Nordic legal overseers and institutional openness in crises: Challenges and adaptation during the COVID-19 pandemic

We analyze challenges and adaptation strategies of Nordic legal overseers, the Parliamentary Ombudsmen and Chancellors of Justice in Denmark, Finland, Norway and Sweden, amid the COVID-19 crisis. We study how the accountability capacities of the legal overseers were affected when standard practices of inclusive decision-making were severed, and how they adapted to these challenges. Furthermore, we seek to understand what explains observed variation in the degree of challenges and needed adaptation measures. The observed challenges include increased and sometimes politicized caseload, limited expertise in medical field and conflicting or underdefined mandates among the institutions. The challenges and adaptation were conditioned by institutional traditions and ad-hoc arrangements in crisis management. In Finland and Sweden, the legal overseers became prominent sites for legal and public accountabilities of crisis governance and experienced more acute organizational challenges from increased and politicized caseloads as actors were seeking alternative accountability forums when participation and openness were severed. In Norway and Denmark, where other institutions were prominent in overseeing crisis governance and its legality, the legal overseers had a more pressing need to adapt for an evolving organizational landscape with new ad-hoc arrangements to oversee crisis management. Contributing to institutional approach on accountability and ombudsman research, we find a dynamic relationship between the government openness and legal oversight where the constraints for openness in crisis governance led to various challenges for the legal overseers' accountability capacities but to which they adapted by promoting openness as a right as well as an enabling mechanism for other accountability institutions.