Post-pandemic transformations: How and why COVID-19 requires us to rethink development

COVID-19 is proving to be the long awaited 'big one': a pandemic capable of bringing societies and economies to their knees. There is an urgent need to examine how COVID-19 - as a health and development crisis - unfolded the way it did it and to consider possibilities for post-pandemic transformations and for rethinking development more broadly. Drawing on over a decade of research on epidemics, we argue that the origins, unfolding and effects of the COVID-19 pandemic require analysis that addresses both structural political-economic conditions alongside far less ordered, 'unruly' processes reflecting complexity, uncertainty, contingency and context-specificity. This structural-unruly duality in the conditions and processes of pandemic emergence, progression and impact provides a lens to view three key challenge areas. The first is how scientific advice and evidence are used in policy, when conditions are rigidly `locked in' to established power relations and yet so uncertain. Second is how economies function, with the COVID-19 crisis having revealed the limits of a conventional model of economic growth. The third concerns how new forms of politics can become the basis of reshaped citizen-state relations in confronting a pandemic, such as those around mutual solidarity and care. COVID-19 demonstrates that we face an uncertain future, where anticipation of and resilience to major shocks must become the core problematic of development studies and practice. Where mainstream approaches to development have been top down, rigid and orientated towards narrowly-defined economic goals, post-COVID-19 development must have a radically transformative, egalitarian and inclusive knowledge and politics at its core. (C) 2020 The Authors. Published by Elsevier Ltd.

Automated summary

COVID-19 is seen as a long awaited pandemic that has brought societies and economies to their knees, highlighting the need to examine the structural and unpredictable processes behind it. The crisis has shown the challenges of using scientific advice in policy-making, the limitations of traditional economic models, and the importance of reshaping citizen-state relations through new forms of politics. The post-pandemic development must focus on transformative, egalitarian and inclusive approaches, moving away from top-down, rigid economic goals.