The experience of Covid-19 has catalysed policy interest in community-based responses and ‘community resilience’ to the health and wider societal impacts of pandemics. However, understandings of resilience in policy use are unclear and there are also significant gaps in knowledge related to community-based responses. Our research draws on the idea of social and care infrastructures, understood as the formal and informal structures (social, political and economic) that communities draw upon to meet their basic needs. We explore the lived experiences of Covid-19 and the ‘whole of society’ impacts in informal settlements in the Western Cape province of South Africa, focusing on the strengths and weaknesses of a range of community-based support initiatives, as well as quantitative indicators of societal distress across different vulnerabilities. We seek to understand what these suggest about resilience, for different people and groups and across timescales, and how future preparedness policy can best support it.
The wider project aim is as follows:
This demand-driven project sought to address these critical gaps to inform lasting policy change in South Africa and for preparedness more widely, through our embedded transdisciplinary relationships across scales. We focused on low-income and informal urban settlements in the Western Cape. Such settings typify intersecting challenges and biosocial vulnerabilities exacerbated by Covid-19. The government, across spheres of government in South Africa, has expressed interest in enabling environments for community resilience and in strengthening data tools for detecting wider societal impacts and vulnerabilities. Our team harnesses strong interdisciplinary expertise – across social sciences and humanities and bridging to medical sciences (as an aligned but separate research process) – to track experiences and impacts of Covid-19 and extend understandings of social and care infrastructures through integrated qualitative and quantitative research. We asked what these insights suggest about resilience, for different people, infrastructures and across timescales, and future policy support needs. We are bringing a critical social science lens to politicise and socialise the concept of resilience, exploring different meanings and practices of resilience amongst key stakeholders and in communities, asking:
Resilience of what and for whom, and in whose interests?
We consider how local agency is enacted to mobilise social and care infrastructures and how this ensures ‘negotiated resilience’ that is cognisant of lived realities and imperatives for social justice. It is also critical that policy ensures care of infrastructures, for mitigation and monitoring of societal impacts of pandemics and for identifying the most vulnerable – what can be termed ‘systems resilience’.
The research questions informing this work are as follows:
1. What formal and informal social and care infrastructures did residents of low-income settlements rely on during the Covid-19 pandemic?
a. to what extent did these address the challenges they faced?
b. what capacities, resources and relations were mobilised?
2. What conditions enabled or inhibited community-based initiatives during Covid-19 and how do the actors assess their strengths and limitations?
3. What do community-based experiences add to efforts to identify indicators of societal impacts of pandemics, and how can data systems for monitoring and assessment of vulnerabilities be strengthened for future pandemics?
4. What does learning from the impacts and experiences of Covid-19 suggest for building resilience in future pandemics and what alternative policy and governance mechanisms could support this?
