Governance and policy in pandemics: approaches to crisis, chaos and catastrophe

This chapter outlines conceptual tools useful for advancing understanding of the impacts of the Covid-19 pandemic on citizenship and governance. What is the meaning and significance of shifts in the conventions and techniques of governance, and of rules governing everyday life and freedoms? Within the global pandemic, social commentators are considering what will endure, what will fundamentally change and what institutional forms and practices will rebound. It considers how interpretations of crisis, chaos, catastrophe and contingency shape our social and political analyses of pandemics. It explores how immediate matters of life, death, urgency and emergency might drive forward or amplify specific biopolitical forms of governance, modes of power and ethical framings of what it means to be a ‘good citizen.' Living in pandemics radically reframes forms of political subjectivity, rationalities of policy design, methods for monitoring of population behaviour, and the materiality of individual bodies.