Research On The Influencing Factors Of Chinese Local Governments’ Emergency Management Capacity In Public Health Emergencies From The Perspective Of Agile Governance

"Preparedness is the rule of the country." The COVID-19 that broke out in early2020 is an unprecedented test of China’s emergency management system and capacity.Under the conditions of unknown viruses,limited information,and tight time,different local governments have demonstrated differentiated emergency management capabilities in response to the epidemic.This epidemic has also provided a broad field for scholars in the field of emergency management and public management at home and abroad to study the emergency management capabilities of the government in public health events.However,most scholars use the qualitative research method to analyze the shortcomings and comparative advantages of the central and local governments in effectively curbing the spread of the epidemic in their respective countries.Consequently,it remains to be explored how governments can respond in a timely manner,make scientific decisions,and effectively prevent and control sudden public health crises caused by the highly contagious virus,as well as what kind of government capabilities can help governments respond quickly to the epidemic.Agile governance,as an emerging governance paradigm in recent years,is an indispensable representation of the government’s ability to respond to sudden public health emergencies.Agility means that the government can timely raise the alarm,coordinate various forces,mobilize social resources,develop targeted technologies,and fully block the trend of epidemic transmission in the process of dealing with sudden public health emergencies.Due to the lack of research on agile governance theory and emergency management capability for public health emergencies,and the inadequacy of qualitative research analysis methods in explaining the factors affecting the government’s emergency management capability,this paper adopts fs QCA(fuzzy set qualitative comparative analysis method),a qualitative and quantitative research method based on case studies.After theoretical tracing and combining with the Chinese context,a framework for agile governance analysis in the context of emergency management of sudden public health events(agile response,agile collaboration,agile governance,and agile learning)is constructed to explore the configurations of influencing factors and improvement paths of emergency response capabilities of 29 local governments in China(excluding Tibet and Hubei)from above four dimensions.Under the framework of agile governance analysis framework constructed in this article,data sources from China Statistical Yearbook,local government official websites,authoritative research reports,and highly reliable news were collected as outcome variables and conditional variables.The fs QCA method was used to reveal the conditional configurations of different local governments in their emergency management capabilities for public health emergencies,including the type of agile collaboration-intelligent governance,the type of agile response-learning,the type of agile response-intelligent governance,the type of agile external response type,and the type of agile response-resource-intelligent governance.Based on the results of configuration analysis and a summary of the actual situation of epidemic prevention and control in various local governments,this paper proposes several suggestions to enhance the emergency management capabilities of local governments in sudden public health events: promoting the application and development of digital emergency technology and enhancing the digital emergency response capabilities of the government in crisis response;establishing a crisis detection protection and mandatory reporting mechanism to cultivate the government’s acute crisis perception and response ability;and optimizing the government’s emergency management subject cooperation capability.