposition ‘think global, act local’ for this new, and what is shaping up to be an extraordinary, decade. Towards the end of the read is also sets out what this new ‘think global, act local’ agenda might look like – especially in terms of community and local economic leadership.

In particular it suggests the new agendas should be values and partnership led, evidence informed, and based on a specific post-Devolution White Paper local devolution strategy. It should explicitly build transnational relations and dialogue whilst supporting and enabling local community activism and democratic renewal. In economic terms, particular attention might be paid to broad public health economies, clean and green industries and technologies, repurposing labour markets particularly at risk of automation and/or lower demand post-social-distancing, and rebooting public places to work in this new post-Covid-19 context.

It presumes a shared author-reader world view that the nation state does NOT have, nor can national government delivery-manage, definitive answers to these questions.

Places will turnaround and recover in disparate and sometimes diverging ways, with highly differentiated results. This paper suggests that the more local leadership teams ‘think global’ the better those results are likely to be.

Thinking global, and making this relevant locally, is demanding at the best of times. In the midst of public health, economic and social existential crises, with so many urgent important, national directives to deliver, is it asking too much?

Self-evidently, this thought piece makes the case that, far from being an indulgent luxury, understanding global dimensions and implications of the pandemic, and the limitations of national responses to this, is central to local authorities’ local leadership roles and ambitions for their place. It seeks to help local authorities and partners in this crucial endeavour.

The identification of Covid-19, its spread, the declaration of a global pandemic, the subsequent economic and social lock downs, and tentative relaxation of restrictions have been, far and away, the defining feature of 2020 to date.

Leadership and governance of the crisis has largely been determined by national leadership teams – each of whom has declared its own crisis management regime.

Whilst there is no single typology of national responses, in broad terms many Asian and Australasian countries appeared to pursue elimination strategies with highly restrictive lock downs, and thorough test, track and trace systems. At the other extreme, countries like US and Brazil exemplify a sometimes-sceptical approach, seeking early return to ‘normal’ economic and social life over public health priorities.

In the EU, the Council did enable both early relaxation of EU rules, including totems like open borders, and latterly agreement of a very large fiscal package of support. However, it mainly deferred to member state national competences in public health. This has enabled highly differentiated approaches to lockdown and reopening – from, for instance, punitive periods in Spain and Italy, to much more reliance on social responsibility in Sweden, to a strong digital strategy in Estonia, to much more politically driven authoritarian strategies in Hungary and Poland.

In the UK, the Johnson government’s approach has been highly contested. A public inquiry is expected (and has been promised) at some stage. Critics accused the UK government of at first intending to pursue a ‘herd immunity’ strategy (which they dispute) but then they introduced increasing guidance during March, culminating in Stay at Home restrictions on 23 March, effectively closing down all but key economic and social functions.

This managed the most acute NHS capacity fears. Testing was ramped up, and some sort of track and trace system has been introduced. Cases and deaths have fallen from the April surge. The government published a largely public health-oriented recovery strategy in May and ‘The next chapter in our plan to rebuild’ in July.

Government’s economic and fiscal strategies have been unprecedented and highly interventionist. Funding has been made available for labour market (eg furlough schemes), sector support (eg tax holidays) and for increased spending (eg NHS).

How much this will cost is uncertain and depends both on the future trajectory of the pandemic, the government’s policy responses, and broader economic impact. However, estimates and forecasts tend to be in the £150bn-£200bn range for direct fiscal stimulus – increasing public sector net debt to around 100 per cent of GDP and the in-year budget deficit to around 20 per cent (from a forecast of 2.4 per cent in the March budget).

If one accepts the premises that acute place-based variation remains an enduring, defining feature of the UK, and limitations of top-down national government have been further exposed rather than reduced by the leadership and management of the pandemic, then the need for local leadership teams to determine some sort of global world view of their own becomes ever more important.

