COVID-19 | Ephemeral universalism in the social protection response to the COVID-19 lockdown in the Philippines

26 June 202029 June 2020 0 min read

Since March 2020, the Philippines has implemented one of the world’s strictest and longest lockdowns in response to the COVID-19 pandemic, which has caused severe disruptions in peoples’ livelihoods. The government’s emergency social protection response, the ‘Social Amelioration Program’ (SAP), has also been notably massive, introducing one-off near-universal income protection. It is an insightful case given that the country’s existing social assistance system has been celebrated as a model for developing countries, even though it has been mostly bypassed in the emergency response. Moreover, the country’s highly stratified and fragmented social policy system has resulted in implementation delays and irregularities that have fostered social hostilities and undermined the potential for such momentary universalism to have lasting transformative effects.

The Philippine government first imposed its ‘community quarantine’ on 15 March, which has since been extended until 30 June. Thus far, the pandemic has not been severe relative to evolving global indicators, with 302 confirmed infections per million people and 11 confirmed deaths per million people as of 25 June (although at only 5,760 tests per million people, these confirmed rates are likely to be significantly underestimated). However, as elsewhere in the Global South, the lockdown has thrown the country into an employment crisis given that more than 60 percent of its workforce is informal, most in precarious situations even when earning above the official poverty line.

In response, the government rolled out the ‘Social Amelioration Program’ (SAP), comprising at least 13 different schemes and with an estimated total budget equivalent to as much as 3.1 percent of the country’s GDP [1]. The largest scheme is the Emergency Subsidy Program (ESP), which has been allocated 200 billion Philippines pesos (PhP; about 3.5 billion euros), more than three times the combined budget of all the other schemes.

The ESP was initially intended to cover 17.9 million households, while the other SAP cash subsidy schemes were to target more than 5.2 million individuals. Assuming that none of these overlapped (e.g. only one subsidy recipient per household), the SAP would have covered over 23 million households, or more than 96 percent of the roughly 24 million households in the country. This extent of coverage is effectively universal, representing an attempt to provide basic income support to all but the richest five to ten percent of households.

The ESP initially sought to provide cash transfers to low-income and vulnerable families during the months of April and May, the projected duration of the lockdown. The transfers range from 5,000 to 8,000 PhP per month (about 90 to 140 euros), depending on the minimum wage of the region of residence. This is notably more generous than the existing poverty-targeted conditional cash transfer programme, the Pantawid Pamilyang Pilipino Program (hereafter Pantawid), which provides families with at most 3,450 PhP per month (approximately 60 euros). The 4.4 million Pantawid families have nonetheless been included in the ESP and the amount they receive has been topped-up to the ESP amount.

Despite these ambitions, the SAP has already been faltering. Based on our research [2], a number of problems can be discerned:

Delays and backtracking in the distribution of the ESP. While the ESP was supposed to be paid in two monthly tranches in April and May, the first tranche was yet to be completely distributed as of 15 June [3]. It was later announced that the second tranche, whose distribution only began on 11 June, would only be distributed to beneficiaries living in communities where the lockdown conditions had not been eased – about 8.5 million families – as well as to an additional five million ‘waitlisted or left out’ families, or, as explained by the DSWD, those that did not make it to the list of first tranche beneficiaries [4]. It is not clear whether either of these numbers include the Pantawid households mentioned above or why there would have been ‘left out’ families from a programme that was ostensibly universal.

Vague and fragmented selection guidelines. In addition to this lack of clarity at the aggregate level, the guidelines in the selection of ESP beneficiaries have also been vague and fragmented, which subjects them to different interpretations and discrepancies on the ground. There is no single document that describes the process in detail or provides even an overview. The social registry that is used for poverty targeting in the Pantawid – the Listahanan – was not used for the identification the non-Pantawid families, who constituted 75 percent of the ESP target beneficiaries in the first tranche. Instead, the government reverted to reliance on village-level government functionaries, who have proven decisive in identifying ESP beneficiaries and distributing assistance. This has re-politicized the administration of social protection after years of supposed attempts at depoliticization by means of the Listahanan and the Pantawid.

Failed attempts at overcoming residualism. The SAP reflects an attempt to overcome the limitations of the country’s polarised and fragmented social protection system, even while this system has rendered almost impracticable its universalist impulses. The existing system notably excludes close to half of the population at the middle of the income distribution – often referred to as the ‘missing middle’ [5]. This refers to the 40 percent of employed people working in the informal sector who are not covered by the contributory social insurance designed for those formally employed, which covers about 40 percent of employed people, while at the same time they are not covered by the Pantawid, which covers about 21 percent of the population. The Pantawid beneficiaries are presumed to be the poorest people, although there have been serious concerns regarding its accuracy of targeting, meaning that it excludes many of the poor, while including many who are not (at least, not according to the poverty lines used by the programme) [6].

Social hostilities in the face of systemic confusions. The confused and fraught implementation of the SAP has therefore exacerbated fundamental schisms entrenched within the existing social protection system, including confusions about who is in fact targeted by the ESP and contestations by local government officials over the number of beneficiaries set for their respective cities or municipalities [7]. In particular, given the perception that Pantawid families are prioritised by the ESP (in the sense that they are automatically eligible for the programme), they have drawn public attention and scrutiny, even though they only accounted for about 25 percent of targeted recipients of the ESP in the first tranche. As a result, anti-poor sentiments have proliferated on social media since the distribution of the first tranche [8].

The inadequacy of celebrated models of poverty-targeted social assistance

These confusions and tensions show how the pursuit of genuine universalism within an existing stratified, fragmented and residualist social protection system presents major in-built challenges for advancing beyond moments of crisis. While the Philippines has been able to roll out a massive emergency social protection response to the COVID-19 lockdown, with near-universal coverage of possibly more than 90 percent of the population, reliance on the existing institutional infrastructure has had the effect of fostering social hostilities and potentially quelling support for such universalism among the population.

This is particularly significant given that the flagships of this infrastructure – the Pantawid and the Listahanan – have received huge support from international financial institutions and successive governments for 13 years prior to the pandemic and have been promoted as models up to the crisis, yet they have proven to be utterly inadequate for identifying systemic vulnerabilities at such a crucial time as the pandemic. The enormity of need engendered by the COVID-19 crisis evidently pushed the government to go beyond its conventional focus on poverty-targeted social assistance. As it scrambled to do this, it mostly bypassed the targeted system that had been so carefully groomed and adulated by donors, which has been neither fit for the purpose of actualizing universalistic aspirations, nor politically facilitative for their perpetuation.

[1] https://www.officialgazette.gov.ph/downloads/2020/03mar/20200328-JOINT-MEMORANDUM-CIRCULAR-NO-1-S-2020.pdf

[2] This work builds on our ongoing research that we have been conducting since 2015 into the political economy surrounding the institutional evolution of the Philippine social protection system, as part of ERC-funded research project entitled ‘Aiding Social Protection: The Political Economy of Externally Financing Social Policy in Developing Countries’ (grant agreement No 638647). Our current research on the COVID response has been based on deskwork ¬– by necessity given that all three authors have been in lockdown in Europe – and has involved the collection and analysis of official documents (including relevant laws, presidential reports, and other administrative edicts) and media coverage concerning the Philippine government social protection responses to the pandemic, and selective remote interviews with social workers from the Department of Social Welfare and Development (DSWD) who have been involved with the COVID-19 response at various levels of government.

[3] https://public.tableau.com/views/SAPMonitoringDashboardforEmergencySubsidyunderAICS/Dashboard1?:display_count=no&:showVizHome=no

[4] See https://news.mb.com.ph/2020/06/11/1-3-m-4ps-beneficiaries-get-sap-2-cash-aid-reports-dswd/ and https://www.dswd.gov.ph/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/Annex-A.-Media-Based-SAP-FAQs-Part-3-ver-june-1-8pm-final.pdf

[5] Cf. Fischer 2018, 2020; ILO, 2017; Rutkowski, 2020.

[6] The rampant inaccuracies of the Pantawid are detailed in our forthcoming article currently under review. Also see Kidd and Athias (2019).

[7] For instance, see https://www.rappler.com/nation/257316-reinstate-original-beneficiaries-metro-manila-mayors-dswd

[8] E.g., see viral posts on Facebook like this and this, and news reports like this.

This article is part of a series about the coronavirus crisis. Read all articles of this series here.

About the authors:

Emma Cantal Emma Lynn Dadap-Cantal is a PhD student at ISS. Her dissertation is a comparative case study of the political economy of social protection in Cambodia and the Philippines, with particular emphasis on the role of external donor influences in shaping the social protection systems in these two countries.

Charmaine G. Ramos

Charmaine G. Ramos (c.ramos@luc.leidenuniv.nl) is a lecturer at Leiden University College, Leiden University, The Netherlands. Her current research focuses on analysing social policy and resource governance, as a means for exploring how political economy dynamics constrain and structure institutions for social transformation and productive expansion in developing economies.

Andrew M. Fischer is Associate Professor of Social Policy and Development Studies at the ISS and the Scientific Director of CERES, The Dutch Research School for International Development. His latest book, Poverty as Ideology (Zed, 2018), was awarded the International Studies in Poverty Prize by the Comparative Research Programme on Poverty (CROP) and Zed Books and, as part of the award, is now fully open access (http://bora.uib.no/handle/1956/20614). Since 2015, he has been leading a European Research Council Starting Grant on the political economy of externally financing social policy in developing countries. He has been known to tweet @AndrewM_Fischer

Title Image Credit: Asian Development Bank on Flickr

Financial inclusion of urban street vendors in Kigali by Diane Irankunda and Peter van Bergeijk

24 June 202025 June 2020 3 min read

During the summer of 2017 we studied financial inclusion of street vendors in the Nyarugenge District (Kigali, Rwanda), a group of underprivileged that very often cannot be reached by traditional surveys or a census. Street vending is prohibited in the Kigali, Rwanda Nyarugenge District, and during the field work several raids by local security agencies were observed. Just a few weeks after the field work, street vending was officially forbidden. Our fieldwork offers a unique and no longer existing opportunity to survey street vending as a truly informal activity in this area. The peer reviewed publication of our innovative multimethod field research appeared in Journal of African Business.

Policy makers need to focus on actual use

Having a financial account is an important policy issue for poverty reduction in Rwanda, where most of the small businesses (tailors, masons, vegetable sellers, welders, and so on) are in the informal sector and run by people with no or limited formal education. A recent Finscope survey finds that the government’s goal to accomplish 90% of ‘financial inclusion’ by 2020 is realistic and attainable.

The government’s target, however, relates to de jure financial inclusion, that is: formal financial account holdership. But simply having an account is not what matters for effective poverty reduction. In our sample the majority of financial account holders does not use the financial account frequently: 57% accessed it once or less a month (half of these accounts have been inactive over the past 12 months). Our findings point out the need for the government to reformulate its policy in terms of actual use (de facto inclusion) and our investigation indicates which tools could be useful to achieve that target.

Individual characteristics do matter for use of an account

We have collected several individual characteristics of the respondents to our survey including gender, age, marital status, and education in order to be able to test if individual characteristics matter for being formally and/or de facto financially included. In our analysis we also control for weekly sales and four types of products that were traded (edibles, clothes, shoes and cosmetics). Gender turned out to be the single most significant driver of de facto financial inclusion (Figure 1) and this was confirmed in our ordered probit model (a higher level of education is associated with a higher frequency of use, but not with formal financial inclusion). Policies supporting female financial inclusion would thus seem to be necessary to correct this imbalance.

Financial infrastructure is key

The presence of a financial institution in the home location of the street vendor is the most significant determinant identified by our research. From a policy perspective this underlines the importance of a good financial infrastructure: the economic geography of financial inclusion is important. Being close to a financial institution is associated with better financial inclusion. The importance of geography and location has also been established by earlier research on the differences between urban and rural areas, but our results are more specific. According to our findings the driver is the availability of a financial institution in the street vendor’s hometown, thus providing policy makers with a concrete tool to improve financial inclusion in Rwanda.

This blogpost was originally published on the INCLUDE platform.

About the authors:

Diane Irankunda is a former student at the International Institute of Social Studies (ISS) in Economics of Development.

Peter van Bergeijk (www.petervanbergeijk.org) is Professor of International Economics and Macroeconomics at the ISS.

Title Image Credit: Adrien K on Flickr. The image has been cropped.

COVID-19 | New modalities of online activism: using WhatsApp to mobilize for change by Lize Swartz

17 June 2020 6 min read

As the COVID-19 pandemic progresses, we are slowly settling in to a ‘new normal’. For many of us, having lived our lives online the last few weeks has made us question the necessity of meeting in person to get things done. Can we also organize online to enact change? While internet access is not yet universal, a recent study shows that WhatsApp can be an important tool for mobilizing. Lize Swartz discusses how new forms of online activism can emerge on WhatsApp and whether it promotes inclusivity.

A recent post by Duncan Green on the drawbacks of online activism left me deep in thought. Green mentioned that not all people have access to a stable and reliable internet connection, leading to the exclusion of some groups and the domination of other groups in online campaigning. He also discussed how issues can be hyped on social media, how attention to the issues are based on the life span of content on different social media channels, and how ‘woke’ online activists need to be. Successful online activism therefore seems to involve the ability to connect to the internet and use it as a tool, for example by building an online presence and communications strategy.

Online activism is often equated to clicktivism and online campaigning for funds or signatures, but can be something else entirely. Being an online activist does not only mean subscribing to campaign emails and following campaigns online, donating money online to your favourite cause, or hashtagging or hyping issues you care about on social media. These are all tired forms of online activism that are seen as the lowest-hanging fruit. And being online does not mean working on a computer, being a ‘digital native’, or keeping up to date with and shaping how debates are developing by being online all the time.

Research I conducted about responses to the collapse of urban water supply systems in South Africa shows the tremendous potential of WhatsApp as a platform for organization and social learning. Mobile phones are the primary way of accessing the internet in South Africa, where I’m from and where I’ve been conducting research on social mobilization. Online activism through channels such as WhatsApp is part of people’s daily lives because the mobile phone has become the primary means of communication for many—a companion that follows us everywhere and helps us make sense of our lives.

Mobile phone users can become activists whenever they share pictures or information on WhatsApp with the hope of changing someone’s perspective or encouraging action. But WhatsApp can also be used to mobilize in different ways. It can either be used to organize physical protests or to organize initiatives or stage protests that take place entirely online.

I studied responses of water users in three South African towns to the interruption of municipal water supplies following the depletion of the towns’ water sources. Through WhatsApp, water users in these towns were able to inform each other about the collapse, including the date on which the municipal water supply would be shut off, where they could access water once this happened, and who needed help. Once the water ran out, people were able to organize at a national level through WhatsApp to collect and transport bottled and bulk water to towns in need (these are called ‘water drives’ in South Africa).

In the process, water users produced knowledge not only on how to adapt, but also about what drove the collapses that ultimately informed certain adaptation strategies. This includes the role they played in bringing about the collapse through how they interact with water. This may not be considered conventional online activism, but it clearly shows how WhatsApp can be used to mobilize for change, in this case by informing choices about preferred adaptation strategies and ways to access water. It also informed strategies to hold actors perceived responsible for the collapse accountable, for example by ‘going off the water grid’ (using private water instead of state-supplied water).

Several things about organizing through WhatsApp could be observed. The most important are:

You don’t need to be a ‘digital native’ or tech savvy to organize online. Most of the water users on the WhatsApp groups were middle-aged or retired persons who use WhatsApp to stay connected and share information. Many of the water users I interviewed for my research who are active on these groups do not own or regularly use a computer, neither do all of them have WiFi. Most of them surf the internet on their mobile phones using mobile data. They are more likely than hyperconnected ‘digital natives’ to call each other. And they regularly talk to each other and share information on WhatsApp. Something as rudimentary as WhatsApp can lead to sophisticated activist strategies that are not based on an extensive online presence or knowledge of how to promote your organization or hashtag the hell out of an issue to get your point across.

