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City diplomacy and public policy in the era of COVID-19: networked responses from the Greek Capital

In recent decades, more and more young actors at the international level have been claiming and aspiring to play a significant role in managing public policy issues with global reach. The recent pandemic highlighted the asymmetry of nation-state responses in managing this health threat. At a time that the return-of-the-state scenario sounded familiar, it was misleading as well. Although each national government was focusing on its own people, and each claimed to have been better prepared to fight the crisis than its neighbors, governance gaps were filled by networks of sub-national authorities, whose partnerships provided a wider geographical perspective of policy decisions. In this framework, this article assesses the role of the city diplomacy, focusing on the pandemic initiatives of the city of Athens that, due to its international affiliations, managed to fill the gaps of the measures taken for the most vulnerable groups by the central government during the pandemic of COVID-19. Desk-based research and the use of secondary sources provide the scope for our analysis.