Abstract
COVID-19 recovery is an opportunity to enhance life chances by Building Back Better, an objective promoted by the UN and deployed politically at national level. To help understand emergent and intentional opportunities to Build Back Better, we propose a research agenda drawing from geographical thinking on social contracts, assemblage theory and the politics of knowledge. This points research towards the ways in which everyday and professional knowledge cocreation constrains vision and action. Whose knowledge is legitimate, how legitimacy is ascribed and the place of science, the media and government in these processes become sites for progressive Building Back Better.
Highlights
A fair recovery for a world living with COVID-19 points to the importance of interactions between science, policy and public discourse and action
First introduced in 2006 by the United Nations Secretary-General’s Special Envoy for Tsunami Recovery, former US President Clinton, the ambition to Build Back Better has been incorporated into the UNDRR Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction 2015–2030 and into the United Nations Comprehensive Response to COVID-19 (UN 2020)
We examine how recovery as emergence might be understood through the lenses of social contracts and assemblage, and with particular reference to the UK experience, consider knowledge, power and action in Building Back Better
Summary
A fair recovery for a world living with COVID-19 points to the importance of interactions between science, policy and public discourse and action. Online platforms can document the range of small, unofficial activities taking place – both to better understand, organise and improve access to these activities, and to serve as a longterm testimony of the bottom up response to the COVID-19 pandemic and open up discussions about the future (Taylor et al, 2020) These limitations indicate research on how technologies can better record and communicate the lived experience of pandemic, as well as the biomedical statistics describing health impacts. This might include research to make data structures and platforms flexible enough to document the broad impacts and response to Covid-19 beyond a strictly medical, quantitative framing. These entry points help interpret the ways in which knowledge flows through and shapes relationships and resulting spaces for change
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