There are numerous big picture reflections on the lessons of the pandemic, and it is impossible to synthesise or even fully summarise them. However, one can identify common strands in many more thoughtful, progressive analyses that this long-read considers relevant for cities, towns and communities in global-local reflections. Some surface, amplify and/or accelerate trends and tensions that were prevalent pre-crisis. Others are more derived directly from Covid-19 experience.

Firstly, if the pandemic and resultant public health and economic crises prove anything, there needs to be more, better global governance to plan and manage increasing existential global challenges.

Yet, global leadership of the public health pandemic has been significantly undermined. The US Trump administration announced its severing of relationships with WHO in May 2020 and formally notified WHO of its withdrawal in July (to be completed by July 2021). That this is beyond presidential powers and therefore probably unlawful is a wider element of the global crisis explored further below.

The fundamental requirement for good, effective global governance, and therefore shared sovereignty, includes future health crises, but also other agendas such as climate change, migration, even big-tech digitalisation. Yet, in essence, some of the most powerful national leaders – Trump, Putin, Modi, and Bolsonaro, share chronically poor pandemic public health management with strong convictions that it is in their interests to underplay global governance in favour of nationalist identity politics or their domestic agenda priorities of the moment.

Second, in terms of long-run global cycles, we often seem to be on the cusp of a profound shift from a neoliberal economic model underpinned by globalisation and mediated politically by representative democracy to a highly volatile new world order.

Worryingly, populists like Trump and Modi seem to have firmed up their offer well in advance of the progressives. Their critics stress that they seem comfortable promoting divisive, nationalist narratives which embed highly unequal economic power in those that deploy dark money, fake news to gerrymander corrupt elections. Internationally, the increasing US-China struggle for supremacy will have major impact in every country’s domestic political economy, as well as reducing the previous norms towards ever-deepening globalisation of trade and exchange.

How this plays out in the UK is uncertain – but there isn’t much evidence so far of the UK government embracing more inclusive, participatory models.

There is little humility from any of the major political parties of their reduced legitimacy from chronically poor voter turnout. Concurrently, pressures for new constitutional settlements, at the least for Scotland and Northern Ireland, are credible threats to the Union with highly uncertain consequences for England and Wales.

Third, two key existential issues the pandemic has definitely surfaced which need to be confronted more aggressively in the recovery period are inequality and trust.

It has been argued that one of the most serious inadequacies of globalisation and liberal democracy have been the systems’ inabilities to address increasing global and national inequalities whilst delivering growth in general and unimaginable levels of wealth in a small number of individuals and their companies in particular.

This mistrust of the distribution of benefits of the existing system has incubated populist identity politics. Paradoxically this has succeeded in addressing divisive ‘hate’ at other victims of the system (e.g. fleeing migrants) or at ‘experts’ more than at the populist leaders who are beneficiaries of the system they claim to attack.

Under this tension, far from becoming a great leveller, the pandemic and its social impact will, without mitigation, exacerbate inequality and mistrust even more. Health impacts are strongly related to existing health inequalities. Employment impacts tend to disproportionately fall on the working class in lower paid occupations and sectors (e.g. retail, leisure). For instance, early evidence suggested greater incidence in furlough for lower paid workers and fewer opportunities for them to work from home. In the medium term, analyses suggest the threats from automation are expected to be accelerated by the pandemic and to hit this same cohort of workers more severely than professional and managerial occupations in more technology rich sectors. Rightly or wrongly, debates on issues like A-level grades also feed this narrative.

Fourth, the crisis itself requires determination of strategic choices for recovery planning and consideration of game-changing shifts in previous orthodoxies. These were rehearsed in this April policy briefing (by the author of this long-read). For instance, the Johnson government has been explicit in saying the crisis response should be informed by his government’s radical transformation agendas (eg of the civil service and other organs of state). Local leadership teams have choices over ‘build back better’ or more incremental ‘rebuild’ strategies.

