Esteban Szmulewicz is a PhD candidate at the Constitutional and Administrative Law Department of Leiden Law School, since February 2020. The title of his research is "Governing decentralized States during the Covid-19 pandemic: challenges of intergovernmental coordination and cooperation in Chile, Italy and the Netherlands". It concerns the question of the conditions and causes that could explain the way decentralised States behave under emergency conditions, particularly the Covid-19 pandemic, and the quest for better practices for managing these crisis.

More information about Esteban Szmulewicz

"Research

Provisional title: "Governing decentralised States under emergency situations: comparative cases during the Covid-19 crisis"

In his PhD research, Esteban studies the quasi “natural experiment” situation with the Covid-19 pandemic, which represents an opportunity to rethink decentralisation, because almost every country in the world has been subject to the pandemic and its effects, during basically the same time-frame. However, countries did not respond to the pandemic in the same manner. The territorial distribution of the State, the type and level of decentralisation in the country, seemed to have influenced the way the State managed the pandemic

The objective is to examine the particular conditions and causes of the selected cases, and compared and contrasted them, in order to explain the way decentralised States behave under emergency conditions, and which dynamics (competition, conflict, coordination or cooperation) work better in terms of achieving more effective and legitimate responses to crisis

Esteban studied Law in the Universidad Austral of Chile. Later he obtained a Master in Political Science from Universidad Autónoma of Barcelona, Spain (2009) and a Master of Science (MSc) in Comparative Politics at the London School of Economics and Political Science, United Kingdom (2010, with distinction)

Esteban is affiliated to the Universidad Católica del Norte, in Coquimbo, Chile, where he is an academic in the fields of constitutional and administrative law, and also participates in the Master of Law in this University. Also, he is a member of the Chilean Association of Constitutional Law, the Chilean Association of Administrative Law (ADAD), and the Chilean Chapter of the International Society of Public Law (ICON). 

He has written extensively in the fields of constitutional and administrative law, especially about decentralisation, the political system, political equality, social rights and constitutional jurisdiction"