COVID-19 Implications for Research and Education on Engineered Structures and Services
Governance Networks
As illustrated through many of the foregoing examples ( and their anticipated aftermath ), we are witnessing internal and external fragmentation of the various levels of public and private organizations that comprise the de facto governance network for many engineering structures and services . And it is no exaggeration to say that there is a real implosion of the systems used in the provision of many essential public services . What is unprecedented about this implosion is that it has been endorsed for decades by public officials themselves — and on a large , even industrial scale ( Agamben et al . 2020 ). For private organizations and companies , business continuity plans are far from adequate to address the large-scale disruptions created by COVID-19 . Furthermore , public-private partnerships once seen as a panacea for a range of challenges , including supplementing limited public sector capacities , will have to be re-imagined as part of a more dynamic public governance and governance networks ( local , national , and global ).
How and when society enters its post-COVID recovery phase is an open question . Among the many challenges for recovery is examining and perhaps revising the role of government ( and other institutions ) in ensuring societal stability and equity . It is therefore appropriate to raise these challenges in the face of the emergence of the dysfunction widely seen in developed and developing countries ( Prado 2020 ; Brisco and Phillips 2020 ). Among developing countries , Brazil offers a dramatic example of friction , disharmony and lack of coordination in intra-governmental policies . As has been well documented , the Brazilian federal government has not only understated the severity of the COVID-19 pandemic , but has also suppressed the development of policies to combat it . Recent examples include exporting vital respirators to Italy and suing the Brazilian State of Maranhao for having bought respirators and other equipment directly from China . Therefore , a country of almost 6,000 municipalities , 27 states , 214 million inhabitants — the ninth-largest economy on the planet – is collapsing ( Bhatia 2020 ).
It is also appropriate to ask ourselves what role the field of engineering can play in the redesign of government systems at federal , state and municipal ( local ) levels . This may include initiatives to renew systems engineering approaches to supporting improved understanding of the role of government in the suppression of large-scale crises . An essential element of this effort will be in building modeling approaches that can explain ( and predict ) the interactions between engineered systems and the societal context in which they are situated . This is in marked contrast to the notion of engineered systems as largely separable from their context . Indeed , we would go further and say that it is precisely the context of a system that imbues it with meaning and produces its value ( or cost ) to society .
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