Civil Society’s Response to Coronavirus Disease 2019: Patterns from Two Hundred Case Studies of Emergent Agency

Abstract

Covid-19 has exposed the limitations of current social protection systems and elicited a variety of responses from civil society. This article attempts to characterise emergent agency during Covid-19 by drawing on a dataset of 200 case studies and texts on how human agency has shifted during Covid-19. The overarching finding is that while the pandemic has disrupted civil society, this disruption has also spawned the emergence of new actors, issues, coalitions, and repertoires. Larger patterns in emergent agency include civil society’s accelerated adoption of digital platforms, the critical role of communities and informal networks in Covid-19 response, the increased reliance on coalition-building, new opportunities for civic action around structural inequalities exposed by the pandemic, and the reshaping of citizen–state relations.