Not everyone needs to be on WhatsApp to be involved in campaigns or initiatives. Many participants on WhatsApp groups represented households. They would share information with family and friends in their personal capacity through personal connections on WhatsApp. This means that online participants linked to their networks to mobilize or share information.

You don’t need to be ‘woke’ about current issues. The participants in WhatsApp groups were part of the group based on a shared concern—a lack of water. Other WhatsApp groups exist in these communities for other issues, including an unstable energy supply (sharing information on ‘load shedding’) or neighbourhood security (organizing neighbourhood watch schedules). One thing I’ve noticed about these communities (of largely middle-class white people) is how there seems to be a WhatsApp group for everything: to organize a baby shower, a birthday gift, a water collection drive, or a protest. Thus, a central concern and an assertive, practical approach to addressing it, rather than the desire to hype an issue on social media, drives engagement and collaboration.

You don’t need to be part of an organization. WhatsApp users were organized loosely around a central concern they collectively identified, not one imposed ‘from above’ by NGOs or other ‘civil society organizations’. The WhatsApp groups emerged organically, with a central administrator and leader, but without any clear hierarchies or agenda. The freedom to set and pursue an agenda was enabled through this, facilitating social learning and deeper impacts.

Some other things should be kept in mind when organizing through WhatsApp:

A concrete goal is important. Do you want the WhatsApp group to be used to share information, to coordinate collective efforts, or to learn?

Think about who you want the message to reach. To make online activism successful, the measures need to reach the right people and have the right clout to place pressure for change. Visual imagery such as videos and photos may prove particularly effective in showing decision-makers, the media or the general public that real persons are concerned about and affected by an issue. It’s even better if social media and physical mobilization are combined.

Opportunism isn’t a problem, it’s strategic. If COVID-19 is seen as a moment of reality, is it so bad if its momentum is used to drive wider or deeper change not directly related to the pandemic? The restriction of movement for example has encouraged environmental activists to emphasize the link between human activity and climate change. Over the last three months I’ve heard how Venice’s water is crystal clear for the first time in years, of wild animals roaming the streets now that humans are not, and how visibility has increased due to the sudden decrease in air pollution. Linking your cause to wider developments can give it momentum to be propelled forward.

A number of concerns regarding the use of WhatsApp remain that require careful consideration. These include the way in which it and other social media platforms can exclude, privacy concerns, and the propensity of using it to circulate fake news. These concerns will be addressed in a future blog.

This article is part of a series about the coronavirus crisis. Find more articles of this series here.

About the author:

Lize Swartz is a PhD researcher at the ISS focusing on water user interactions with sustainability-climate crises in the water sector, in particular the role of water scarcity politics on crisis responses and adaptation processes. She is also the editor of the ISS Blog Bliss.

COVID-19 | Putting COVID-19 into context(s)

15 June 202025 June 2020 0 min read

COVID-19 is a hazard, but does not produce the risks that we now see unfolding throughout the world, says ISS researcher Dorothea Hilhorst, who recently participated in a webinar organized by Humanitarian Knowledge Exchange platform Kuno to reflect on how the COVID-19 pandemic is being handled and what could be done differently. Here’s what she had to say.

Covid Checks in India COVID-19 is sweeping the globe and widely triggers top-down and centralised emergency measures. I don’t recall another crisis that has created such a response, even though the actual numbers of people affected have been very modest compared to many of the other crises we have in this world, including the lack of access to clean water, resource competition in mining areas, conflict and refugee problems, and climate change. In the beginning, I often found myself thinking if only the world would muster the courage to also address these other crises, and give them more priority than short-term economic gain.

However, it is also clear that there are strong limitations to the bold and robust responses of top-down emergency management. Firstly, I really resent how we seem to conflate the hazard of COVID-19 with subsequent risks. Yes, COVID-19 is a nasty and infectious virus. But it is not a virus that dictates that it should lead to widespread food shortages or increased marginalisation of the poor and vulnerable populations. These are spillover crises that relate to but are not directly caused by the virus.

These spillover crises are not just happening, they are let be by policy. When we signal the risk of food insecurity in the wake of COVID-19, I see agencies jumping to raising funds and stockpiling to feed the world. However, why don’t we talk about preventing this crisis? Why not focus on diplomacy to continue food exports from surplus-producing countries? Why not ensure that markets stay open and continue to function? Why not give peasants free range to go to their fields (at distance from other human beings) instead of locking them down in their houses?

Secondly, we have to be really aware about the many instances where governments have instrumentalised COVID-19 for other purposes, such as to curb the freedoms of civil society, to silence the media, or to undermine political opponents. Hungary is a case in point, where the government, under the pretext of misinformation about COVID-19, has closed critical media outlets. Authorities in many areas are seen to instrumentalise COVID-19 to increase surveillance and control, at the detriment of human rights and civil society, with rumours increasing the mistrust between people and their state.

Thirdly, while there is no doubt that top-down policies and expert knowledge is required to address the crisis, there are also indications about the limitations of this approach. Top-down approaches may ignore, stifle, or expire local coping capacities, social networks, and small-scale formal and informal institutions. Based on previous experiences and research, this may have grave consequences and render the COVID-19 response counter-productive:

Local institutions are people’s first and very often only line of defence against crises. Where top-down policies don’t reach out to communities to provide services and when people cannot rely on local institutions, they become increasingly vulnerable. Why close schools instead of mobilising teachers to help spread messages about personal hygiene in relation to COVID-19?
In areas where state-society relations are already characterised by mistrust before the crisis, there is a high risk that people will not believe the messages about COVID-19 coming from the authorities and will try to circumvent policies aiming to prevent the spread of the virus. A notorious example was found when the Ebola pandemic erupted in Sierra Leone: people sometimes hid patients to avoid their hospitalisation.
One-sided top-down policies can contribute to spillover crises at the local level, including crises of livelihoods and food security. This can lead to adverse coping mechanisms that actually increase the risks of COVID-19. There are signals that some women in the Eastern DRC who are prohibited to cross the border with Rwanda for their petty trade now resort to transactional sex to feed their families.

Let’s stay alert, or as we say nowadays, let us be ‘woke’ about these consequences of responding to COVID-19. The virus is a hazard, but does not produce the risks that we now see unfolding throughout the world. Top-down measures need to be linked up with bottom-up initiatives and coping mechanisms to effectively deal with the crisis.

Hilhorst’s discussion was part of a webinar titled ‘How COVID empowers local civil society organizations’. Other speakers included Hero Anwar, Program Director at REACH Iraq; Gloria Modong, Executive Director, Titi Foundation South Sudan, and Deputy Chair, NGO Forum South Sudan; and Feliciano Reyna, Executive Director and founder of Accíon Solidaria in Venezuela and representative of Civilis.

The entire webinar can be (re-)watched here: https://www.kuno-platform.nl/events/kuno-covid-cafe-how-covid-empowers-local-civil-society-organizations-in-the-south/

This article is part of a series about the coronavirus crisis. Read all articles of this series here.

About the author:

Dorothea Hilhorst is Professor of Humanitarian Aid and Reconstruction at the International Institute of Social Studies of Erasmus University Rotterdam. She is a regular author for Bliss. Read all her posts here.

Title Image Credit: Gwydion M. Williams on Flickr

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COVID-19 | How ‘COVID-19 hunger’ threatens the future of many by Jimena Pacheco

12 June 2020 5 min read

As the COVID-19 pandemic progresses and lockdowns continue, even more people are suffering from hunger and malnutrition due to their inability to access nutritious food. The pandemic has revealed the importance not only of alleviating immediate hunger produced by the sudden loss of movement and restrictions to economic activity, but also the longer-term effects of a lack of nutrition arising from the inability to access or pay for nutritious food during the pandemic. Children are particularly vulnerable: the lack of an adequate diet can lead to persistent losses in health, education and productivity that can have lasting effects. The after-effects of the pandemic could be more severe than its immediate effects, writes Jimena Pacheco.

The Food and Agriculture Organization (FAO) estimates that the COVID-19 crisis will expose 265 million people to the threat of severe hunger. The effects of the increase of hunger worldwide could be more catastrophic than the virus itself on the long run. Hence, it is of the utmost importance to implement policies that fight the pandemic from a holistic and intertemporal perspective, including the challenges presented by the accompanying hunger crisis.

According to the IMF, the global economy will suffer a downturn of -3% in 2020, pushing 200 million people out of employment.[1] In addition, millions of self-employed and informal workers will suffer from the abrupt interruption of their income flows brought about by illness or measures to curb virus transmission, including total lockdowns that prevent the normal circulation of people, goods, and services. In addition to the contraction of household income, the prices of cereals and other foodstuffs have increased as a result of trade barriers and difficulties transporting goods due to the lockdowns. As a consequence, we observe a deterioration in the nutrient intake of the population.[2]

Both the quantity and quality of calories are affected. The disruption in food markets has decreased access to vegetables, fruits, and proteins. These food products are labour intensive and need good storage and good distribution logistics, all of which have been affected by the COVID-19 crisis. In addition to supply shortages[3], the mobility restrictions and volatility of the price of quality food products, as well as sudden income cuts, have pushed households to consume more perishable, cheaper, and less nutritious foods.[4]

But not only the direct effects of interrupted distribution chains are visible in the nutrient intake patterns of the poorest populations. The most vulnerable populations usually live in resource-poor countries with weak fiscal finances, tight health budgets, and high debts. The coronavirus crisis has led these countries to reallocate resources to fight the pandemic, leading to the neglect or interruption of state-driven food programs. Children who were able to receive a square meal at schools can no longer do so, and food- and cash-transfer programs have also been interrupted. The WFP estimates that the school closures and mobility restrictions have prevented 368 million children from receiving meals through school food programs worldwide—a devastating observation. While some countries have ensured that children remain fed, there are no data available on the coverage and quality of those alternative solutions.[5]

Poor childhood nutrition has lasting effects

It is not only the immediate hunger caused by the COVID-19 crisis that is worrisome. The insufficient intake of nutrients during childhood increases vulnerability to infectious diseases, and starvation leads to premature death. Those children who survive are likely to face the lifelong impacts of malnutrition. Malnutrition during childhood generates changes in an individual’s metabolism to save energy. Furthermore, women who have suffered starvation during childhood are shorter and have a higher probability of giving birth to babies with a low birth weight. Besides, children who did not have sufficient nutrients during childhood perform worse in school and are less productive as adults. All these mechanisms that are being fed by coronavirus responses will generate long-term impacts that are likely to persist for more than one generation if we do not counteract the ‘COVID hunger’ now.

The way forward: immediate action and long-term monitoring

The need for timely and adequate policies to prevent hunger and starvation is pressing. Bodies such as the FAO and WFP have suggested a number of measures that can be implemented to combat immediate hunger and a longer-term lack of adequate nutrition linked to economic losses and poverty. These include:

Installing emergency cash transfers that smooth the income shocks of the vulnerable households
Assuring the correct functioning of food markets by decreasing barriers for food trade
Improving dietary quality, among others, by assuring the access to vegetables, fruits, and meat at affordable prices in local markets, or increasing the quantity and quality of school meals
Supporting maternal services by strengthening public health services, especially regarding the access to nutrition supplements
Promoting homestead food production.

However, the implementation of these recommendations does not seem feasible in countries that are resource strapped and already fail to invest in quality nutrition, healthcare, and food-producing agriculture.[6] We need commitment from governments and international organizations to allocate enough resources to fight hunger today in order to avoid future costs for society. Furthermore, we have to assure that the response to the ‘COVID-19 hunger’ and the monitoring of its effects persist long after the pandemic has ended.

Acknowledgments: I am grateful to Natascha Wagner for her thoughtful feedback on an earlier draft of this post.

[1] Also see https://www.ilo.org/wcmsp5/groups/public/—dgreports/—dcomm/documents/briefingnote/wcms_740877.pdf

[2] The situation is especially difficult in urban areas, where households are unable to smooth the consumption shock through household-level food production.

[3] There are even more channels that contribute to rising hunger and lack of food supplies—the pandemic stopped the movement of migrant workers involved in harvesting activities, resulting in a loss of production for many farmers because of a lack of workers to pick vegetables.

[4] Nutritious food can be 10 times more expensive than basic calories as a result of COVID-19.

[5] For example, in Madrid, the municipality controversially signed a contract with a fast-food provider to cover the meals for vulnerable children. Health institutions and families have raised complaints about the nutritional quality of these meals that the children received for almost two months. See https://elpais.com/espana/madrid/2020-05-03/las-pizzas-de-ayuso-y-algunos-kilos-de-mas.html [in Spanish].

[6] World Bank data show that on average around 7% of a country’s GDP is dedicated to healthcare. For OECD countries it reaches 10%, while it is under 5% in Latin America and Southeast Asia. In the least-developed countries, the expenditure in healthcare is as low as 1% of a country’s GDP. See https://data.worldbank.org/indicator/SH.XPD.GHED.GD.ZS.

Title Image Credit: Jimena Pacheco

This article is part of a series about the coronavirus crisis. Read all articles of this series here.

About the authors:

Jimena Pacheco is a development economics Ph.D. candidate at the ISS. Her research interests rely in development, health and education economics. Currently, she is working in the impact of negative shocks -economic and natural crisis- in human capital formation in Ecuador and Spain as main cases.

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COVID-19 | Will current travel restrictions help academics change their flying behaviour? by Lara Vincent and Oane Visser

8 June 20207 June 2020 5 min read

With drastic restrictions on mobility due to the COVID-19 pandemic, international academic air travel for research, conferences, and defences has largely come to a halt. The sudden inability to hop on a plane and fly away makes us even more aware of how mobile academics have become over the past decades. The COVID-19 pandemic may provide the perfect opportunity to reassess and alter our travel behaviour now that we are forced to stay put, write Lara Vincent and Oane Visser.

Hypermobility is widely viewed as a cornerstone of contemporary globalised academics and a sine qua non for professional success in the increasingly competitive environment of higher education that requires the showcasing of research at academic conferences and elsewhere. Academics are pressured to be innovative and utilise travel to undertake and present distinguishable research (Nursey et al. 2019: 1). Data collection, conference attendance, and networking opportunities are three of the main reasons for international (short-term) mobility, all which are described by academics as essential for one’s visibility—and success—in the academia. This is consistent with the profession’s ranking as one of the three most mobile jobs in the world, with business executives and politicians filling up the other two spots (Mahroum 2000: 26).

Frequent air travel is gradually becoming an issue of debate in academia. Several European universities have introduced policies to reduce (the impact of) academic travel. In the Netherlands, a ‘climate letter’ drafted end 2018 by a group of prominent academics pushed for a progressive climate agenda to be adopted by Dutch universities, with strong support from the Association of Universities in the Netherlands (VSNU). In Belgium, Ghent University is one of the pioneers, with a travel policy that distinguishes ‘green destinations’ (with a travel time by train or bus below six hours) and ‘orange destinations (up to eight hours). For green destinations like Oxford, Frankfurt and Montpellier, flights are not offered anymore; for ‘orange destinations’, such as Geneva and Hamburg, train and bus are the preferred options.

But at most universities, it still seems business as usual regarding air travel. Unlike business executives and politicians, academics are deemed knowledge producers. The paradox between the abundant knowledge produced and circulated in academic settings about the far-reaching negative repercussions of climate change and continued frequent air travel by academics raises the question why the profession fails to move to more pro-environmental mobility.

Research by Tom Storme of Ghent University on the contradictory nature of knowledge and action regarding air mobility stimulated Lara to conduct her ISS Research Paper on this topic. She found that many of the 20 academics interviewed about how they view their academic travel behaviour mentioned psychological discomfort due to the inconsistencies between their knowledge and behaviour. This can be characterised as cognitive dissonance and can only be relieved with a change in attitudes or actions to match the other (Festinger 1957: 7).

The academics interviewed at the ISS stated that not travelling was viewed negatively in the ever-changing world of academia where transnational connections enhance the ability to be socially and professionally visible. As a result, the interviewees dismissed their dissonance by predominately adapting their attitudes to match their flight patterns, such as by comparing academic flight emissions favourably to other industries, emphasising the lack of control over their actions, compensating emissions by becoming more environmentally conscious in their personal lives, or highlighting the essential societal value of the research that the travelling enabled. Changing travel behaviour by reducing flying was seen as impossible when you want to build an academic career.

