Modernizing for Resilience? The Case of Germany’s Public Health Service
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Abstract
Recent crises have renewed interest in resilience as a guiding concept for public administration, yet reform agendas often remain vague about what resilience entails, which organizational capacities it requires, and how it relates to organizational stability versus change. This paper examines how reforms introduced in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, most notably the Pact for the Public Health Service, seek to strengthen Germany’s Public Health Service (Öffentlicher Gesundheitsdienst, ÖGD). Differentiating between analytical and leadership capacities, operational capacities, and political capacities for strategic organizational development, as well as between absorptive, adaptive, and transformative forms of resilience, we aim to understand how these reforms influence resilience and for what resilience is being strengthened. The study draws on a comprehensive empirical dataset combining expert interviews with key policymakers and practitioners with a nationwide survey of all 376 local public health offices.
Keywords: crisis management, organizational capacity, adaptive and transformative change, public health governance, ÖGD reform
Bibliography: Klenk, Tanja, Riese, Dorothee, Reiter, Renate, Lückenbach, Caspar & Ewert, Benjamin (2026). Modernizing for Resilience? The Case of Germany’s Public Health Service. dms – der moderne staat – Zeitschrift für Public Policy, Recht und Management, 19(1-2026), 57-77.
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