Global Framings of Pandemic Recovery: Insights Across Conservation, Development and Health Fields

In many contexts recovery from COVID-19 is ongoing. The impacts of the pandemic were diverse and their distribution uneven, which may in part explain the diversity in the ways in which its recovery has been framed. Numerous framings concerning what constitutes ‘recovery’, what its pursuit should entail, who (or what) it should target and whose vision the notion of recovery should represent have been expressed by various fields of study. An assessment of the way in which diverse fields (e.g. health, conservation and development) have represented the priorities of recovery from the COVID-19 pandemic is so far not available. This knowledge gap is important since understanding the threads in common, and those distinct between fields, may help move towards a more integrated appraisal of the multiple priorities salient to recovery. Integration however also involves representing diverse knowledges, values and lived experiences and supporting disaster-resilient communities requires being attentive to the voices of the most marginalized. Due recognition of and engagement with these groups is essential for enhancing the justice and equity of recovery-focused interventions, and can help ensure that interventions do not presume, misplace or misrepresent local priorities. With growing recognition of the need for decolonial, grounded and co-developed responses to processes of recovery, nature futures and global development there is a need to understand how COVID-19 recovery has been conceived and articulated across fields, and crucially, the extent to which it has included the perceptions of socially, economically and politically marginalized groups. We analyzed 30 papers (10 per field), and asked (1) How does COVID-19 recovery tend to be framed within these fields, including the representation of intersecting risks? (2) Where is there divergence and congruence in recovery discourses across these fields, and what would an integrated understanding of recovery look like? (3) To what extent are local voices reflected or acknowledged in these international framings? We found that while perspectives differed, all highlighted how COVID-19 exposed pre-existing interconnected crises. Many framed the root cause as flawed economic growth models, which was considered in need of various degrees of transformation combined with more integrated governance. Crucially, few framings had strong representation of local, or marginalized voices and relatively few papers actively grounded their calls, or prominently advocated for such practices. Our findings point to a need for more co-created knowledge generation and agenda setting for COVID-19 recovery, and disaster recovery more broadly.