In terms of the economy, it seems sensible to assume that digitalisation and automation will increase, possibly with enduring higher levels of home working. Demand may be depressed medium term both by loss of income and uncertainty, and particularly for some activities like travel or collective leisure. The weaknesses of global supply chains may drive opportunities for re-shoring or near-shoring – but this may be a two-edged sword for export sectors. Whilst there may be rebalancing in terms of our appreciation of key workers, how can this be translated into good jobs and address the problems with the gig economy? The appreciation of environmental improvements during the pandemic may well endure and bring new opportunities for clean growth and green jobs. Each government will have to determine its monetary and fiscal policies for addressing the rising deficits from the crisis. And it seems likely that future global crises, whether health, climate or social, will mean resilience will sit much more strongly alongside growth priorities.

Whichever mixes of these types of trend come to pass globally and nationally will undoubtedly have differential impacts regionally and locally.

Fifth, much more tentatively, there is emergent evidence of possible new empowering, sustainable, globally responsible and responsive futures. One can see that in, for instance, the community activism and mutual help that lockdown generated; in pre Covid-19 green and climate change movements; and in the Black Lives Matter resistance during the crisis. Even at the level of the nation state, the way countries like Taiwan and Estonia have used technology as ‘fast, fair and fun’ to manage the pandemic effectively, and to enrich their civil societies more generally, suggests that, shorn of global pretensions, even nation states can be purposeful, productive enablers of economic and social change.

• In the UK, examples of local leadership, community activism and dynamism do exist – from some of the elected-mayors, to local mutual self-help schemes, to initiatives like the circular economy and some of the more dynamic social enterprises. Whether this can be empowered, enabled and sustained in the absence of genuine national advocacy, though, remains an open question.

The point about the global mega-issues outlined above – globalisation, democracy, inequality, trust, strategic recovery planning futures, and community activism – is not whether the long-read’s analysis is correct; it is certainly not comprehensive. Rather, it suggests that local authorities and partners in place-based leadership teams need their own understanding of global context to achieve what is best for their cities, towns and communities. They should not default to an assumption that national government has all the answers and knows best. Therein lies the root of and route to field administration! The remainder of the paper discusses what these trends might mean locally and how local authorities might set about addressing them.

This longread started by asking how places can set about delivering success in the post-pandemic landscape, whether a new ‘think global: act local’ perspective was a useful part of the answer, and, if so, what might that mean in practice.

This explicitly personal perspective positions post-pandemic recovery as a moment of existential strategic choice in the long cycles of global change.

In this construct, the post-WW1 settlement and pandemic sowed the seeds for the depression, the rise of fascism and WW2. The post-WW2 settlement launched a baby-booming period characterised by a breadth of increasing prosperity and an uneasy balance between competing national alliances in a bipolar world. The 1970s oil crisis and collapse of the Bretton Woods system ushered in a more aggressive neoliberal primacy, the collapse of the Soviet Union, capitalist globalisation, but also deeply ingrained inequalities. The 2007-10 Global Financial Crisis surfaced these inequalities leading to a populist backlash through the 2010s. The 2020 pandemic exposed the contradictions of at least some major nation states in managing global challenges effectively and consensually.

These contradictions might reinforce national identity politics and populist divisions locally and globally. In extremis, trade wars might presage much wider social unrest and international conflict.

An alternative scenario is of more humble, thoughtful, evidence-informed, tolerant, consensus-building national states, embracing bottom-up, differentiated approaches in their countries, and sharing sovereignty to meet global challenges internationally.

This article’s provocation is to the local authorities and partners of place-based leadership teams to provide the bottom-up dynamism to enable this alternative vision to flourish.

Ultimately, long-term place-based visions and plans are about the type of world in which we want our cities, towns and communities to succeed. This is the enduring meaning of ‘think global: act local’ for place-based leadership teams.

By all means disagree with the overall thrust of the details of this longread if it does not resonate with your place’s vision and values. But, if it has at least reminded you to question and then resolve the importance and relevance of the biggest global trends and tensions, then it will have served its purpose.