Ironically, it seems that 2020 has forced academics to re-evaluate their reliance on cross-border travel. The grounding of aeroplanes due to COVID-19 has forced academics to review their reliance on air travel, behaviour that was previously imagined as virtually impossible. PhD defences are now suddenly done online, part of planned conferences are being shifted online, and some face-to-face research is being substituted by online and phone interviews. Will these trends stick when the airspace is opened, or will we divert to our old habits?

The move to confine individuals to their houses and limit travel to contain the coronavirus has also drastically reduced the carbon emissions produced by air travel. The world has seen a reduction in pollution levels with satellites images showing clear skies over cities that were previously impossible to view from space (Collins 2020: 1). The pandemic has unexpectedly unleashed or accelerated pro-environmental mobility policies in various cities. Mostly notably, Milan is drastically reducing car use to rapidly make space for laying out cycling infrastructure in order to stimulate people to avoid public transport where it is difficult to keep enough distance to prevent the proliferation of the coronavirus.

While air traffic is likely to rebound substantially after the pandemic has been contained, it seems that the global lockdown has enabled academics to re-evaluate their need for hypermobility in a world where the repercussions of climate change are acutely experienced—a change that was deemed almost impossible until early 2020. The pandemic has shown that it is possible to go back to ‘normal’ levels of mobility when compared to today’s hypermobility, but the academia that demands air travel as way to ensure success may also have to be fundamentally transformed to allow for academics to conduct and showcase their research differently. More online conferences, conferences with a mixture of online and offline presentations, and organising (or selecting) conferences based on their accessibility by ground transport may be some of the ways to go.

Acknowledgments: A word of thanks to the ISS academics who shared their views in the interviews.

This article is part of a series about the coronavirus crisis. Read all articles of this series here.

About the authors:

Lara Vincent was part of the 2018/2019 Masters students who graduated in December 2019. While at ISS she majored in Agrarian, Food and Environmental Studies, with a specialisation in Environment and Sustainable Development.

Oane Visser (associate professor, Political Ecology research group, ISS) leads an international Toyota Foundation funded research project on the socio-economic and environmental effects of -and responses to- big data and digitalisation in agriculture. He is an ISRF fellow for 2020-21.

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COVID-19 | Remote research in times of COVID-19: considerations, techniques, and risks by Rodrigo Mena and Dorothea Hilhorst

20 May 202019 May 2020 5 min read

The current COVID-19 pandemic is preventing many scholars and students, especially those in the social sciences, from visiting identified research sites and interacting with the groups or actors important for their research. Many researchers now plan to shift to forms of remote research where data are gathered without meeting research participants in person. While COVID-19 compels this trend, even before the pandemic scholars have had to conduct remote research when fieldwork is considered risky or difficult, for example in high-conflict or remote contexts. Our research of the interaction of disasters and conflict in Afghanistan and Yemen shows what to keep in mind when conducting remote research.

Remote research refers to research where the principal researcher is not engaging in face-to-face data gathering processes ‘on the ground’. This means that other people can gather data on behalf of the researcher in research locations, or that interviews with research participants are conducted by phone or using the Internet. Whereas quantitative research often uses enumerators to survey, qualitative research usually relies on face-to-face interviews or focus-group discussions that now need to be organized and conducted from a distance. Research shows that it is indeed possible to talk to participants using interfaces like telephones or social media platforms and to obtain rich and qualitative data through these, mostly internet-based, forms of communication[1]. However, the use of technology also needs to be approached with caution and in a reflective manner, as discussed in another blog.

Fundamentals and ethics for sound research still apply

No matter how hard one tries, remote research creates additional challenges, and some research questions beg so much nuance and depth that they better not be considered in remote research. Data gathered by means of remote research is also difficult to triangulate and validate, as a multitude of data sources not considered at the onset of the data collection process may present themselves in the field. Researchers may also come closer to understanding complex dynamics when immersed in the communities they are studying. Otherwise, many other routes can be explored to validate data. Think newspaper articles, GIS or satellite images, secondary sources, consulting other researchers familiar with the area, among others.

Research ethics can also be complicated when research is conducted remotely. Whether data are collected through video-based conversations or by using a third person to conduct the interview, it is important to consider whether informed consent genuinely has been obtained and how confidentiality can be guaranteed. In case of sensitive issues, face-to-face interaction allows one to read participants’ body language to detect whether the interview creates discomfort. It also allows researchers to build a trust relationship with research participants. How can researchers make sure that enough checks and balances support remote interviewing processes to avoid interviews creating anxiety or discomfort?

Finally, we need to think about how to convey the message that the research is in the interest of the research participants. Without the engagement and personal attention of a real encounter, will participants feel that they benefit from the research? Researchers often seek to ‘leave something behind’—stories, information, advice, or perhaps volunteer work for a community or NGO—to ‘give back’ to the research participants. Remote research requires questioning ways in which to move beyond the mere extraction of information that so clearly signals the asymmetric power relations between researchers and researched actors.

Some do’s and don’ts

When these complicated questions have been addressed, the question remains how to do remote research. Here are some pointers that we developed out of our experiences of researching the interaction of disasters and high-intensity conflict in Afghanistan and Yemen:

Some research questions cannot be addressed remotely, hence, the research design and questions needed to be adapted for remote research.
Ethical board approval is just as important for remote research as it is for fieldwork and cannot be skipped.
In order to enrich and triangulate findings, we need to be innovative. For our research, interviews were also conducted with people that recently migrated from the areas of interest to a place where they could be reached physically. Similarly, aid workers active in the area were interviewed during stop-overs at airports.
In order to create a broad and in-depth range of data, a multiplicity of methods besides interviews were used. These included digital surveys, the analysis of photographs taken by the participant and voice messages from participants describing places and situations, and many other creative options.
To remotely understand the context, relevant news, and everyday life in research areas, talking to people who know the area and reading the news about those places were key. This information allowed for better interviews and better data analysis.
Just like in normal interviews, body language is important for creating trust and diminishing anxiety. Sitting too close to your camera can make your presence intimidating, whereas keeping some distance and not filling the screen allows the participants to see your hand movements and background. Participants will see everything, also when you stop being attentive because you want to check some information on your phone, for example. It is therefore important to be mindful of your actions and to try to remain focused and engaged.
Rules for asking questions, such as using active language, asking questions one by one, trying to phrase questions and reword them in understandable language, apply even more in remote research.

Remote research is possible, but as students and researchers have to adapt to remote research, so do universities, research institutions, supervisors, and donors. Budget lines for travel may be reduced, but it may be important to provide funds for better computers, webcams, and video-based solutions.

Remote research can also be seen as an opportunity to do research differently, especially in an era where the need for travel must constantly be weighed up against the harm of adding to emissions related to climate change. We can now think of expanding the geographies of our research and reaching people in regions and places that were not considered possible before. For many students and researchers with limited budgets, it also can be a means to reduce the costs of research. However, as mentioned before, all these benefits and the use of remote research need to be weighed against adverse risks.

Which other relevant considerations would you like to share? Please feel free to leave a comment with tips, tricks or concerns.

[1] Bolt N and Tulathimutte T (2016) Remote Research. Rosenfeld Media. Available from: http://rosenfeldmedia.com/books/remote-research/#faq (accessed 1 November 2016). No page.

This article is part of a series about the coronavirus crisis. Read all articles of this series here.

About the authors:

Rodrigo (Rod) Mena is a socio-environmental researcher and AiO-PhD at the International Institute of Social Studies of the Erasmus University Rotterdam. His current research project focuses on disaster response and humanitarian aid governance in places affected by high-intensity conflict, with South Sudan, Afghanistan and Yemen as main cases. He has experience conducting fieldwork and researching in conflict and disaster zones from in Africa, Latin America, Europe, Oceania and Asia. Twitter: @romenaf

Dorothea Hilhorst is Professor of Humanitarian Aid and Reconstruction at the International Institute of Social Studies of Erasmus University Rotterdam. She is a regular author for Bliss. Read all her posts here.

COVID-19 | Restaurants are empty, but the work continues: freelance food delivery in times of COVID-19 by Roy Huijsmans

18 May 202020 May 2020 5 min read

Freelance food delivery workers have largely had to make their own decisions about working during the COVID-19 pandemic. Who are they? How has their work been affected, and how have they responded?

On Sunday 15 March at around 17:30, Dutch Prime Minister Mark Rutte announced the closure of restaurants and bars as of 18:00 that same evening. I was out on the road riding for food delivery platform Deliveroo and had to pick up an order from the KFC in The Hague’s city centre a little past 18:00. When I arrived, the bouncer was in the process of making people leave the fast food restaurant and was preventing new guests from entering. He wasn’t planning on letting me in, either, until I showed him the order confirmation on my phone.

Meanwhile, a WhatsApp group for Deliveroo riders in The Hague was buzzing with activity as we tried to digest the announcement. An English-language news item summarising the prime minister’s announcement was shared. What would this mean for food delivery services, riders wondered? Many feared the worst. Indeed, already before 20:00 a first message appeared, informing other riders that another KFC restaurant in The Hague had also closed for deliveries.

Reflecting on this event a few weeks later, one rider recalled fearing that “my business was coming to a close”. Some started counting their savings and calculated for how long they could sit it out if deliveries came to a stop. A few other riders were more optimistic, though. One or two were even talking about an approaching ‘golden age’ if restaurants would remain open for deliveries only.

Staying, leaving, and getting back into it

A good number of those riding for Uber Eats and Deliveroo are highly educated migrants[1]. Platform-based food delivery work is relatively easy to get into—no knowledge of the Dutch language is required, the work is flexible, and the earnings can be good. Food delivery work is probably seldom the only reason why international riders come to or stay on in the Netherlands. Rather, it helps to realise other aspirations, including international education, generating funds for projects back home, while it also subsidises internships and pays the bills while riders look for jobs more in line with their education level.

Uncertainty about delivery work that for some is their main source of income and the health risks of doing this work in the times of COVID-19 led to at least one rider’s decision to leave the Netherlands when this was still possible, even though this meant going into a 17-day quarantine upon arrival back home.

Most riders stayed, often negotiating their decision transnationally. An Uber Eats rider from an Asian country was advised by his parents to stay in The Hague because back home many people were losing their jobs, including educated employees. Others had to put concerned families at ease who had read media reports about the devastating consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic in Europe. One way of doing this was by saying that the situation in The Hague wasn’t as bad as elsewhere in Europe and that they were permitted to carry on with their work because it was “classified as an essential service”[2].

An international student said he stopped riding initially when the partial lockdown was first announced because he was “kind-of terrified”. When he later learned that food delivery work was continuing, he resumed riding. “I found a way I could help during this confusing time by doing delivery work in my break time after sitting in my room alone for a long time with eyes glued on the laptop,” he said.

The COVID-19 crisis also affected some riders in unexpected ways. Collecting a ‘zoekjaar hoogopgeleiden’ permit (search year permit for highly educated migrants) at the Dutch Immigration Office (IND) proved difficult because its offices had closed. This affected some Uber Eats riders whose student visas had expired in the midst of the partial lockdown. Uber Eats then automatically deactivated their user accounts, and getting them to reopen them based on the documentation for their ‘zoekjaar’ permit[3] took many phone calls and led to various days without an income.

Making money while trying to stay safe

As freelance workers, it is largely riders’ own responsibility to stay safe. Both platform companies have implemented so-called ‘contact-free’ delivery procedures, but what this means differs from restaurant to restaurant and in terms of what is practically possible when delivering the food to customers’ homes.

Riders are very much aware that food delivery during the COVID-19 outbreak carries a risk. Especially in places where one knows things have been touched a lot by many different people (e.g. crowded student flats) and you have to touch that button or hold that door handle, “you know there is something wrong, but you have to [do it]”, one Deliveroo rider remarked. He tried to stay safe by using gloves when hand sanitising gel was hard to obtain and has been using a scarf that Deliveroo distributed as ‘free winterwear’ because the surgical masks available in the open market were disposable ones.

An Uber Eats rider echoed similar concerns and said “for me it [food delivery work] is not safe, but I try my best to make myself safe”. He did this as follows: “I always bring my kit [tissue, hand sanitiser, etc.], and keep distance”. His main concern was that he might pick up the virus and infect his housemates with whom he shares his accommodation: “if I go outside and get corona, they will get it, too”.

For Uber Eats riders, the first weeks of the partial lockdown were quite good financially. It was even referred to as a ‘golden age’ by one rider because of the temporary bonus schemes, such as getting an additional €5 after having completed four orders, and then an additional bonus for each subsequent order. For the Deliveroo riders, business has definitely been slower during the partial lockdown. One rider guessed that his earnings were probably down to half of what he usually makes, but he was hesitant to ascribe it to the COVID-19 crisis, as there were various other factors, too. Reflecting on the past few weeks, he concluded: “My job didn’t end, but it also did not turn out as good as I thought [that] it would. No!”

[1] The demographics of Thuisbezorgd, another food delivery platform, appear different. Another important difference is that Thuisbezorgd employs its riders and pays them an hourly wage, whereas Uber Eats and Deliveroo work with freelancers who are paid per order.

[2] The rider in question admitted he had not seen food delivery work listed as such, but he reasoned that “in my mind, I feel that people need to eat and if they order food, then this is essential”.

[3] Formally: ‘orientation year highly educated persons’.

Title Image Credit: Roy Huijsmans.

This article is part of a series about the coronavirus crisis. Find more articles of this series here.

About the author:

Roy Huijsmans is a teacher/researcher at the ISS, and a Deliveroo rider.

COVID-19 | “Stay safe” conversations that illuminate the glass walls between her and me by Mausumi Chetia

12 May 20206 October 2020 5 min read

Disasters are lived in different ways by different classes of people. During the COVID-19 pandemic, the differential impacts of disasters lie in the blurred spaces between populations fortunate enough to focus on ‘productivity-during-lockdown-times’ and others who focus on ‘providing-food-for-their-children-and-having-a-home-during-lockdown-times’. For generationally disaster-prone or disaster-torn populations of India, this global pandemic is only widening the class gaps that have characterized local realities for the Indian society for centuries.

My husband and I recently witnessed thousands of daily-wage workers and families marching towards a bus terminal near our home in Delhi. From there, they would take buses to their hometowns. Many were travelling on foot, too, trying to make their way to their homes hundreds of miles away from Delhi after the entire country was placed under lockdown from 25 March. This involuntary exodus of workers from India’s many cities that has continued despite fatal consequences is an oxymoronic act that seems to oppose the social distancing measures prescribed by the WHO and related suggestions from developed nations. It is not that these workers are unwilling to keep safe—it is simply that a substantial part of India’s population, including these workers, cannot afford to do so, as has been emphasized repeatedly.

My current research looks at the everyday lives of families facing protracted displacement due to the disaster of riverbank erosion along Brahmaputra River in Assam, a state in India. The families I engage with for my research source their income from daily wages. As economic activity suddenly ceased in March, the small stream of income stopped. Consequently, many of the workers were not able to travel back to their families, as they usually would when on leave or a break period. Many male members of these families are currently trapped in the towns within Assam where they work. They were unable to travel to their homes, many miles away, not only because of the physical cost of walking or taking a bus home, but for a different set of reasons as well.

Conversations on care and health that are classes apart

*Rita and her friends after collecting firewood for cooking from a neighbouring paddy field. February 2020*

A few days after the Delhi exodus, calls from concerned families I work with increased significantly. “You should have just stayed back here with us,” Rita Saikia, a regular caller, often quips. “Come back to the village whenever you can.” Megacities like Delhi have much higher infection rates than rural places, as many of the rural inhabitants I work with recognize.

Besides the exchange of well-intended thoughts and mutual worries, these telephonic conversations are constant reminders of the class differences in the everyday lives of people that surround us, beginning with those of the researched and the researcher. Ironically, despite my power position over the families I work with for my research, they offered me what they thought I did not have in Delhi: a sense of safety they felt in the countryside. Here, thus, they were able to close the distance between the researcher and the researched. Nevertheless, the challenges that these families are facing are colossal in comparison to those I am facing, such as not being able to travel to my university in Europe or being anxious about my inability to work on my dissertation as effectively as I would have liked to from home.

