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This article builds on fieldwork conducted during lockdown in Denmark among users of services at the intersection of homelessness and drug use. The paper bridges two distinct approaches to understanding the relation between marginalization and crisis, with one focused on the impact of "big events" on marginalized populations, and another on everyday strategies employed to survive situations of homelessness and drug use. The paper shows how past experiences of hardship became relevant for coping with pandemic crisis. It further exploreshow, through critical engagement with dominant accounts of vulnerability, research participants carved out a space for negotiating their marginality in the Danish welfare state. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

What has shaped the different responses to COVID-19? The orthodoxy in the crisis management literature holds that the response to events like COVID-19 is primarily shaped by a decentralized group of actors on the ground. In this paper, we argue that a top-down explanation, focused on the actions and intentions of the core executive, is an essential complement to this bottom-up emphasis on a distributed network. Specifically, we advance a 'court politics' understanding of how governing elites have taken advice and made decisions, and sketch out the impact this has had in framing and constraining crisis response efforts. The argument uses an interpretive framework centred on the dilemmas that governing elites face in managing crisis. We illustrate the underlying 'court politics' which has driven responses to COVID-19 in England and Denmark. We show that pathologies and dysfunctions in Johnson's court have filtered through into inertia and indecisiveness, while the centralization of authority in Frederiksen's court has enabled swift and decisive intervention. Our analysis shows that a top-down emphasis on executive government – and the 'court politics' therein – offers a fruitful agenda for understanding and comparing COVID-19 crisis response. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

To explore how COVID-19 altered public service provision and what lessons were learned from the first months, this study draws on sickness absence data, employee feedback data, fieldwork among vulnerable families and qualitative interviews with public servants responsible for vulnerable youngsters, children and families in four Danish towns. The analyses find evidence of a dilemma between self-protection and service provision across towns and public servants from the police and social departments. A relationship between situational knowledge and service delivery arrangements is uncovered and used to discuss the role of autonomy in public service provision within street-level bureaucracy theory. Note: In the interests of space, street-level theory and the pandemic context underpinning the articles for this special issue are discussed in detail in the Introduction to the issue. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]