Open AccessCivil Society’s Response to Coronavirus Disease 2019: Patterns from Two Hundred Case Studies of Emergent Agency
Author(s) -
Niranjan Nampoothiri,
Filippo Artuso
Publication year - 2021
Publication title -
journal of creative communications/journal of creative communications
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.273
H-Index - 11
eISSN - 0973-2594
pISSN - 0973-2586
DOI - 10.1177/09732586211015057
Subject(s) - agency (philosophy) , civil society , pandemic , variety (cybernetics) , state (computer science) , collective action , political science , action (physics) , covid-19 , sociology , public administration , public relations , politics , social science , law , disease , infectious disease (medical specialty) , medicine , physics , pathology , algorithm , artificial intelligence , quantum mechanics , computer science
Covid-19 has exposed the limitations of current social protection systems and elicited a variety of responses from civil society. This article attempts to characterise emergent agency during Covid-19 by drawing on a dataset of 200 case studies and texts on how human agency has shifted during Covid-19. The overarching finding is that while the pandemic has disrupted civil society, this disruption has also spawned the emergence of new actors, issues, coalitions, and repertoires. Larger patterns in emergent agency include civil society’s accelerated adoption of digital platforms, the critical role of communities and informal networks in Covid-19 response, the increased reliance on coalition-building, new opportunities for civic action around structural inequalities exposed by the pandemic, and the reshaping of citizen–state relations.