ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the politically destabilizing impact of the COVID-19 pandemic on governance arrangements in the USA and elsewhere using an ethics of care framework. It does so by analyzing conflicts over the efforts of national authorities to establish protocols for a health crisis that is primarily experienced locally. It argues that the current pandemic – understood as having spread through global flows of viruses that know no national boundaries – has accelerated new tensions between local, national and even international authorities about how best to respond. Concerns about which scale of authority should lead the battle against the pandemic reveal long-standing conflicts between proponents of state versus market solutions, even as they lay bare societal fissures over individual versus collective rights and responsibilities. These developments not only generate new questions about who is responsible for protecting human life, but also call for a rethinking of the most appropriate territorial scale for accommodating normative ideals of ethical care and accountable governance. The chapter suggests that one way to move forward in the context of the pandemic is to strengthen urban sovereignty built around an ethics of care that creates trust between local residents and authorities. The logic here is that cities are better positioned than nations to identify the uneven distribution of health impacts, spearhead more equitable responses and strengthen infrastructures of care in the context of ongoing urban vulnerabilities.