Rita[1] is from one of my host families in one of the villages where I spent time conducting research. With no other choice, she has been managing the household and two children all by herself this entire period. Ajeet, her husband, is a construction worker surviving off daily wages. He is currently stuck at one of his work sites, around 100 kilometers away from his family village. For now, the family is surviving from its meagre savings. Rice has been provided by the children’s school and another one-time ration (of rice) provided by the local government. Quietly hiding away from the eyes of authorities, Rita, along with other women from her village, regularly goes to collect firewood behind their village in the dry paddy field. Refilling the cooking gas cylinder from their savings is a luxury they cannot afford right now.

Ajeet had left the family’s only mobile phone at home, so he calls his family once every three days from his co-worker’s phone. Last night, their younger child of four cried himself to sleep because his father’s call was disconnected before the child could speak to him. The mobile credit had probably run out. The older child of six years smiled and casually said to me, “you know pehi[2], Deuta[3] will not come home now even if the virus dies, but only later. He needs to bring the money home.” This understanding of the daily realities and hardships, and the acceptance of the hardships of life, contrasts sharply with how more privileged people experience the coronavirus pandemic, like any other disaster.

Amidst all of this, the annual season of extreme winds in Assam has begun. Homes of three of the research families have been battered by these winds. The families plan to complete the rebuilding process once the lockdown is relaxed, unable to do so during the lockdown. In addition, come June, the monsoon will make its appearance, inviting the annual visit of the floods, erosion of the banks of Assam’s rivers, landslides and associated socio-economic insecurities that are now compounded by those the lockdown has brought about. A slowing economy post-pandemic and consequential decrease in sources of income, along with exposure to the said disasters, will significantly push these already displaced families further to the brink of poverty.

Living through the intersections of inequalities

Poverty is both a driver and a consequence of disasters[4]. The year 2020 could become one of the most barefaced examples of this. Many socio-economically and politically insecure populations elsewhere in India and in the neighbouring countries of Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, the Philippines, and Indonesia etc. are also disaster-prone or -torn. Once the world gets back on its feet post-COVID-19, these populations are set to face increasing human insecurities in their everyday lives arising due to the pandemic and its after-effects, like the families in Assam.

A society’s many aspects are unclothed in the aftermath of a disaster[5], which continues to reinforce social inequalities[6]. Disasters, therefore, including the current pandemic, hardly manage to break the walls of class structures – political, economic, social, and so forth. If anything, they increase the height and depth of these walls – between societies within a nation, between different nations, and, most definitely, between the researcher and the researched.

*The Brahmaputra River at the backyard of one of the families’ home (from the research). January 2020*

[1] All names of research participants have been changed

[2] Assamese word for paternal aunt

[3] Assamese word for father

[4] https://www.preventionweb.net/risk/poverty-inequality

[5] Oliver-Smith, Anthony, and Susanna M. Hoffman, eds. The angry earth: disaster in anthropological perspective. Routledge, 2019.

[6] Reid, Megan. “Disasters and social inequalities.” Sociology Compass 7.11 (2013): 984-997.

This article is part of a series about the coronavirus crisis. Find more articles of this series here.

About the author:

Mausumi Chetia is a PhD Researcher at the ISS. Her research looks at the everyday lives of disaster-displaced people in Assam, a northeastern state of India.

COVID-19 | How Kerala’s response to the COVID-19 pandemic is highlighting inadequate responses elsewhere in India by Sreerekha Sathi

8 May 202016 May 2020 5 min read

The Indian state of Kerala seems to have addressed the COVID-19 pandemic remarkably well, limiting the amount of virus-related infections and deaths through its assertive approach. Kerala’s outlier position in India is well known, and its development model that differs from those of other Indian states might well be the cause of its successes in responding to COVID-19. Central to this development model—and the state’s response—is a well-functioning public healthcare system rooted in the state’s left-wing government. The rest of India and other countries can learn several lessons from Kerala’s government and its people, if they are willing to listen.

By the end of April, India’s coronavirus infections exceeded 40,000 cases, while around 1,300 people have died from the virus. India has been under a severe lockdown since 25 March, which due to the country’s socio-economic dynamics has caused many problems for working-class and unemployed people, especially for the large body of internal migrant labourers and marginalized communities, many without the resources to self-quarantine. Millions of Indians will face starvation due to a sudden loss of income as the lockdown has made it impossible for them to engage in economic activity. More than 90 percent of India’s population of 1.3 billion people work in the informal sector, while two-thirds of the population moreover have to get by on less than US$2 a day.

Kerala, a small state on India’s southern tip, was hit first and hardest. The state reported its first case of coronavirus (COVID-19) on January 29^th, and by May counted 500 infections, however had only three virus-related deaths with a recovery rate above 90 percent. It is evident that the state with its population of 33 million people has had significant successes thus far in staving off the virus. Here, for example, there is no shortage of medical masks for health professionals, no lack of hand sanitizers, and people living in the state have not been running around trying to hoard basic necessities as has happened in rich countries like the United States. The story of the state’s success in controlling the pandemic has attracted global attention, particularly because this state in India, one of the poorest countries in the Global South, has managed to do what many others with vastly more resources have not been able to.

So how has Kerala been doing this?

The coronavirus epidemic hit the state as it was in the process of recovering from two majors disasters that occurred in 2018—severe floods and the spread of the deadly Nipah virus. These disasters shaped responses to COVID-19 by creating a readiness to respond to future disasters, so that when the coronavirus emerged, the state and local communities were dedicated toward collectively fighting the COVID-19 pandemic, knowing what was at stake.

When the number of coronavirus cases reached around 100, the state government’s popular health minister declared a campaign called ‘Break the Chain’ to fight the further spread of the virus. The campaign that reached deep into Kerala’s densely populated cities and villages was focused on sharing information about the virus and how to fight it by educating people on maintaining personal hygiene. The state government in a short time installed water taps in all important public transportation hubs and public offices and provided free hand sanitizers. It also informed people about the importance of social distancing and self-quarantining. Students from colleges and universities along with volunteers from different sectors were entrusted with the duty of producing facial masks and hand soap and distributing them through community institutions. This engaged public response is world away from the policies elsewhere in India and many other parts of the world that consigned people to their houses, leaving them to fend for themselves without providing adequate support.

As in other countries, while health professionals remain at the center of the fight against the virus, it is important to point out just how central the community healthcare workers in Kerala have been. The backbone of the fight have been women called Accredited Social Health Activists (ASHAs) and Anganwadi workers (Sreerekha, 2017) who are employed in the state’s social welfare schemes and who were able to reach every nook and cranny of the state’s numerous cities, villages, and towns to trace contacts effectively. Alongside these women workers have been the state police and fire departments as well as other emergency services who have helped the state fulfill services such as distributing essential medicines to non-corona patients.

Most importantly, state-backed community kitchens have been a lifeline for many hungry residents. For the first time in history, by the third week of March, Kerala opened community kitchens in every village and municipality of the state, providing free cooked food so that no-one would go hungry during the lockdown. This contrasts very sharply with the experience of poor people in many other parts of India, where they are left mostly at the mercy of NGO or volunteer help.

How Kerala does it differently

A well-functioning public healthcare system is at the core of the state’s response, the foundation for which goes back to the much popular, well-debated and critiqued Kerala development model (Ravi Raman, 2010). The state is led by the Communist Party of India (Marxist) (CPIM), well known for its experiments with projects related to the grassroots decentralization of government and community-driven developmental planning in the 1990s. The Kerala development model does have its limitations, especially in addressing issues of gender and caste hierarchies and discrimination, and its successes have been achieved even alongside the pressures and compromises with liberal modernity. The state’s successes in fighting the pandemic though have been possible due to relevant steps taken on time and owing to the functional state mechanisms supplemented by the support and commitment of local community networks and an educated population.

With a very high number of expatriates and a big tourism industry the state needed to quickly implement restrictive measures. This has not been an easy path for Kerala, especially considering the fact that its officials are in a constant battle with the right-wing BJP central government. Time and again, the BJP central government has tried ‘to teach Kerala a lesson’ by cutting its funds or even halting the arrival of aid during emergencies. The right-wing party has until now failed to ever win any elections in the state.

Amidst all these dynamics, Kerala presents a useful lesson to the world as a state that even in the face of extreme adversity through sensitive and practical programs and with the support of a politically educated community has been able to take major steps to protect the interests of its residents, particularly marginalized and working class populations. Although the COVID-19 threat remains, Kerala has collectively mobilized to confront it. Kerala’s public healthcare system functions through effective local development measures and community and state networks to make it possible not only to tackle the COVID-19 threat, but also to protect the well-being of its people in so doing.

This article is part of a series about the coronavirus crisis. Find more articles of this series here.

About the author:

Sreerekha Sathi is Assistant Professor of Gender and Political Economy at at the International Institute of Social Studies of the Erasmus University in The Hague. Her research interests span theories of women’s work, feminist critiques of development, feminist research methodologies and social movements in the global south, specifically South Asia.

COVID-19 | A political ecology of epidemics: why human and other-than-human diseases should push us to rethink our global development model by Fabio Gatti

4 May 202016 May 2020 6 min read

The recent COVID-19 outbreak has generated an incredible interest around public health in particular and other social issues in general. However, most commentaries have failed to look at the crisis from an environmental and ecological perspective. We need to look at the links between COVID-19 and the global environmental crisis in order to identify and address the structural causes leading to the emergence of the pandemic: increasing urbanization, an exodus from rural areas and the abandonment of peasant farming, the intensification of natural resource extraction, and the industrialization of agriculture.

Different epidemic, similar responses

I started getting familiar with diseases and epidemics last summer when I was looking at an agricultural pest outbreak in Apulia, southern Italy. At that time it was not humans who were considered at risk, but a different species: olive trees. The bacteria Xylella fastidiosa that arrived in Europe for the first time in 2013 endangered the survival of thousands of centuries-old olive trees. These plants in Apulia not only are an important agricultural asset on which many depend for their livelihoods, but also have a strong cultural value that relates to the history, the identity, and the landscape of a whole region.

In my research, with the risk of simplifying a bit, two different interpretations of the bacteria’s role in the desiccation of the trees were apparent on the ground: on the one side, a reductionist position considering the new pathogen as the one and only cause of the disease, and therefore concentrating efforts on ‘eradicating’ the bacteria from the countryside; on the other, a more holistic view stressing the fact that the bacteria was only one of the factors contributing to the trees’ pathology, and thus calling for a much deeper reflection on the structural causes of the outbreak.

For example, the abuse of pesticides and herbicides during the last decades, desertification due to climate change, depletion of water resources linked to the intensification of monoculture plantations, and the lack of traditional mantainance practices (e.g. pruning of ploughing) due to the rural exodus might have all together contributed to the weakening of the immune system of the olive trees and the contamination of the environment they are embedded in. Thus, addressing the wider social, economical and environmental factors which made olive trees especially vulnerable to the spread of the bacteria would have been another strategy to tackle the emergency.

What happened then strongly reminds me of the recent COVID-19 crisis: the Italian government declared a ‘state of emergency’ and the crisis was managed by creating an “infected area” in order to try to isolate the bacteria. Infected trees, after being isolated, had to be eradicated in order to avoid the contagion of neighbouring plants. Pesticides were employed in order to get rid of the insect responsible for carrying the bacteria from one tree to the other. The reductionist paradigm ended up dominating.

Spillover

“The real danger of each new outbreak is the failure—or better put—the expedient refusal to grasp that each new Covid-19 is no isolated incident. The increased occurrence of viruses is closely linked to food production and the profitability of multinational corporations”

(Rob Wallace, from this interview)

The current COVID-19 pandemic thus raises some important questions: is this pandemic just the effect of a random event, i.e. the accidental incursion of coronavirus SARS-CoV-2 into human bodies, or are there some structural reasons which we are failing to consider? Is this only a public health crisis, for which the goal should be to make sure that we can eradicate the virus in order to ‘go back to normal’ (e.g. developing a vaccine that makes us immune to it), or is this part of a global socio-ecological crisis that should push us to reconsider our global development model?

Some studies support the latter position. In his book Spillover: Animal Infections and the Next Human Pandemic, David Quammen claims that, while zoonotic diseases (infections caused by pathogens who jump from animals to humans—the so-called spillover) are not something new to humankind, what is relatively new is the frequency of such events. In the last 30 years, spillovers have happened at an unprecedented pace due to primarily deforestation and land use change caused by the expansion of agribusinesses, together with uncontrolled and explosive urbanization processes that have greatly increased the occasions of encounters between humans and wild species.

Intensification of animal farming also plays a role. In Big Farms make Big Flu, evolutionary epidemiologist Robert Wallace claims that intensive animal farming is responsible for the recent increase in new pathogens’ creation. More than that, the production of diseases is itself part of companies’ business models. Rather than just an unintended consequence of a genuine effort to ‘feed the world’ or achieve ‘food security’, the logic of agrifood corporations implies the externalization of health and environmental costs (such as the accidental generation of a new pathogen) to the public (animals, humans, local ecosystems, governments) while privatizing the profits resulting from their activity, in the most pure capitalist economic rationality.

And a recent position paper analyzing the spread of the infection in northern Italy claims that atmospheric particulate matter might have played a non-negligible role in the long-range transmission of SARS-CoV-2 virus in the area, and therefore adds another aspect to the relationship between COVID-19 and environmental degradation, in this case air pollution.

We cannot go back to normal, because normality was the problem

What can we do, then? The attempt of this post was to make clear that the biggest mistake we can make is to consider the COVID-19 pandemic as an isolated event unrelated with the global environmental crisis and to miss the connection with global capitalism, the expansion of commodity frontiers, and the intensification in the industrial mode of food production. COVID-19 and climate change are two sides of the same ecological crisis and should be addressed as such[1].

If we realize this, the crisis will open a great space for radical social change to be put in place. In a recent intervention on the Spanish newspaper El País, South Korean philosopher Byung-Chul Han reminds us that “the virus will not defeat capitalism, there will be no viral revolution: no virus is capable of doing the revolution”. It should therefore be us—civil society, progressive governments, development professionals, environmental activists—who gather momentum to foster radical change in what we believe development is, and making it what we want it to be.

[1] In a recent blog post, Murat Arsel looks at some similarities and differences between the COVID-19 crisis and the climate crisis, with the goal of learning something useful for climate change politics. He acknowledges that “the astonishing spread of COVID-19 could not have been possible without the incredible powers of global capitalism”, and calls for a different system “not so fundamentally focused on maximizing profits over all other concerns”. Still, he talks of the pandemic and climate change as two separate crises. My claim here is that, from a structural point of view, COVID-19 and climate change are in fact two sides of the same coin.

The author thanks Oane Visser and Fizza Batool for their comments on an earlier version of the post. This article is part of a series about the coronavirus crisis. Find more articles of this series here.

About the author:

Fabio Gatti is a graduate from the Agrarian, Food and Environmental Studies (AFES) major at the International Institute for Social Studies (ISS) in The Hague. His current research interests speak to the fields of political ecology, science and technology studies (STS), environmental humanities, and post-development studies.

COVID-19 | Revaluing essential workers by Karin Astrid Siegmann

1 May 202016 May 2020 5 min read

This year we are celebrating Labour Day in a very different way—the world we live in has changed dramatically over the past few months because of the COVID-19 pandemic and our collective and individual responses to it. As economies are shut down, many people are for the first time realizing that essential workers keep the cogs of societies oiled and turning. Yet many essential workers remain underpaid and underappreciated. We should realize that these workers are nurturers and deserve living dignified lives that can only be achieved if our economic system is critically examined and transformed.

A new hero has emerged in the wake of measures to prevent the spread of the new coronavirus: the essential worker. A global crisis like the one we are facing now raises our awareness about how essential care and food are for human flourishing. The underlying logic is very simple: essential workers are life-making rather than product- or profit-making. Care and food workers therefore top the list of occupations whose work is critical to the COVID-19 response that many governments have published.

