Non-institutional policies of crisis management in the Middle East: the case of Lebanon

Policy process research can be sometimes difficult when it deals with complex scenarios, such as states that present an overlapping between institutional and non-institutional powers (Smith & Larimer, 2018). That can be particularly true for territories like Lebanon, where the coexistence between the government and Hezbollah entails the establishing of complex dynamics and different outcomes on territorial administration in terms of attention to prevention and risk management (Boin, ‘t Hart, & Kuipers, 2018). Therefore, this paper addresses the Lebanese management of Covid-19 crisis and the following Beirut port explosion through the Institutional Analysis and Development (IAD) approach (Ostrom, 2019), in order to shed light on the methods of action of institutional and non-institutional actors and how their different behaviors were perceived by the general public. In particular, the analysis will consider the resilience of Hezbollah’s primacy in Lebanese politics through its network of social and health service organizations (Daher, 2019; Harik 2004), focusing on how the management of the Covid-19 and blast crises became an actual reinforcement to the party’s ideology of resistance (Nilsson 2020) thanks to the implementation of efficient non-institutional public policies.