The paper briefly sketches different “adaptations” possible to address
the Covid crisis and then advances three possible avenues for future policy analysis
of Covid-related measures, each of these avenues being based on a “conjecture”,
respectively an evolutionary, a critical, and a cosmopolitan, and conjecture.
The evolutionary conjecture implies regulatory transplants, the critical conjecture
elicits competition of Covid-related measures, and the cosmopolitan conjecture
assumes coordination of policies. The paper discusses how these conjectures
based on pre-Covid literature could explain the regulatory dynamics and then
asserts that growing evidence shows that regulatory measures appear to naturally
lead to a “polity convergence” based on a common core of “Covid-biopower” and
“Covid-biopolitics”. This convergence defies the initial expectations that the
fragmented reactions to the Covid crisis could be explained by using the traditional
research tools and also poses unprecedented critical issues that demand an
expansion of the horizon of policy research.