Amidst collective clapping for nurses and radio spots praising the role of domestic workers for containing the coronavirus, it is easy to forget that today’s essential workers were the precariat of the old normal. Around the world, care and food workers find themselves at the bottom rung of wage and social hierarchies. In Pakistan, for instance, earning the minimum wage remains a distant dream for the vast informal workforce in agriculture and domestic service. For female workers, this income poverty is aggravated by a wide gender wage gap. Female community health workers called ‘Lady Health Workers’ have been recognised as key to the improvement in maternal and child health indicators in rural Pakistan since the 1990s. Yet, for many years, these vital medical professionals were paid ‘stipends’ at half the minimum wage and not offered regular contracts like other public employees.

This pattern is not much different in a rich country like the Netherlands where I live. Here, the majority of farmworkers are migrants from Central and Eastern Europe on zero-hour contracts. Their hard work in horticulture has turned agricultural export income in the Netherlands into the world’s second highest. Yet, their employment contracts provide neither work nor income security for themselves. Many domestic workers who raise their Dutch employers’ children and care for elderly persons are undocumented migrants whose precarious legal status prevents them from realising the few rights to social protection that they are entitled to. The status of their work is the tail lamp of common classifications of occupational prestige. Only sex workers fare worse in terms of social stigma, while their work satisfies the human ‘skin hunger’ that has turned into a veritable famine in the context of corona-preventing quarantine.

Thus, while symbolic and literal applause for essential workers reveal a level of cognisance of their importance, in fact, the coronavirus crisis even aggravates these workers’ precarity. More often than not, the additional workload for medical personnel and domestic workers to provide quality emergency care to infected persons and prevent further spread of the pandemic through cleanliness and hygiene is not balanced with overtime work compensation. Pakistan’s Lady Health Workers have even seen cuts in their anyway meagre compensation.

In addition, many migrant domestic and sex workers have lost their jobs, but their legal status and/or their occupation’s stigma imply that they are not entitled to government relief packages. Migrant food workers face a cruel choice between infection at work, in crammed transport or accommodation quarters where social distancing is impossible, or the loss of their job and livelihood. Leyva del Río and Medappa hit the nail on the head when concluding that: “The ‘heroes’ of this crisis, those who are sustaining our lives, are barely able to sustain theirs.”

While many observers now demand a revaluation of essential work in a new, post-corona ‘normal’[1], the examples above demonstrate that this is unlikely to be an automatic consequence of the new symbolic recognition of the importance of food and care for our wellbeing. In contrast, they flag that the ongoing crisis is likely to further erode life-sustaining activities. How can this revaluation be achieved, then?

Historically, higher wages, better social protection and more recognition have resulted from workers’ collective struggles. Falling through the cracks of government support in rich and poor countries alike, that’s what today’s essential workers are doing, too. In the Netherlands, for instance, organised migrant domestic workers and sex workers have set up emergency funds, called on clients to continue to support them for as long as the crisis continues, and demanded social security independent of immigration and employment status from the Dutch government.

Given the commonality of their concerns, if networked, these struggles have huge potential to shape a post-corona future that provides essential workers with the recognition they deserve. The call to listen to and take on board essential workers’ own insights in reforms towards greater labour justice and more nurturing societies is the shared starting point of many food and care workers’ organisations. They typically agree that the intersecting hierarchies of gender, race, sexuality and immigration status that condition the precarity of their work and lives need to be addressed head-on in moves towards greater rights and respect. Last but not least, a choir of diverse, yet, united essential workers’ voices is more likely to add volume to their demand for recognition, decent working conditions and inclusive social protection for all workers – and evoke positive public responses.

These suggestions are not some unworldly utopia, but reflect existing, encouraging practices. A few years back, I asked a Mexican domestic worker from Texas why she had travelled all the way to Ohio to join the rally of an organisation demanding justice for Florida’s migrant farmworkers. Her answer was: “They support our struggles, we support theirs.” The demand to value people over profit unites them.

These are some starting points for how the ongoing coronavirus crisis can teach our societies whose work matters most for nurturing humans. Let’s not waste this opportunity.

I am grateful to Thierry Schaffauser, STRASS for his thoughtful feedback on an earlier draft of this post.

[1] It is encouraging to witness that a diverse group of colleagues formulates and shares similar ideas (e.g. Ebata et al. 2020, Jaffe 2020, Koebe et al. 2020, Leyva del Río and Medappa 2020, Mezzadri 2020). The ideas outlined here are also in line with and specify the demands of broader visions for sustainable post-Corona scenarios (see e.g. https://www.degrowth.info/en/feminisms-and-degrowth-alliance-fada/collective-research-notebook/ , https://www.gndforeurope.com/covid and https://braveneweurope.com/manifesto-for-a-more-sustainable-and-fairer-netherlands-after-corona ).

This article is part of a series about the coronavirus crisis. Find more articles of this series here.

About the author:

Karin Astrid Siegmann is a senior lecturer in gender & labour economics at ISS.

COVID-19 | Is deglobalization helping or hindering the global economy during the coronavirus crisis? by Peter A.G. van Bergeijk

29 April 202030 June 2020 5 min read

We are only starting to see the economic impact of the COVID-19, but it is likely to have far-reaching effects and will result in unprecedented economic transformation. We are currently in a phase of deglobalization and the impact on livelihoods is closely linked to how we respond to the pandemic. The bad news is that we’re not yet responding very well. The silver lining is that we will nevertheless stay globally connected.

Suddenly deglobalization is no longer a hypothetical possibility, but a reality: the IMF in its April 2020 World Economic Outlook predicts a reduction of the world trade volume for this year by 11%, which pales in comparison to the 13% best-case scenario of the World Trade Organization (WTO) in which the economy is somewhat robust and its 32% worst-case scenario that sees the world economy in free fall.

What can we learn from earlier periods of deglobalization?

World openness 1880 – 2021

Source: P.A.G. van Bergeijk, Deglobalization 2.0, updated using IMF WEO April 2020

The Great Depression of the 1930s with its enormous negative impact on world openness and economic welfare was preceded by the worst pandemic of the previous century: the Spanish Flu. Estimates of its death toll vary widely from 20 to 100 million fatalities. With a world population of about two billion people, that amounts to a mortality rate of 1-5%. With COVID-19 these numbers look like a chilling possibility as well.

The pandemic that preceded the Great Depression did not cause it. Recovery of the recession triggered by the Spanish Flu was relatively quick and spontaneous. World trade did not collapse. A major difference between the context of the Spanish Flu and the economic background against which COVID-19 now is emerging is that our world was already in the downward phase of Deglobalization 2.0 when COVID-19 hit. The pandemic appeared at top of the deglobalization wave.

Pandemics are signs of the times

Indeed, in hindsight the Spanish Flu was a sign of the impact of a virus on a globalized world, in a sense a warning of a turning point in globalization. That turning point was due to the rising costs and decreasing benefits of globalization. It would bring the world what I have called Deglobalization 1.0.

COVID-19 can of course not be seen as such a sign, but the fact that preparation for pandemics was not sufficient, in addition to the breakdown of international cooperation, reflect the second underlying mechanism of deglobalization. We can observe both in the Great Depression of the 1930s and in the Great Recession that the leading power of the time (the hegemon) deserted the rules of the game that underpinned globalization and were actually designed by its interest in an open trade and investment climate. An open, stable and relatively peaceful system allows other countries to develop and grow faster, capturing a larger share of the benefits of globalization. In the early phase of globalization, a smaller share from a larger economic pie may still be an improvement. At some point, the costs of being a hegemon, however, outweigh the benefits. This is where the emergence of China as the new hegemon comes into play.

It is ironic, but sad, that the United States and the United Kingdom (the hegemons that helped to build a constellation in which trade, democracy, and peace were reinforcing aspects of the world order) are spoiling global and European governance. Proceeding with Brexit is a dangerous mistake, but it is an outright disaster that the United States, in the midst of a pandemic, has cut its support to the World Health Organization, in the same vein as it paralysed the World Trade Organization earlier this year. This attack on global governance is dangerous, but it is not unexpected—it is after all behaviour that one can expect from a declining hegemon in a period of deglobalization.

Lessons from history

The first thing is that isolationism offers no protection against a highly contagious virus. Indeed, probably the scariest thing about the Spanish Flu was its ability to reach even the most remote corners of our planet. Mind you, that was a world without mass tourism, global production networks and refugee flows. We have also learned that sound policies can counteract the negative economic forces that turned the 1930s into the Great Depression.

I do not think that the expansionary monetary policy does any good in this crisis that is essentially a negative supply shock x it is perhaps best seen as a signal – but support of effective demand is welcome especially if it can be organized more efficiently by focusing on the needs of new industries that we need to fight COVID-19—machinery and protective gear for the health sector, the testing industry (including case monitoring), distribution and logistics, and ICT. Finally, we have learned that the deglobalization virus in the 1930s spread especially in autocratically governed countries, but that it first showed up in the democratic world during the recent phase of deglobalization.

A striking difference between autocracies and democracies is the difference in death toll of the virus, and it may reflect the fragmentation and lack of solidarity in modern democracies.

Room for optimism

The first reason to be optimistic is because of the significant resilience of world trade and investment during global crises. Global firms have had a good exercise with the collapse of world trade by 20 percent in 2008. That collapse did set in motion the process of deglobalization, but the good news is that world trade and investment recovered to previous peak levels within a year. The finding that deglobalization started during the Financial Crisis is also a reason for optimism because Deglobalization 2.0 thus preceded Brexit and the “Make America Great Again” movement.

We should not confuse the symptoms and the disease. The attack on supranational governance has an underlying disease that can be cured if we fight the underlying causes that have driven the deglobalization process so far, that is greater inequality and a lackluster trickling down of the benefits of international trade and investment.

And last but not least, the outlook for openness of the world economy is still much better than in the 1930s. Yes, deglobalization exists. Yes openness will be much lower than previously expected. But as illustrated in Figure 1, it will in all likelihood remain at a level that is two to three times the level in the 1950s. Even if trade and investment flows would decrease according to the WTOs gloom and doom scenario our societies would remain much more open than in the 1950s, connected via the internet at a level never seen before in history.

This blogpost appeared April 21 on Edward Elgar blog and is reproduced with permission. Readers of Bliss can order the paperback Deglobalization 2.0 by Peter A.G. van Bergeijk at a discount (enter VANB15 in the discount code box at the basket stage of ordering here). The article is part of a series about the coronavirus crisis. Find more articles of this series here.

About the authors:

Peter van Bergeijk (www.petervanbergeijk.org) is Professor of International Economics and Macroeconomics at the ISS.

COVID-19 | Increased surveillance during the COVID-19 pandemic reveals the emergence of a new architecture of global power by Jacqueline Gaybor and Henry Chavez

24 April 202016 May 2020 7 min read

Central to efforts to fight the COVID-19 pandemic has been the monitoring and prevention of the spread of the virus. To do so, governments need to keep discipline amongst their populations and limit their movements. While new big data, artificial intelligence technologies and control mechanisms are being implemented, we are witnessing the emergence of a new global structure of power built with our digital traces. As the intertwined history of epidemics and states shows, the utility of these new trends and devices should not be solely evaluated in terms of their effectiveness in controlling the spread of the virus, but also in terms of their consequences for the global structure of power and the future functioning of states.

History is replete with deadly contagion episodes that have decimated populations. Viruses, these little “insignificant” beings (Žižek 2020), have created the conditions for the emergence of several devices and institutions that have become the very bases of modern nation states. Looking back, censuses, quarantines, hospitals, biometric registers and even punishment for disobedience were first conceived to be necessary to shorten the chains of infections and control the spread of diseases.

But once the crises were over, these devices were kept and instrumentalized by governments to better control their populations and territories and exercise their sovereignty. They became what Foucault called a disciplinary model of power (Foucault 1975). This model, based on a panoptical architecture (Bentham 1995) of societies and institutions, has been working, improving and spreading around the world since the 19^th Century. In this panoptical model, found for instance in prisons, hospitals, or schools, a watchman position creates a feeling of constant surveillance among the population, which triggers them to ‘behave themselves’ (assert self-discipline).

Marseille in quarantine. A naval officer with his family
The man who brought the plague to Milan

Source: gallica.bnf.fr / BnF (National Library of France)

The unprecedented scale and speed of responses to the COVID-19 crisis we face have unveiled a process of profound transformation in the architecture of power around the world. The panoptical disciplinary model from the 19^th and 20^th centuries seems insufficient to retain order in an increasingly interconnected and complex global system. The global lockdown we are part of is a step backward that reveals the weakening of the disciplinary model that supports modern nation states. At the same time, it reveals the emergence of new trends and devices with an unprecedented capacity to reshape, in a short period of time, human practices, imaginaries, and policies around the world. A huge transformation is taking place without a prior careful analysis, mostly based on new forms of population control and surveillance.

Mass harvesting of biometric data

An important distinction from other historical health crises is the largely unquestioned mass harvesting of biometric data—what Yuval Noah Harari (2020) has called a transition from ‘over-the-skin’ to ‘under-the-skin’ surveillance. Through this transition, largely sustained by contactless technologies, such as cameras measuring body temperature in airports, or at the entrance of Buddhist temple (as shown in the picture below), we have come to normalize images of temperature, breath, and heartrate screenings. But also, any actions that bear a resemblance to coughing, sneezing or blowing our noses can be collected and reported. This data is being used to identify possibly infected persons and control their mobility.

Buddha tooth relic temple, Singapore. 09 March 2020. Credits: Peter van Leeuwen.

The public seems to be rapidly accepting the risks involved with providing biometric data for prevention purposes, but caution is needed: While these devices may help solve urgent public health concerns, we do not know how they will be used afterwards.

Using apps to ‘manage the spread of the virus’

The emergence of mobile ‘coronavirus apps’ is another phenomenon that has become an integral part of collecting biometric data and limiting citizens’ freedom of movement during this pandemic. The Alipay HealthCode app was developed for the Chinese government to assign users three colour codes based on their health status and travel history, and a QR code that can be scanned at any time by law enforcement authorities. The app has specificities according to each city, but the three color codes[1] are a general commonality. The app relies on self-reporting by the user integrated with medical information provided by the government[2]. Yet, the app does not make clear to users what data is being stored, who can make use of it, and how it is used.

The global chaos has pushed different governments around the world to adopt approaches that have been conceived and designed under authoritarian regimes. For example, Andrus Ansip, Vice President of the European Commission, promoted Singapore’s TraceTogether Bluetooth-operating app as a key component for preventing COVID-19 spread in the EU. Countries like the Netherlands are looking at apps to trace the movements of citizens, but are facing resistance in light of the EU General Data Protection Regulation (GDPR) that prioritizes anonymization and privacy. Despite a strong common legal framework, we see the EU struggling to choose between ‘giving in’ and disregarding the complexities that the technological solutions impose on privacy rights in order to contain the spread of the virus, or protecting the rights of their citizens to privacy and the future of their democracies.

As the intertwined history of epidemics and states shows, the relevance of these new trends and devices should also be evaluated regarding their future consequences in the structure of power and the functioning of the states. Which of the array of devices, technologies, and policies imposed to us during this crisis will governments or corporations keep in the aftermath to exercise control over their citizens and reinforce their power? The reality in the Global South is even more complicated, considering their limited technical capacities and lack of privacy regulations.

A new architectural power design

The current global quarantine reveals a weakened of the panoptical model, a lack of capacity of the states to keep discipline and order among their populations. However, the emergence of new trends and devices suggest that a new architectural power design is in the making: an omniopticon model. This model offers the same disciplinary advantages of the Bentham’s design, yet it is designed in a virtual space. In this model everybody can be seen, heard, localized, measured and predicted without the necessity of towers, walls, windows, or watchdogs. As in the panoptical model, it doesn’t matter who exercises power, or even if there is someone actually watching: the discipline is internalized by fear.

However, two differences can be identified. First, this new model is not limited to the actual existence of institutions or physical spaces that discipline individuals. It is diluted around us; we contribute to it every day through our digital traces, our physical movements, eye blinks, and heartbeats. It can be anywhere in the world at any time and therefore it cannot be contained or driven by limited entities as the modern states. We are facing the emergence of a global structure of power with no modern political entity capable of controlling it.

