Gaining agency? Pandemic governance and the Indian city

This article focuses on the place of local governance in the management of the COVID-19 pandemic in Indian cities. It situates pandemic governance in the evolving debates around decentralisation and its various strands, such as participative governance, service delivery, institutional capacity and performance, proximity of institutions and representatives, and representative democracy. The pandemic was a crisis that placed multiple governance and service delivery challenges on the state. Local governments had to innovate and deliver on multiple fronts in a highly uncertain and challenging context. To what extent were these innovations linked to the past trajectories of local governance? What happened to these innovations after the pandemic? On the basis of case studies of two highly diverse cities, the article argues that pandemic governance was circumscribed by the past trajectories of local governance. Further, it seeks to ask whether the pandemic contributed to an awareness of the need for democratic decentralisation or whether it intensified ongoing trends towards de-democratisation. This article was published open access under a CC BY-NC-ND license: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/ .