Sustaining Asia’s development amidst the COVID-19 pandemic: capacity development and governance innovation

ABSTRACT Resilience is of paramount importance in dealing with a prolonged pandemic such as COVID-19, in which all countries inevitable suffer through multiple stages of adversity. Many Asian countries were initially hard hit by the pandemic, but some of them displayed the remarkable ability to withstand these shocks, overcome despair, and bounce back quickly. This special issue examines two aspects of resilience building in policy responses to crises such as COVID-19 – capacity development and governance innovation. Capacity can be a key factor in determining the effectiveness of health emergency preparedness, surveillance, response, and recovery systems for unprecedented public health crises like COVID-19, and governance innovation also plays a key role in resilience building by strengthening the roles of non-government actors in public health crises, the efficacy of science-policymaking interactions, and the uses of disruptive technologies.