Introduction

COVID-19 caught the world suddenly and unprepared and turned into a catastrophic outbreak at an unprecedented pace. Besides being a public health crisis, the pandemic also triggered a broader multi-dimensional global crisis, whose outcomes were undoubtedly more devastating for socially and economically disadvantaged groups. Global trade almost halted, many companies closed down, massive layoffs occurred, and many countries experienced recession (see, World Bank, 2020). To combat these impacts and to protect their citizens, governments adopted different measures, varied according to their policy capacities, economic circumstances, and administrative traditions (Capano et al, 2020). In Turkey, the central government, thanks to the strong centralist administrative structure, was able to provide a quick and effective response to the early wave of the pandemic in terms of health care and lockdown measures (Bakir, 2020). Nevertheless, the fragility of the economy forced it to prioritize market-oriented strategies at the expense of the social and economic support needed by impoverished classes.

On the ground, this resulted in an uncodified and forced intergovernmental task-sharing, sometimes pushing social aid policies further into the field of responsibility of local governments. For local governments, which already suffered a severe loss of income during the pandemic, this also meant a heavy economic burden that they could not manage. Unfortunately, this was the case for the metropolitan governments ruled by the opposition parties, which could not get enough financial support from the central government. The Ankara Metropolitan Municipality (AMM) was one of these metropolitan governments. Nevertheless, the Municipality was able to develop an innovative, comprehensive, participatory, and most importantly, relatively low-cost, social support strategy during the pandemic, despite all the financial and political restraints. Put differently, in collaboration with local NGOs, the Municipality not only implemented standard measures more effectively but also encouraged and organized citizenship solidary and developed various mutual-aid platforms so that wealthier citizens could help economically and socially vulnerable people.

In the following sections, we provide background information on governmental responses to COVID-19 with particular attention to the intergovernmental relations and then proceed with the reasons pushing the Ankara Municipality to follow a solidarity-based strategy and provide a detailed account of the performance of this strategy.

The governmental response to COVID-19: from a mandatory distribution of tasks to intergovernmental conflict