Secondly, the Bentham’s ideal model guaranteed that the watchman position is held by any individual and therefore anyone outside the panopticon could supervise the watchman. A form of accountability to prevent a tyranny. In the omniopticon, the feature of accountability is replaced by automation led by big data and artificial intelligence technologies. No human can hold the position of the watcher, neither can they supervise something they don’t understand. As in the quarantines of the 17th century, this new disciplinary model that is taking over will lock all of us (the watchdogs included) in our cells, leave the keys outside the doors, and will leave no-one to reopen them afterwards.

[1] Green allows individuals to travel relatively freely, yellow confines individuals to their homes for isolation, while red indicates individuals with a confirmed COVID-19 case who should be in quarantine.

[2] This comprises medical records, travel history records, and information regarding being in contact with someone diagnosed with COVID-19.

References

Bentham, Jeremy. 1995. Jeremy Bentham: The Panopticon Writings. Edited by Miran Bozovic. London: Verso.

Foucault, Michel. 1975. Surveiller et punir: Naissance de la prison. Paris: Gallimard.

Harari, Yuval Noah. 2020. “Yuval Noah Harari: The World after Coronavirus.” Financial Times, March 20, 2020. https://www.ft.com/content/19d90308-6858-11ea-a3c9-1fe6fedcca75.

Žižek, Slavoj. 2020. “Slavoj Žižek ‘el Coronavirus es un golpe a lo Kill Bill al sistema capitalista.’” Esferapública (blog). March 18, 2020. http://esferapublica.org/nfblog/slavoj-zizek-el-coronavirus-es-un-golpe-a-lo-kill-bill-al-sistema-capitalista/.

Title Image: The new medusa, “it’s a good thing i can’t see myself”. Credits: Richard Scott

This article is part of a series about the coronavirus crisis. Find more articles of this series here.

About the authors:

Jacqueline Gaybor is a Research Associate at the International Institute of Social Studies/Erasmus University Rotterdam, in The Netherlands. She holds a Ph.D. in development studies and has an interdisciplinary background in law, gender, social studies of science and technology, and sustainable development. She is also a lecturer at Erasmus University College.

Henry Chavez is a Research Associate at the Science, Technology and Society Lab (CTS-Lab) FLACSO, in Ecuador. He holds a Ph.D. in Social Sciences from the École des Hautes Études en Sciences Sociales in Paris, France. He has an interdisciplinary background in social sciences, economics, and politics; and is a specialist in social studies of science, technology and innovation; anthropology of global systems; public policy design and evaluation.

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COVID-19 | Driving transformative social change through an internationalist response to COVID-19 by Lize Swartz

13 April 202027 May 2020 5 min read

A recent webinar organized by the Transnational Institute and partners brought together activists from all over the world to brainstorm how to make social justice central to our responses to the COVID-19 pandemic. The main message? Stand united instead of divided, let empathy inform context-based responses, and start thinking of changing what’s broken, including our healthcare systems. These principles should also guide our collective efforts to enact transformative social change that starts with our responses to the crisis and ends in a sustainable, just and resilient future—one in which no-one is left behind.

We find ourselves standing on the edge of a cliff with an abyss in front of us, left with three (or more?) choices: build a bridge to reach the other side, which is unknown territory; become engulfed by the darkness of the abyss and stand paralyzed; or retreat from the edge of the cliff to deceptive safety. This metaphor symbolizes the critical juncture[1] we’re currently at and the pathways we can choose: a radical transformation (the other side representing an unknown future, hopefully a sustainable and just one), paralysis (do nothing and watch the crisis run its course, whatever the consequences), or many steps in the opposite direction (further away from each other, creating a new normal that is worse than the one we had before).

Never before has the opportunity for real, comprehensive change been greater, never before has it been as necessary, and never before have the stakes been higher. But we have to start now―the window of opportunity is closing. There is some progress on this front as activists and thought leaders gather forces to fight for change. A webinar held recently by the Transnational Institute (TNI), in collaboration with the Alternative Information and Development Centre (AIDC) and Focus on the Global South, brought together roughly 600 participants to brainstorm how to build an internationalist response to COVID-19 in light of the crisis of deep global inequality.

Current responses to COVID-19 will shape future trends in how crises are tackled, and it is imperative to 1) prevent further injustices and inequalities arising from current responses that build upon already-existing inequalities and divides, and 2) start to enact radical change to prevent a return to the old normal or the adoption of a new normal that may be manifold worse. Thus, our responses show which of the pathways we choose now that we have reached the critical juncture, and responses should mirror the future we desire.

This seems like a mammoth task, but there are many energetic fighters across the world that are eager to get started. The webinar was a starting point to discussions and strategies for enacting change collectively. Discussions centered around not only humane responses to COVID-19, but also the need to critically discuss the state of our healthcare systems and to transform them. The crisis has clearly highlighted that healthcare systems in the Global North and Global South alike are woefully unprepared to deal with pandemics, not even providing universal healthcare services in non-crisis times. Mazibuko Jara, founder of the Treatment Action Campaign and currently Deputy Director of the Tshisimani Centre for Activist Education (both in South Africa), emphasized the need for healthcare to be seen as a fundamental human right—a public good, which would change how it is approached.

Many are not focusing on building up (improving health systems), however, but on breaking down (fighting the virus and fighting each other). Sonia Shah, award-winning investigative science journalist who authored the book ‘Pandemic: Tracking Contagions, from Cholera to Ebola and Beyond’ (2017), noted during the webinar that diseases and viruses are framed as external, prompting the closing of borders and the closing of minds as we distance ourselves from these ‘alien entities’^[2].

Rather, what she calls a ‘microbial xenophobia’ arises as the disease is blamed on China and cultural practices in Asian countries. This process of ‘othering’ entrenches racism and xenophobia, enacted both by individuals and countries, preventing a collective global effort to transformative change and leading to increasing isolation as countries shut their borders and global geopolitical divides are strengthened. A strong counternarrative to this militaristic imaginary of ‘being at war’ with the disease and with each other urgently needs to be created.

Several discussants highlighted the inadequacies of current responses. Even if stringent measures can prevent the spread of the virus, which has yet to be proven by evidence, the authoritarian measures lack humaneness, further threatening the survival and dignity of already vulnerable populations without access to basic human rights. A one-size-fits-all approach, such as a national lockdown, does not work in contexts where such lockdowns can hasten the spread of the virus and lead to suffering due to loss of income and hunger, for example.

Thus, keynote speakers at the seminar concluded, we need an internationalist approach that:

Is based on solidarity and empathy so that responses are context-specific and do not create new injustices or inequalities that place an additional burden on vulnerable people
Creates a strong counternarrative to the xenophobic, militaristic narrative that is driving defensive and authoritarian responses, with a central emphasis on human rights and a common humanity, shown in how we communicate and how we act
Are based on health as a human right, a public good and working toward transforming the health system to this end
Recognizes that we are facing a supercrisis, that standing crises of poverty, inequality and climate change are interacting with biological crises such as COVID-19 and cannot be viewed in isolation
Counters growing authoritarianism and fundamentalism at all levels of society that are threatening to deepen social divides and split the world apart.

Participants agreed that solidarity and empathy should drive responses to COVID-19, but I argue that we need to go further than just responding. Our recognition of the root causes of injustices and inequalities should drive a multi-pronged strategy to not only prevent the spread of the virus and prevent unjust responses to it, but also to enact radical transformation through our responses to ensure that the inequalities the crisis feasts on are eradicated and that no-one is left behind as we move on to a future we can only dream of.

Without the recognition that the crisis requires a collective global response, we will get nowhere. And central to this is questioning the underlying structures and institutions that have created the breeding ground for the virus and the disaster that it has brought along with it, and changing them through intense and enduring collaboration based on a sense of shared humanity, or what especially Buddhist monks have called interbeing.

[1] Thank you to Duncan Green for mentioning the term ‘critical juncture’ that perfectly sums up the thoughts that I’ve had since the pandemic broke out in February.

^[2]She also highlights the failure to recognize that pathogens or microbes become pandemics due to humankind’s encroachment on wildlife habitats.

This article is part of a series about the coronavirus crisis. Find more articles of this series here.

About the authors:

Lize Swartz is a PhD researcher at the ISS focusing on water user interactions with sustainability-climate crises in the water sector, in particular the role of water scarcity politics on crisis responses and adaptation processes. She is also the editor of the ISS Blog Bliss.

COVID-19 | Ecuador, COVID-19 and the IMF: how austerity exacerbated the crisis by Ana Lucía Badillo Salgado and Andrew M. Fischer

9 April 202016 May 2020 7 min read

Ecuador is currently (as of 8 April) the South American country worst affected by COVID-19 in terms of the number of confirmed cases and fatalities per capita. While even the universal health systems of Northern European countries are becoming severely frayed by the nature of this pandemic, Ecuador serves as a powerful example of how much worse the situation is for many low- and middle-income countries, particularly those whose public health systems have already been undermined by financial assistance programmes with international financial institutions (IFIs). The IMF and other IFIs such as the World Bank must acknowledge the role they have played and continue to play in undermining public health systems in ways that exacerbate the effects of the pandemic in many developing countries.

The recent IMF Extended Fund Facility (EFF) Arrangement, signed in March 2019 with the Government of Ecuador, was already the subject of massive protests in October 2019 given the austerity and ‘structural reforms’ imposed on the country (aka structural adjustment). It has also directly contributed to the severity of the pandemic in this country given that health and social security systems were among the first casualties of the austerity and reforms. In particular, the government’s COVID-19 response has been severely hindered by dramatic reductions of public health investment and by large layoffs of public health workers preceding the outbreak of the virus.

From this perspective, even though the IMF has recently moved to offer finance and debt relief to developing countries hit by the COVID-19 pandemic, a much more serious change of course is needed. For this, it is vital to understand its own role – and that of other IFIs such as the World Bank – in undermining health systems before the emergence of the pandemic in various developing countries, lest similar policy recipes are again repeated.

The baseline

It is clear that the pre-existing national healthcare system in Ecuador has been replete with problems even in ‘normal’ times. As in most of Latin America, the weaknesses of the healthcare system in Ecuador stem from its segmented and stratified character, with a distinct segregation between three main subsectors – the public, social security, and private sectors. The Ecuadorian Ministry of Health has a weak coordinating and regulatory role over these three subsectors, each of which caters to different beneficiary populations and with clearly distinct quality of services. The public system is the lowest quality and the one accessed by most poor people. Despite claims of universal health, the national system is a far cry from anything approaching genuine universalism.

Moreover, there has been a progressive privatization and commodification of healthcare since 2008. For instance, the building of capacity within the social security system has been undermined by the channelling of health funding via contracts to the private sector, where pricing is also mostly unregulated [1]. More generally, Ecuador has consistently exhibited one the highest out-of-pocket (OOP) health expenditure shares in South America, despite a government discourse and constitutional mandate to deliver free, high quality, public healthcare for all citizens. OOP payments – or direct payments by users at the point of service – reached 41.4% per total health spending in 2016 [2]. They include, for instance, payments for medicine or medical supplies by poor people in public hospitals, as well as payments by middle- and upper-class people for consultations and surgeries. The COVID-19 crisis puts pressure on precisely these aspects of healthcare provisioning, rendering the system prone to systemic failure for the majority of the population, especially in times of economic crisis when the ability of users to pay is severely curtailed.

Crisis and IFIs

These problems in the healthcare system have been exacerbated by the austerity measures of the current government of Lenín Moreno. The measures were introduced in the context of the protracted economic crisis that started in 2014 and have been endorsed by the IMF and other IFIs. Public health expenditure plateaued at 2.7% of GDP in 2017 and 2018, and then fell slightly to 2.6% in 2019, when GDP also slightly contracted (see figure). This was despite the constitutional goal that established an increase of at least 0.5% of GDP per year until 4% was to be reached, which is still far below the 6% of GDP recommended by the Pan American Health Organization [3].

Source: elaborated from the Fiscal Policy Observatory data (last accessed 7 April 2020 at https://www.observatoriofiscal.org/publicaciones/transparencia-fiscal/file/221-transparencia-fiscal-no-163-marzo-2020.html)

* The main component of this expenditure is on non-contributory social protection (social cash transfers).

** It excludes health expenditure of the social security system.

However, the collapse in public investment in the health sector has been far more dramatic, falling by 64% from 2017 to 2019, or from USD 306 million in 2017 to USD 110 million in 2019 [4]. Such reductions would have been largely borne by the public health system and constitute expenditures that are vital for a COVID-19 response, such as the construction of hospitals and the purchase of medical equipment.

It was in this context that the IMF Extended Fund Facility (EFF) was agreed and signed in March 2019. Within the framework of this programme, the government implemented a large layoff of public healthcare workers (including doctors, nurses, auxiliary nurses, stretcher-bearers, social workers, and other healthcare workers). The layoffs continued throughout 2019, despite protests by the National Syndicate of Healthcare Workers of the Ministry of Health [5], [6], [7]. It is difficult to know the exact number of layoffs because of the fragmented functioning of the health system, although within the Ministry of Public Health alone, 3,680 public health workers were laid off in 2019, representing 4.5% of total employment in this Ministry and 29% of total central government layoffs in that year [calculated from 8]. Similar reductions in the social security sector were announced in 2019 for 2020, although we have not yet been able to find any data on these reductions.

Thus, it is not a surprise that Ecuador is currently doing so poorly in handling the COVID 19 crisis. The retrenchment of the public health system together with an already weak and retrenched social protection system coupled for the perfect storm. But even more worrying is that, in the face of the pandemic, the government paid 324 million USD on the capital and interest of its sovereign ‘2020 bonds’ on 24 March instead of prioritizing the management of the health crisis. This decision was taken despite a petition on 22 March by the Ecuadorean assembly to suspend such payments, along with a chorus of civil society organizations lobbying for the same [9] [10]. The government nonetheless justified the payment as a trigger for further loans from the IMF, World Bank, Inter-American Development Bank, and Andean Financial Corporation [11]. This is especially problematic given that Ecuador has been hard hit by the collapse of oil prices and, as a dollarized economy, its only control over money supply and hence hope for economic stimulus rests on preventing monetary outflows from the economy (and encouraging inflows).

The payment is also paradoxical given that the IMF and the World Bank are currently calling for the prioritization of health expenditure and social protection and for a standstill of debt service, and have announced initiatives for debt relief and emergency financing [12] [13]. Nonetheless, despite such noble rhetoric, it appears that the precondition for such measures continues to be the protection of private creditors over urgent health financing needs.

Atoning for past and present sins on the path to universalism

The COVID-19 pandemic undoubtedly exposes the inadequacies of existing social policy systems in developing countries and the urgent need of moving towards more genuinely universalistic systems. Ecuador is exemplary given that it has until recently been celebrated as a New Left social model even while its national health system has remained deeply segregated and increasingly commodified.

However, while the IMF and other IFIs have emphasised the importance of placing health expenditures in developing countries at the top of the priority list in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic [12], they have not acknowledged their own continuing roles in undermining these priorities. Indeed, their messaging is often contradictory, given that both the IMF and the World Bank have also repeatedly insisted that developing countries must persist with ‘structural reforms’ during and after the pandemic [13] [14]. In other words, there is no evidence that the course has been reset. As one way to induce a reset, it is important that they acknowledge the roles they have played and continue to play in undermining public health systems and universalistic social policy more generally, lest they continue to repeat them despite the switch to more noble rhetoric.

