Policy responses to Covid-19 in housing and the utilities: a comparative analysis

What did the state do to protect people from losing access to basic services during the Covid-19 pandemic? While governments took measures to limit the spread of the virus, including lockdowns and closure of schools and workplaces, they also took measures to compensate for such closures though measures of social protection. These included a near universal implementation of income replacement measures, but also, in some countries, measures aimed at preventing people from losing access to basic services such as housing and the utilities. Using regulation to prevent people from losing access to these services is puzzling: first, because it is considered a less efficient form of assistance, and second because it accompanied already existing measures of income replacement. The question is, then, how such measures were used, and why policy makers chose to use them. These questions have wider implications for the study of social and regulatory responses to economic and social crises, but also for our understanding of the state, and how social and regulatory policies are used, interact and may contradict one another.