Leach Melissa, MacGregor Hayley, Scoones Ian, Wilkinson Annie
Institute of Development Studies at the University of Sussex, UK.
World Dev. 2021 Feb;138:105233. doi: 10.1016/j.worlddev.2020.105233. Epub 2020 Oct 16.
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.
事实证明，新冠疫情就是人们期待已久的“大事件”：一场足以让社会和经济陷入瘫痪的大流行病。迫切需要审视新冠疫情作为一场健康与发展危机，是如何以其发生的方式发展演变的，并思考疫情后转型的可能性以及更广泛地重新思考发展问题。基于对流行病长达十多年的研究，我们认为，新冠疫情的起源、发展和影响需要进行分析，这种分析既要关注结构性政治经济状况，也要关注那些远没有那么有序、反映复杂性、不确定性、偶然性和具体情境性的“无序”过程。疫情出现、发展和影响的条件与过程中的这种结构与无序的二元性，为审视三个关键挑战领域提供了一个视角。第一个挑战是，在情况严格“受制于”既定权力关系且又如此不确定的情况下，科学建议和证据如何在政策中得到运用。第二个挑战是经济如何运行，新冠疫情危机揭示了传统经济增长模式的局限性。第三个挑战涉及新的政治形式如何能够成为重塑公民与国家关系以应对疫情的基础，比如围绕相互团结和关怀的关系。新冠疫情表明，我们面临一个不确定的未来，对重大冲击的预期和应对能力必须成为发展研究与实践的核心问题。在主流发展方法一直是自上而下、僵化且以狭义的经济目标为导向的情况下，新冠疫情后的发展必须以一种具有根本变革性、平等主义和包容性的知识与政治为核心。
