Elin Maria Therese Sefton will defend her thesis for the PhD program in Social Sciences, with specialization in Business Administration, Innovation and Governance, with the title «Proportionality under uncertainty: Nordic COVID-19 crisis governance and public perceptions».
The title of the trial lecture is «Who governs a crisis? National ambitions, local realities, and the challenge of multi-level governance in crisis management.»
The ordinary opponents are:
The leader of the public defence is Oddgeir Osland, Dean at the Faculty of Social Sciences, OsloMet.
Supervisors:
The dissertation examines how rights-restricting COVID-19 measures were designed, justified, and implemented in the Nordic countries, and how citizens evaluated these measures. The dissertation is based on a combination of a literature review, qualitative studies of municipal crisis management in Norway, and survey data from citizens in Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway, and Sweden.
The first of the dissertation’s four articles examines how proportionality has been understood and applied in the research literature on public health crises during COVID-19. The second article analyses how Norwegian municipalities justified and designed infection-control measures within a framework of local discretion, and how considerations of public health, rights, and local capacity were balanced in practice. The third article investigates how Nordic citizens assessed the reasonableness of different COVID-19 measures, and how such assessments were associated with trust, fear of illness, and evaluations of local crisis management. The fourth article analyses how perceptions of reasonableness varied across social groups, particularly by gender and family structure.
Taken together, the dissertation shows that proportionality was a central ideal in the management of the pandemic, but was applied only to a limited extent in a clear and systematic way. The dissertation further shows that proportionality is not only a normative requirement, but also an analytical framework for examining how public authorities justify and balance rights-restricting measures under conditions of uncertainty. By bringing together proportionality as a state-centred perspective and perceived reasonableness as a citizen-centred perspective, the dissertation sheds light on how legitimacy in crisis governance is shaped both through institutional justifications and through citizens’ assessments of whether the measures are acceptable.