SDG 3 in the Caucasus Region and COVID-19 Pandemic Response in Georgia, Armenia, and Azerbaijan

This chapter focuses on Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 3: Good health and well-being, which pledges to improve people’s lives worldwide. The chapter aims at analyzing the situation with the COVID-19 crisis in the three Caucasian countries: Georgia, Armenia, and Azerbaijan, with subsequent policy-relevant recommendations. The conditions accounting for the diverse impact of the global pandemic in the Caucasus region are explored and analyzed. The interplay between socioeconomic conditions in each country (developmental economic indicators, globalization levels, and other social factors), affecting infection rates and mortality, is also investigated. The chapter looks into the respective political cultures, which account for diverse human behaviors in the region (social interactions, communal living, urbanization levels, religion, etc.). In addition, discrepancies in COVID-19 indicators are analyzed, which explains vaccine hesitancy in Armenia and Georgia, compared to the higher vaccination rates in Azerbaijan. The “whole-of-government and whole-of-society response” outlook is applied in this chapter, as suggested by SDG 3. The results of this chapter will impart to “[s]trengthen[ing] the capacity of all countries, in particular developing countries, for early warning, risk reduction and management of national and global health risks” (SDG 3, Target D). Lastly, through the analysis of the diverse forms of governance in Georgia, Armenia, and Azerbaijan, this chapter brings additional insights into the Corona virus vaccination discrepancy between these countries.