Looking at the Responses to the COVID Crisis through Policy Mobility and Care Regimes

The coronavirus health crisis has represented, especially for the underdeveloped countries of the Global South, a multiplicity of crises that have specifically combined in each context affected by the pandemic. This was one of the reasons why the event did not manifest itself equally around the world (Segata et al, 2020). In this sense, the social welfare regimes found in each place were the basis for the way States responded through policies to this situation. Even so, due to the nature of the crisis, there was a certain standardization in the way governments responded (Hale et al, 2021), following guidelines and best practices, especially those disseminated by the World Health Organization. In this text, I intend to analyze the possibilities of implementing the policy guidelines for combating COVID-19 disseminated by the WHO, taking the case of the city of São Paulo - Brazil and its welfare regime at the time.
By framing the guidelines and best practices of lockdown and closure policies through the lens of policy mobilities, I understand how the expertise of an international organization is inserted into global policy-making circuits (McCann, 2010; Peck and Theodore, 2001). Locating the WHO as an infrastructure for disseminating best practices, however, does not exempt us from understanding how these practices are applied and transformed locally. It is therefore necessary, through a case study, to understand the welfare regime of a city whose response policies were inspired by these guidelines. I use the notion of a care regime (Daily and Lewis, 2005; Razavi, 2007) to take a broader look at the possibilities for providing social well-being.