Sources:

[1] http://cdes.org.ec/web/wp-content/uploads/2016/01/privatizaci%C3%B3n-salud.pdf

[2] https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(19)30841-4/fulltext

[3] https://www.cepal.org/es/publicaciones/45337-america-latina-caribe-la-pandemia-covid-19-efectos-economicos-sociales

[4] https://coyunturaisip.wordpress.com/2020/03/28/los-recortes-cobran-factura-al-ecuador-la-inversion-en-salud-se-redujo-un-36-en-2019/

[5] https://www.eluniverso.com/noticias/2019/03/06/nota/7219694/trabajadores-publicos-salud-denuncian-despidos-masivos

[6] https://www.elcomercio.com/actualidad/recorte-personal-contratos-ocasionales-ecuador.html

[7] https://www.elcomercio.com/actualidad/despidos-trabajadores-ministerio-salud-evaluacion.html

[8] https://www.observatoriofiscal.org/publicaciones/estudios-y-an%C3%A1lisis/file/220-n%C3%BAmero-de-servidores-p%C3%BAblicos-del-presupuesto-2018-2019.html

[9] https://www.elcomercio.com/actualidad/asamblea-suspender-pago-deuda-coronavirus.html

[10] https://ww2.elmercurio.com.ec/2020/03/24/la-conaie-pide-al-gobierno-suspender-el-pago-de-la-deuda-externa/

[11] https://www.bourse.lu/issuer/Ecuador/34619 (first link under the notices section)

[12] https://www.imf.org/en/News/Articles/2020/04/03/vs-some-say-there-is-a-trade-off-save-lives-or-save-jobs-this-is-a-false-dilemma

[13] https://www.worldbank.org/en/news/speech/2020/03/04/joint-press-conference-on-covid-19-by-imf-managing-director-and-world-bank-group-president

[14] https://www.worldbank.org/en/news/speech/2020/03/23/remarks-by-world-bank-group-president-david-malpass-on-g20-finance-ministers-conference-call-on-covid-19

This article is part of a series about the coronavirus crisis. Read all articles of this series here.

About the authors:

Ana Lucía Badillo Salgado is a PhD researcher at the ISS focusing on the political economy of social protection reforms in Ecuador and Paraguay, in particular the role of external actors in influencing social policymaking. She is also a Lecturer at Leiden University College.

Andrew M. Fischer is Associate Professor of Social Policy and Development Studies at the ISS and the Scientific Director of CERES, The Dutch Research School for International Development. His latest book, Poverty as Ideology (Zed, 2018), was awarded the International Studies in Poverty Prize by the Comparative Research Programme on Poverty (CROP) and Zed Books and, as part of the award, is now fully open access (http://bora.uib.no/handle/1956/20614). Since 2015, he has been leading a European Research Council Starting Grant on the political economy of externally financing social policy in developing countries. He has been known to tweet @AndrewM_Fischer

COVID-19 | Rethinking how to respond to COVID-19 in places where humanitarian crises intersect by Rodrigo Mena

7 April 202016 May 2020 6 min read

It is widely known that COVID-19 will disproportionately affect developing countries and impoverished peoples. Many of these countries are already affected by conflict and disasters including humanitarian crises, making the contexts even more fragile and complex and the threat of COVID-19 even more serious. Some approaches to fighting the coronavirus pandemic might not be feasible in these contexts where multiple crises intersect, argues Rodrigo Mena. The responses implemented in many countries are not sufficient to minimize impacts that include the potential loss of thousands of lives in vulnerable contexts; prevention and context-specific solutions that also address the root causes of humanitarian crises are needed now more than ever.

While many are waiting for the crisis to pass, we need to remember that hazards such as conflicts, earthquakes, or droughts do not take holidays during pandemic times. When they set in, governments will have to decide where to allocate the limited funds they have. Whereas many countries already have to make hard choices, hovering between strategies to prevent an economic recession and the prevention of the spread of the virus, countries with several pre-existing and ongoing crises, particularly those dependent on humanitarian aid, have even harder choices to make. When a disaster occurs together with COVID-19, will efforts be directed toward rebuilding the country or stopping the spread of the virus? And how will these countries deal with ongoing issues such as underdevelopment in general?

After four years researching disaster responses and humanitarian aid in conflict-affected places, I summarise here some considerations to take into account on why the general approach to COVID-19 might not be viable in many situations. Most recommendations can make things worse in traditional humanitarian crisis scenarios or places where the poorest and most vulnerable live. The places I studied faced disasters, conflict, and were generally underdeveloped, making them particularly vulnerable to any shock, including pandemics such as the COVID-19, and rendering governments incapable of responding effectively.

Refugee Camp in Bangladesh. Photo: Rod Mena

Additional issues are multiple. Here are a few:

Lack of access to water. With about 780 million people in the world without access to clean water (780 million!) and in places facing conflict, ‘access to safe water is often compromised; infrastructure is damaged or goes into decline, pipelines are in disrepair, and water collection is dangerous’, as presented by UNICEF. The advice to wash your hands regularly or use disinfectant might certainly not be feasible for many. In fact, aid actors are already struggling to deliver water in many places and an extra demand for it can exacerbate or be the source of new conflicts.
Lack of space. As many have indicated, COVID-19 will disproportionately affect the most vulnerable in the world, including those depending on humanitarian aid to survive. Social distancing might be impossible for the close to 30% of the world urban population living in slums, or for the close to 7 million living in refugee camps. And with more than 6% of the world’s employed population in the informal economy, the option to stay at home or quarantine looks unfeasible for many, let alone for those whose homes have been destroyed or left behind when they had to move because of disasters and conflict.
Greater humanitarian need. In addition, less-developed countries and populations not being aided at the moment might also start needing support. For example, despite multiple difficulties in many refugee camps and crisis-affected areas, there is a system in place to support people in need, but people living out of those spaces might struggle as much or more with this pandemic. The humanitarian aid sector, thus, will face a greater number of people depending on external aid. How and whether the aid sector should assist people affected directly or indirectly by the coronavirus is still an open debate, not only in terms of the real capacities to do it beyond the funding, but also in terms of capacities to do it adequately and safely[1].
Challenges to apply response strategies. A number of challenges can also impede the World Health Organization’s Test, Treat, Track strategy in places under high levels of conflict or facing humanitarian crises[2]:

Testing. If there is zero or reduced access to testing kits (and laboratories or medical personnel to run the tests), accurate figures on the number of deaths or infected people are obscured, making it difficult to plan how to provide relief.

Treating. When it comes to treating the most severely affected by COVID-19, the main procedure is connecting them to ventilators. A global shortage of ventilators is already apparent, and in least-developed countries, we need to add reduced access to reliable sources of electricity. In fact, close 20% of the world populations do not have access to electricity, and in low-income countries that can reach up to 60% —and yes, this includes hospitals that only have electricity via petrol or diesel generators.

Tracking. Then, when it comes to tracking the virus, we know that in places affected by conflict and disasters, many people are displaced or constantly on the move (there are 70.8 million displaced people worldwide, ranging from internally displaced persons to refugees and asylum seekers). Also, the demographics or databases of these places are not always reliable. This makes tracking very cumbersome or even impossible.

Finally, the option to close borders or declare lockdowns might be detrimental in places affected by war or conflict, where many flee to safety or do not have access to goods and services to support their lives.

Vulnerability is created

These are far from all the concerns, but they are enough to show what is well known in disaster studies: that disasters are not natural but socially constructed, including the COVID-19 crisis, as a blog post from Ilan Kelman clearly shows. The pandemic that we have is much more the consequence of social and politically wrong decisions and lack of preparedness than the spreading rate or lethality of the virus. Particularly, a lack of preparedness or decision not to act based on the knowledge that we had (because multiple official reports indicated the probabilities of a pandemic like this and how to prevent it or mitigate its impacts), has greatly contributed to the severity of the crisis[3].

If we do not start thinking about how to prepare to COVID-19 in less-developed places with context-specific solutions, we will be repeating the story; we will keep choosing not to be prepared, which will keep on resulting in catastrophic impacts. If there is something that we have learnt from disasters in the past, it is that prevention is almost always better than responding. Not doing so, or expecting that measures as these reviewed above will work in the most vulnerable places, is to turn a blind eye and hope for the best.

[1] But now with a global economic recession and an aid system already with a 40% shortfall on the funds needed to assist everyone in need, as presented in the 2019 ‘Global Humanitarian Assistance Report’.

[2] And in many cases not even feasible in western countries like France or the United States.

[3] For instance, the ‘National Risk Profile 2016’ of the Netherlands indicated that ‘due to the possible destabilising impact, the main focus of the NRP [National Risk Profile] is on the risks of a large-scale outbreak of an infectious disease, such as a flu pandemic’. Similarly, in 2006, the United States developed the National Strategy for Pandemic Influenza based on the risk of this event to occur (with the following update in 2017). Also, astonishingly, a report on global preparedness for health emergencies dated September 2019, issued by the Global Preparedness Monitoring Board, co-convened by World Health Organization and the World Bank, that ‘explores and identifies the most urgent needs and actions required to accelerate preparedness for health emergencies, focusing in particular on biological risks manifesting as epidemics and pandemics’, concludes that a global pandemic ‘would be catastrophic, creating widespread havoc, instability and insecurity. The world is not prepared’.

This article is part of a series about the coronavirus crisis. Read all articles of this series here.

About the author:

Rodrigo (Rod) Mena is a socio-environmental researcher and AiO-PhD at the International Institute of Social Studies of the Erasmus University Rotterdam. His current research project focuses on disaster response and humanitarian aid governance in complex and high-intensity conflict-affected scenarios, with South Sudan, Afghanistan and Yemen as main cases. He has experience conducting fieldwork and researching in conflict and disaster zones from in Africa, Latin America, Europe, Oceania and Asia.

Image Credits: Rod Mena

COVID-19 | Europe’s far right whips out anti-migrant rhetoric to target refugees during coronavirus crisis by Haris Zargar

6 April 202016 May 2020 4 min read

The explosion of the coronavirus has dramatically brought about fresh challenges for refugees, asylum seekers and migrants. With countries adopting stringent measures to contain this pandemic, including rigid border controls, the outbreak will not only have a huge impact on those driven out of their countries by crisis situations, but may create another refugee tragedy that may be worse than what has been experienced before.

The global response to the spread of the virus formally known as COVID-19 has been shaped by the complexity of national political interests and hardened immigration policies. Xenophobic rhetoric about how migrants and refugees are potential carriers of the deadly virus and pose a health threat has already become a central theme for right-wing populists in Europe, who advocate for cracking down on immigration.

As Steven Erlanger aptly noted in an article for The New York Times, COVID-19 is not only proliferating, but is also “infecting societies with a sense of insecurity, fear and fragmentation”. The possible outcome in the aftermath of the pandemic, therefore, may be a further polarization of societies and ‘othering’ of refugees and migrants.

This will likely jeopardize their rights and future course, setting in motion a new wave of xenophobic and racial politics bolstering far-right groups in many countries as a result. And this global health emergency may allow governments to implement temporary immigration and health-related measures that could systematically target refugees, asylum seekers, and migrants on the pretext of containing the spread of the virus.

Politicians across the European Union (EU) have already begun to exploit the COVID-19 outbreak by levelling suspicion at refugees and migrants. Ultra-nationalist Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orbán blamed migrants for the spread of the virus in Hungary: “We are fighting a two-front war, one front is called migration and the other one belongs to the coronavirus. There is a logical connection between the two as both spread with movement.”

In Italy, currently the most affected European country with the highest death toll outside China, right-wing political leader Matteo Salvini whipped up anti-immigration rhetoric by suggesting that migrants from Africa may have brought the virus with them. Greece’s nationalist government has cited the risk of COVID-19 infection as its reason for pressing ahead with a contentious plan to build “closed” camps for asylum seekers trapped on the Aegean islands of Lesbos and Chios.

In the Balkans, Croatian Health Minister Vili Beroš said migrants represent a ‘potential’ risk of spreading the virus, while Serbia’s far-right parties have threatened to expel about 6,000 migrants who are residing in the country. Far-right groups in France, Germany and Spain have called for suspending the Schengen agreement that allows passport-free travel among 26 member states in the EU. Border closures and tighter travel restrictions have been used as preventive measures during previous public health emergencies. Following the outbreak of diseases such as the Zika virus in 2016, Ebola in 2014, and H1N1 influenza in 2009, many countries imposed tight travel restrictions.

The World Health Organization has warned that trying to tighten border security will not work and may even impede the global fight against the spread of COVID-19. “We cannot forget migrants, we cannot forget undocumented workers, we cannot forget prisoners,” said WHO executive director and public health specialist Michael Ryan. “The only way to beat [coronavirus] is to leave no one behind.”

Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF, or Doctors Without Borders) has also urged Greece to immediately evacuate refugees and migrants from overcrowded camps on its islands owing to the high risk of COVID-19 spreading swiftly among people living in squalid conditions. The organization said that it would be impossible to contain an outbreak in such camp settings and that it had not yet seen a credible emergency plan in case of an outbreak.

Recent humanitarian situations such as the ongoing civil war in Syria have highlighted how the destruction of critical healthcare infrastructure in a country can contribute to the emergence of infectious and communicable diseases. With fears growing over the excessive strain on public healthcare services owing to the coronavirus outbreak and an inability to cope with the rising number of infected people, the health implications for refugees may be profound.

This article is part of a series about the coronavirus crisis. Read all articles of this series here. This is a shortened version of an article originally published by New Frame.

About the author:

Haris Zargar is a PhD researcher looking at links between land reforms, social movements and armed insurgencies in Indian-controlled Kashmir. He has been a journalist for the past nine years, writing on the intersection of politics, conflict and human security. He worked as a political correspondent based in New Delhi with leading Indian new outlets including The Press Trust of India and The Mint. He holds degrees in Journalism and Development Studies from the University of Kashmir, and the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS), University of London.

Image Credit: EYE DJ on Flickr

COVID-19 | Lessons from the COVID-19 crisis for climate change politics by Murat Arsel

2 April 202016 May 2020 7 min read

COVID-19 and climate change bear striking – and worrying – similarities and differences. Both are characterized by high uncertainty, but while COVID-19 has been identified as an immediate threat and action has been taken despite the absence of comprehensive knowledge, uncertainty has been touted as impeding concerted efforts to transform energy systems to combat climate change. The global economic system has strongly contributed to our failure to make radical changes. A different system – one that is not so fundamentally focused on maximizing profits over all other concerns – could have been better placed to make the undeniably painful economic adjustments we are forced to make, both before the emergence of COVID-19 and to prevent a catastrophe arising due to climate change. While both crises require dramatic societal transformations, we need to be aware of the potential negative political consequences of declaring them as emergencies.

One thing is certain about COVID-19: we simply do not know enough. Some aspects about it are simply unknown, on others we have conflicting information. Scientists are asked to take shortcuts from their rigorous methods and to offer their ‘best guess’ on hugely consequential questions. Policy makers then take decisions within a fog of uncertainty since experts have also argued that doing nothing is the absolute worst option. This is a terrifying situation for us all, but it is not entirely without precedent.

While the threat of COVID-19 might seem unique, there are some interesting parallels between this threat and that of climate change. At a general level, neither is simply a ‘natural’ phenomenon. This is not to suggest – as some have – that they are a ‘hoax’. Viruses exist, mutate, and infect ‘naturally’. Similarly, the climate of the earth shows variation due to various factors outside of human influence. But what imbues both COVID-19 and contemporary climate change with a catastrophic potential is the political economic context in which they are developing. More specifically, it is global capitalism that takes what is ‘natural’ and weaponizes it against humanity.

In the case of climate change, the problem is not that humans are extracting natural resources in order to secure their livelihoods. The manner in which this extraction is carried out, its continuous intensification and, most importantly, the extraction of resources not necessarily to meet the human need to exist and to thrive, but rather to fulfil the need of capitalism to continuously expand, is what transforms extraction into a planet-altering force captured in the concept of the Anthropocene.

Similarly, the astonishing spread of COVID-19 could not have been possible without the incredible powers of global capitalism. The virus has spread so quickly and so effectively on the back of a global structure that transports goods, humans and – let us not forget – ideas at almost magical speeds. But it is important to not fall into the trap of blaming connectivity and mobility for the spread of the virus but the underlying economic structures that made combatting it so difficult and painful. While such a pandemic could also occur under a different global economic order, the precarity of not just individuals or classes but even some of the richest and technologically sophisticated economies is what makes COVID-19 so dangerous. A different system – one that is not so fundamentally focused on maximizing profits over all other concerns – could have been better placed to make the undeniably painful economic adjustments we are forced to make.

