COVINFORM - Baseline report: Community and citizen responses - update M24

The COVINFORM project addresses the following top-level research questions within the target countries and municipalities:

RQ1: How and under which conditions were COVID-19 responses drafted and practiced? RQ2: How and in which ways was vulnerability considered in COVID-19 response?
RQ3: What were the lived experiences of the pandemic/crisis management within certain vulnerable groups across diverse local contexts?

RQ4: Which barriers, unintended consequences, trade-offs, lessons learned and promising practices can be identified in COVID-19 responses across diverse local contexts?

This deliverable contributes insight primarily to RQ4 by collecting promising participatory practices – defined as practices in which ordinary residents played active, significant roles – across diverse local contexts. N=150 participatory practices in the target countries and municipalities were identified, described, and analysed. The analysis finds that:

Participatory practices adopted both short-term and longer-term aims. Some emerged in the first phases of the pandemic as stopgaps for overburdened governmental services; however, others addressed areas of life long outside the scope of core social welfare systems, and/or targeted chronic structural inequalities.

Participatory practices involved numerous configurations of actors. They included practices initiated and maintained solely by self-organised groups of residents; those initiated by self- organised groups, but supported by established civil society organisations (CSOs) and/or governmental organisations (GOs); and those initiated by CSOs or GOs, but which involved large numbers of residents as volunteers, donors, etc.

Participatory practices ran the gamut from initiatives focused on a single type of service to umbrella programmes that supported initiatives spanning numerous domains (e.g., material and psychosocial support, arts and culture, education, jobs, children and parenting, the environment, etc.).

Participatory practices typically made use of online channels, but also often involved some type of activity in the field. A prototypical example is the use of online platform to request or offer face-to-face support.

The deliverable finds that participatory practices aimed toward, and often appear to have achieved, a range of positive outcomes: they helped address critical needs during periods of systemic stress; offered supplements and/or alternatives to governmental services; reduced barriers to material and informational support; and helped mitigate the unintended consequences and trade-offs of disruptive policies such as lockdowns. A systematic analysis of practices and outcomes with the participation of both national authorities and the actors involved would constitute a valuable task for future research. Participatory practices can also be seen as contributing to social resilience in a holistic sense by augmenting social capital, advancing social learning, and preserving social memory. The deliverable concludes that participatory practices offer promising lessons for the adaptive management of crises such as the COVID-19 pandemic.