Covid Collective Key Issue Guide: Impacts of the Covid-19 Pandemic on Decision-Making, Accountability and Empowerment

The unpredictable, fast-moving and high-risk decision-making environment during the Covid-19 pandemic challenged policymakers around the globe. The shortcomings of global and national collective action and accountability mechanisms have been exposed. Covid-19 responses have provided new opportunities for corruption, fuelled waves of disinformation, and fed into pre-existing authoritarian trends. Top-down approaches during the pandemic have ignored people’s lived realities and agency, and exacerbated social and economic inequalities. Risks of prolonged securitisation of the Covid-19 response and shrinking civil space are heightened in fragile and conflict-affected settings. At the same time, from the start of the pandemic, local mutual solidarity and community-led groups and actors have stepped in to meet people’s needs, including in places with widespread poverty and vulnerability.