Assessing the crisis management of the COVID-19 pandemic: a study of inquiry commission reports in Norway and Sweden

This article examines the inquiry reports from the commissions charged with investigating government crisis management of the COVID-19 pandemic in Norway and Sweden. Such postcrises commissions have been a common feature in many countries as they seek to systematize their experiences and learn from the crisis. In this article, we used various dimensions of governance capacity and governance legitimacy as assessment criteria. It reveals that the commissions’ assessment criteria were not very specific in their reports, but a reanalysis of their findings shows that governance capacity and governance legitimacy dimensions are useful to assess the reports themselves. The two reports reveal a lack of preparedness in both countries, but they differ in their conclusions about governance regulation and output legitimacy.