The parallels between climate change and coronavirus do not end there. Climate scientists – those in the natural as well as the social sciences – have long been arguing that if drastic changes are not made to the way we produce and consume, in other words to the way we live, we can expect apocalyptic changes to global ecosystems. When these materialize, their impacts are likely to be just as and probably even more colossal than the toll that COVID-19 will have exacted. Yet scientists’ pleas for radical action have been rebuffed on two grounds – we do not know enough, and dramatic curbs to economic activities are fundamentally against public interest. The effectiveness of these arguments has been far greater in the case of climate change than in COVID-19! As the COVID-19 crisis shows, these two grounds have not prevented governments across the world from acting in response to the COVID-19 threat.

Can we expect a change in attitude to climate change politics once the COVID-19 crisis is over? That is certain though it is possible to expect two dramatically different responses which will depend on how, in the aftermath of COVID-19, societies around the world come to understand the now evolving response. If the response to COVID-19 comes to be seen as an overreaction or a form of mass delusion, this would have massively negative effects on ongoing efforts to respond to climate change. That would mean not only that scientific authorities – not just the epidemiologists or immunologists but the entire enterprise itself – will be discredited, opening the door to an ever-intensifying challenge that will dwarf the anti-vaccination movement. Worse still, such an impression will embolden the Trumps and Bolsanaros of the world (unfortunately not a rare breed!) to challenge and pull back all too necessary measures to reduce greenhouse gas emissions.

However, if the experts as well as politicians and policy makers who follow them are vindicated in making draconian changes (and if those who do not do so are vilified), we can expect a new era in which scientific authority is once again celebrated and valorised (rather than challenged by baseless arguments as has been the case with the anti-vaccination movement). It can also be expected that the spectre of an ecological apocalypse will be taken more seriously, bringing it with it meaningful socio-economic and cultural transformations to adapt to and mitigate climate change.

Authoritarianism creeping in through the back door

Implementation of dramatic societal transformation in response to anticipated catastrophes might at first be seen as an entirely positive outcome. But it is important to remember that all appeals to emergency, such as the declaration of a state of emergency, regardless of how justified they are, contain within them the seed of authoritarianism. A call to urgent action is almost by definition a call to silence dissent, to short-circuit deliberative democracy and to privilege the opinion of a select few over all others.

While rare, the climate movement has long had an authoritarian streak as demonstrated by this statement by no less than the developer of the Gaia hypothesis, James Lovelock: “We need a more authoritative world. We’ve become a sort of cheeky, egalitarian world where everyone can have their say. It’s all very well, but there are certain circumstances – a war is a typical example – where you can’t do that. You’ve got to have a few people with authority who you trust who are running it”[1]. A few years ago, such statements could have been considered fringe opinions intended more for provocation than for actual implementation. With countless leaders and scientists comparing COVID-19 to a war, there is genuine reason to be actively worried about ending up in a situation where climate change too becomes securitized in this manner.

This brings us back to the question of uncertainty and authority. While our knowledge of climate change – how it works, what its impacts are and how we can reverse it – are incomparably better than what we know about COVID-19, the socio-economic and ecological decisions that need to be taken are far from obvious if we are to avoid an economic crisis similar to the one brewing at the moment. How can we transition towards a carbon neutral economy? Which fossil fuel reserves need to be designated as ‘unburnable’? Where do we restore ecosystems and to what state? How, if at all, do we prevent flooding of cities and towns? What are the ecological tipping points and how can we prevent them if they remain largely unseen? These and countless other questions require not only authoritative scientific input but genuine deliberative discussion as well.

No society – regardless of how extensive its education and research attainment – is ready for this challenge. This is because the model of economic development that has dominated since World War II has created a relationship with science that Ulrich Beck has brilliantly described as “organized irresponsibility”[2], in which global capitalism has powerfully capitalized on the explosion of productivity enabled by modern science and technology while brushing under the metaphorical carpet its risks and uncertainties. Debates about the safety of genetically modified foods and nuclear power were harbingers of a brewing crisis of how science and technology can be socialized. COVID-19 is a stark reminder that the challenge remains great. If it is not addressed, we can expect many more war-like situations, not least in relation to climate change.

[1] https://www.theguardian.com/environment/blog/2010/mar/29/james-lovelock

[2] https://www.theguardian.com/education/2015/jan/06/ulrich-beck

This article is part of a series about the coronavirus crisis. Find more articles of this series here.

About the author:

Murat Arsel is Professor of Political Economy of Sustainable Development. His research and teaching focus on the tensions between nature, capitalism, and emancipatory socio-economic development. Additional details of his work can be found at www.marsel.me

Image Credit: Markus Spiske on Unsplash

COVID-19 | Sex workers driven further to the margins by the coronavirus crisis by Jaffer Latief Najar

31 March 202016 May 2020 6 min read

Despite inroads having been made in recent years to improve their rights and reduce precarity, sex workers are still shunned, struggling to shift negative attitudes toward this age-old occupation. The coronavirus crisis is placing further pressure on sex workers, not only leading to a loss of income, but also pushing them further to the edges of society. Jaffer Latief Najar argues that states have the responsibility to ensure the acknowledgement of sex work and its entrepreneurs so that they can enjoy the same benefits as other employees or entrepreneurs during and after the crisis.

Sex work is a centuries-old global occupation, yet sex workers have always been marginalized. The sector has historically been regulated to keep tabs on the social, racial, political, and economic mobility of its workers. The regulation of the activities and bodies of sex workers worldwide and their marginalization are predominantly a colonial legacy. In the contemporary age, sex work is approached in binaries, seen either as legal (but regulated) labour or conflated with sex trafficking, which encourages its illegalization.

Concerning the radical changes enacted worldwide due to the spread of the coronavirus, including lockdowns and the temporary halting of high-risk occupations, it appears that the livelihoods, financial mobility, and health situation of sex workers are at risk. Some sex workers have used social media platforms to point out the decline of clients, income, and increasing health risks following the outbreak of COVID-19. For instance, one sex worker used a chain of threads and tweeted that,

“There’s no clients! Nobody in their right mind is having sex with a stranger during a pandemic. So often we’re not even given the option of seeing clients! Which means we’re BROKE. ”

Some sex workers are even offering extra unpaid services to continue drawing clients during the crisis. For instance, a number of sex workers are offering services such as ‘pay for 12 hours and get 12 free’. Indeed, sex workers in the Global South, in India for example, are struggling to make temporary arrangements to make ends meet, even fearing possible starvation if the current crisis endures. It explicitly speaks to the severity of coronavirus crisis and the strategies for survival employed by sex workers themselves. More so, sex workers’ communities and collectives have also come forward to raise funds to support sex workers who are suffering from financial stress during the time of this coronavirus pandemic. But is it their responsibility to ensure their survival? What role should the state play in helping sex workers stay afloat financially?

The precarity of sex work

Policies and feminists have contesting views on approaches to sex work. Some view it as a form of ‘exploitation’, while others see it as a form of work, framed in relation to individuals’ agency. The contestation is further complicated by the global anti-trafficking discourse, which largely conflates sex work with sex trafficking and encourages the criminalization of sex work. The United Nations Protocol to Prevent, Suppress and Punish Trafficking in Persons, Especially Women and Children (UN TIP Protocol) clearly promotes such a criminalization framework, which, after acknowledgement by the majority of nation-states, is shown to have a strong negative impact on the lives and livelihoods of sex workers. Indeed, within such a dominant frame, institutional support largely reaches sex workers when they represent themselves as victims of trafficking rather than as independent agential sex workers. My personal field engagement in India’s largest red light district in Sonagachi has provided ample evidence that the criminalization framework encourages the incarceration of sex workers who resist being framed as victims of trafficking and the dismissal of their basic human rights.

The tensions are also embedded in an intersectional system that supresses sex workers socially, politically, economically, and as individuals. During interviews conducted as part of my ongoing fieldwork on the research topic ‘Locating marginalized voices in human trafficking discourse: learning from the experiences of urban subalterns in India’ in Asia’s biggest red light district in Sonagachi, Kolkata, sex workers often noted the issue of exclusion from or discrimination in public healthcare services and in trying to access welfare benefits due to their occupation. Moreover, a majority of sex workers are working with concealed identities and are using surrogate jobs titles to deal with social stigma and tensions in the family.

The current coronavirus pandemic creates a situation of hardship for them as they avoid working in streets and brothels and lose a share of income, which they present to their families as a salary from surrogate jobs, in addition to their crucial need to earn money to support themselves and their families. During my recent telephonic conversation with sex workers in India, after the outbreak of coronavirus pandemic, it appears that some of the sex workers are migrating back to their native villages as they can’t afford the expenses and possible risks in Sonagachi. Besides, it appears that the situation has become more risky and harsh for those migrant sex workers who stay back or even can’t go back to their native villages, especially undocumented migrant sex workers from outside states and outside national boundaries. It highlights that institutional support during such crisis situations is essential.

State support essentially needed

In pandemic situations, states largely comes forward to support those who are suffering from a loss of income (for example, see how the United States is responding). But due to the illegality or precarity of the occupation in many contexts, sex workers often are not seen as entrepreneurs who qualify for government subsidies or financial assistance. In such cases, there would be no mandate or institutional responsibility to offer financial packages, healthcare services, or relief benefits to sex workers. Industries and several unorganized work sectors suffering losses due to the coronavirus pandemic have been offered financial packages or healthcare benefits by several government agencies or employing institutions. But if sex work is not a commercially acknowledged industry, sex workers will be further cornered and will suffer further marginalization. Also, being a non-acknowledged industry, sex workers have no option of benefitting from other government support systems that have made several provisions to protect employees and companies alike. Indeed, those states that regulate sex work as work have imposed a recent ban on the commercial activities related to sex work due to the coronavirus pandemic, which has the potential of encouraging financial instabilities and further precarities among sex workers if no institutional support is provided.

The system of non-acknowledgement of sex work in established policies therefore excludes sex workers from entitlements or rights and invisiblizes sex workers during a pandemic situation, as the current coronavirus pandemic has demonstrated. It also holds back the political, social, and institutional responsibility of the state and other actors, including civil society, towards marginalized communities of sex workers. The onus, on the contrary, is indeed forcefully and irresponsibly imposed on sex workers to manage their situation, survive, and take high risks for the fulfilment of their basic human needs. Changes in the global socio-political landscape due to the coronavirus pandemic are hence leading to further burdens and precarities in the lives of sex workers, whereas an institutional system is failing to show any sign of support. But it is also a learning lesson for sex workers’ collectives and their allies in preparing responses to future pandemic situations. Last but not least and importantly, the crisis also puts in the spotlight the desirability of the criminalization approach toward sex work that exists in dominant anti-trafficking models.

This article is part of a series about the coronavirus crisis. Find more articles of this series here.

About the author:

Jaffer Latief Najar currently works as a researcher in the Vital Cities and Citizen Program at International Institute of Social Studies (ISS) in The Hague, Netherlands. He can be reached on Twitter or LinkedIn.

Image Credit: Matt Zulak on Flickr. The image has been cropped.

About the authors:

Policy makers need to focus on actual use

Individual characteristics do matter for use of an account

Financial infrastructure is key

About the author:

[1] Also see https://www.ilo.org/wcmsp5/groups/public/—dgreports/—dcomm/documents/briefingnote/wcms_740877.pdf

[2] The situation is especially difficult in urban areas, where households are unable to smooth the consumption shock through household-level food production.

[3] There are even more channels that contribute to rising hunger and lack of food supplies—the pandemic stopped the movement of migrant workers involved in harvesting activities, resulting in a loss of production for many farmers because of a lack of workers to pick vegetables.

[4] Nutritious food can be 10 times more expensive than basic calories as a result of COVID-19.

Title Image Credit: Jimena Pacheco

[1] Bolt N and Tulathimutte T (2016) Remote Research. Rosenfeld Media. Available from: http://rosenfeldmedia.com/books/remote-research/#faq (accessed 1 November 2016). No page.

[1] The demographics of Thuisbezorgd, another food delivery platform, appear different. Another important difference is that Thuisbezorgd employs its riders and pays them an hourly wage, whereas Uber Eats and Deliveroo work with freelancers who are paid per order.

[2] The rider in question admitted he had not seen food delivery work listed as such, but he reasoned that “in my mind, I feel that people need to eat and if they order food, then this is essential”.

[3] Formally: ‘orientation year highly educated persons’.

Title Image Credit: Roy Huijsmans.

[1] All names of research participants have been changed

[2] Assamese word for paternal aunt

[3] Assamese word for father

[5] Oliver-Smith, Anthony, and Susanna M. Hoffman, eds. The angry earth: disaster in anthropological perspective. Routledge, 2019.

[6] Reid, Megan. “Disasters and social inequalities.” Sociology Compass 7.11 (2013): 984-997.

I am grateful to Thierry Schaffauser, STRASS for his thoughtful feedback on an earlier draft of this post.

Source: P.A.G. van Bergeijk, Deglobalization 2.0, updated using IMF WEO April 2020

Marseille in quarantine. A naval officer with his family

The man who brought the plague to Milan

Source: gallica.bnf.fr / BnF (National Library of France)

Buddha tooth relic temple, Singapore. 09 March 2020. Credits: Peter van Leeuwen.

[1] Green allows individuals to travel relatively freely, yellow confines individuals to their homes for isolation, while red indicates individuals with a confirmed COVID-19 case who should be in quarantine.

[2] This comprises medical records, travel history records, and information regarding being in contact with someone diagnosed with COVID-19.

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Foucault, Michel. 1975. Surveiller et punir: Naissance de la prison. Paris: Gallimard.

Harari, Yuval Noah. 2020. “Yuval Noah Harari: The World after Coronavirus.” Financial Times, March 20, 2020. https://www.ft.com/content/19d90308-6858-11ea-a3c9-1fe6fedcca75.

Žižek, Slavoj. 2020. “Slavoj Žižek ‘el Coronavirus es un golpe a lo Kill Bill al sistema capitalista.’” Esferapública (blog). March 18, 2020. http://esferapublica.org/nfblog/slavoj-zizek-el-coronavirus-es-un-golpe-a-lo-kill-bill-al-sistema-capitalista/.

Title Image: The new medusa, “it’s a good thing i can’t see myself”. Credits: Richard Scott

[1] Thank you to Duncan Green for mentioning the term ‘critical juncture’ that perfectly sums up the thoughts that I’ve had since the pandemic broke out in February.

[2]She also highlights the failure to recognize that pathogens or microbes become pandemics due to humankind’s encroachment on wildlife habitats.

Source: elaborated from the Fiscal Policy Observatory data (last accessed 7 April 2020 at https://www.observatoriofiscal.org/publicaciones/transparencia-fiscal/file/221-transparencia-fiscal-no-163-marzo-2020.html)

* The main component of this expenditure is on non-contributory social protection (social cash transfers).

** It excludes health expenditure of the social security system.

Sources:

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[2] https://www.thelancet.com/journals/lancet/article/PIIS0140-6736(19)30841-4/fulltext

[3] https://www.cepal.org/es/publicaciones/45337-america-latina-caribe-la-pandemia-covid-19-efectos-economicos-sociales

[4] https://coyunturaisip.wordpress.com/2020/03/28/los-recortes-cobran-factura-al-ecuador-la-inversion-en-salud-se-redujo-un-36-en-2019/

[5] https://www.eluniverso.com/noticias/2019/03/06/nota/7219694/trabajadores-publicos-salud-denuncian-despidos-masivos

[6] https://www.elcomercio.com/actualidad/recorte-personal-contratos-ocasionales-ecuador.html

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Refugee Camp in Bangladesh. Photo: Rod Mena

[1] But now with a global economic recession and an aid system already with a 40% shortfall on the funds needed to assist everyone in need, as presented in the 2019 ‘Global Humanitarian Assistance Report’.

[2] And in many cases not even feasible in western countries like France or the United States.

^[2]She also highlights the failure to recognize that pathogens or microbes become pandemics due to humankind’s encroachment on wildlife habitats.