Co-governance à la carte: the Covid-19 crisis and the failure of urban governance in Spain

On 25 October 2020, the Spanish government, seeking to address a second wave of the Covid-19 pandemic, declared a new state of emergency. As opposed to the one introduced earlier in the year, on this occasion the government left to each region – the comunidades autónomas – the power to decide how, where and what mitigating measures would be put in place on the basis of a ‘co-governance framework’. The rationale behind this lockdown à la carte was motivated by a series of judicial rulings that had challenged the legal basis for regions and the central government to introduce stricter measures following the end of the first state of emergency. While different analyses have focused on how governments have dealt with the Covid-19 pandemic on a national scale, little discussion has taken place on the relationship between the national and the regional. Taking as point of departure recent debates about policy failure and urban governance, this paper focuses on the contradictions and challenges the Spanish government and the different regional governments had to face throughout the different states of emergency the country went through during the Covid-19 crisis, and the resulting mismatching policies put in place throughout this time.