![]() Long-dominant development models, such as those promoting economic growth, market liberalisation, globalisation, carbon-intensive industries and command-and-control planning regimes, are now under unprecedented challenge. ‘Development’ – understood as progressive social, economic and political change – is rapidly being undone as COVID-19 threatens collective futures. Further outcomes seem inevitable: the deepening of poverty increases in multiple, intersecting inequalities a worsening of chronic fragility and instability and potentially intensified authoritarianism. It is already clear, however, that they are being felt unevenly, exposing differences of vulnerability across geographies and social groups. ![]() At the time of writing, impacts are still unfolding fast and remain uncertain. Drawing on our experience of working on past major disease outbreaks, and of studying social change and transformation, this article focuses on questions of, what next? While the pandemic has exposed fractures and contradictions in conventional ways of acting – most notably mainstream approaches to capitalist development – it is also suggesting new ways forward.Įxisting fragilities in systems of all kinds – be they those that assure health and wellbeing, food, sustainable livelihoods, resilient ecologies, resource access, employment, trade, finance, inclusive governance, citizen rights and more – have been highlighted, and sometimes intensified, by COVID-19. The massive global health and development crisis enwrapped with the COVID-19 pandemic has exposed the limits of conventional framings of development both North and South. What made the world so vulnerable? Why were individual countries and the international community not better prepared? And what needs to change to mitigate harm from future threats, particularly with respect to the most politically, economically, socially and clinically vulnerable? Epidemics often provoke such reckoning, but rarely on this scale. The impacts of the disease and of measures to control it have raised questions about epidemic preparedness and more generally about development, past, present and future. ![]() The COVID-19 pandemic has sent shock waves through societies and economies around the world. 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. 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. 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. Second is how economies function, with the COVID-19 crisis having revealed the limits of a conventional model of economic growth. 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. This structural-unruly duality in the conditions and processes of pandemic emergence, progression and impact provides a lens to view three key challenge areas. 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. ![]() 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. COVID-19 is proving to be the long awaited ‘big one’: a pandemic capable of bringing societies and economies to their knees.
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