Nations are faced with numerous crisis quite often both at the national level such as earthquakes, hurricanes and droughts, and at the transnational level such as climate change, migration and transnational crime. The COVID-19 pandemic, however, has presented countries globally with unprecedented, interlinked challenges. All crisis, and in particular the pandemic, have made it clear that states, especially developing and fragile states need to bolster their resilience to adapt and recover from complex shocks. To this effect, effective and responsive governance seems central to determining how effectively states can handle crisis. Effective governance for crisis resilience is a complex and multi-faceted concept which encompasses a number of inter-linked factors such as state capacity, decentralization, institutional memory, high quality political leadership, effectiveness of bureaucracy, digitalization and information technology, control of corruption and vibrant civil society. It is thus essentials that states develop their governance systems to be able to anticipate, adapt and recover from domestic and global crisis.