Final summary: Emergencies, wellbeing and social justice in the Anthropocene

Gabriela Marques di Giulio shares with us her concluding thoughts on the IGDC/YESI Webinar ‘Emergencies, wellbeing and social justice in the Anthropocene’ in the final blog of the series.

This blog series accompanies the YouTube videos available in English and Portuguese.

Co-host of the event, Gabriela Marques di Giulio, joins us for this concluding blog following the sessions on Epistemological perspectives, Empirical experiences, and Future scenarios.

Emergencies can appear hidden in plain view

Nowadays, ‘emergency’ is strongly associated with the idea of crisis, an unexpected event, which demands immediate response. However, Sarah Bezan reminded us of another important concept: submergences, which are unseen, overlooked, but bring innumerable impacts. This idea can help us to think about some emergencies that are self-perpetuating, creating ongoing conditions of death, disease, vulnerability and bondage. Emergences that are hidden in plain view, but not without resistance.

Lessons from Covid-19

Pete Coventry proposed that the narrative of catastrophe, which is often implied in this framing of emergency, can be problematic.

The Covid-19 pandemic taught us several lessons, which we can think about when confronting planetary challenges. One of them is to understand that the emergency, however attention-grabbing, may not be enough to motivate transformative action. The pandemic showed us, for example, that the commitment to the necessary restrictive measures was not even close to a consensus.

Mariana Vale outlined that one of the most relevant lessons from Covid-19 is that the costs of prevention to avoid pandemics are much lower than the costs involved in the responses when an emergency breaks out. However, is this fact enough for us to act in the face of the biodiversity crisis? We have robust scientific evidence regarding the biodiversity crisis, but individual, collective, and political actions are still slow. Are people tired of bad news? The answers to address this and other crises are not likely to come from Academia, nor from the Global North.

Thinking about the lessons from Covid-19, Deisy Ventura informed us about the challenges of transposing important aspects concerning public health emergencies to think about planetary emergencies. She mentioned, in particular, two critical points: (i) international norms, treaties and negotiations are important for supporting actions at the local level; and (ii) there is a difference between protecting human rights during an emergency, and looking at emergencies from a human rights perspective.

Our capability of change might not be adequately utilised

While economics, as Paul Hudson discussed, still seems optimistic that these planetary crises can be resolved through innovation, the problem with this emergency framework may, in particular, be its association with immediate responses, rather than long-term solutions that will change the outcome in a significant way.

The role of wider cross-cutting issues and awareness

Discussing ’emergency’, as Gale Rigobert correctly pointed out, requires thinking about the cross cutting issues involved, which did not necessarily cause the immediate disruptions that led to emergency, but play a central role, such as colonialism, social justice, and suffering. Another critical aspect is thinking about who benefits from this framing, and what impacts this framing can bring.

Renzo Taddei alerted us to the fact that ‘knowing’ and ‘caring’ are not the same, and this has implications even for communication. Thinking about the emergency framework requires going beyond the limitations of the approach based on visibility, perception, and awareness. Care is a critical element of all social organizations. This is one important aspect that has been perpetuated by indigenous leaders.

Another aspect, which was reinforced in Janaka Jayawickrama’s and Claudia Milena Adler’s talks, is the urgent need to break the division between human beings and nature. In response to the current humanitarian and planetary crises it is critical to empower nature, to prioritise equity and cooperation, as well as decolonise approaches and actions.

Helena Ribeiro proposed two coordinated responses that should be interconnected to be more effective in tackling crises and emergencies, considering the current armed conflicts, and the increasing deforestation and destruction of ecosystems: (i) actions to fight for peace; and (ii) restoration, considering issues of vulnerability, social justice and environmental justice.

Time to Act

Lindsay Stringer reminded us of the political implications of climate emergency declarations. In particular, she emphasised the limitations of the most vulnerable groups, who have been more directly impacted by this current model of exploitation, in responding to and minimizing the impacts of accelerated climate change. The time for action is very short.

This idea of time connects with Peter Sutoris‘s reflection on how this emergency framework can limit the vision of alternative futures (distraction), alternative scenarios (technological utopias), ethical problems, bringing negative impacts and implications on social justice, and effects on the amplification of societal polarization, and exclusion of the diversity of imagination.

Thinking about the emergency framework is also critical in the responses in disaster situations, as Jon Gascoigne reminded us, based on his experiences. Considering local specificities, local voices in the design of disaster responses are key.

In conclusion

We recognize that there are different understandings of the concept of emergency. However, the most conventional definitions and the predominant technocratic framework commonly adopted in the analysis of global health security reinforce the idea that certain phenomena – such as the Covid-19 pandemic – should be characterized and addressed particularly by their degree of immediacy, exceptionality and, to some extent, by their unpredicability, and their properties of danger and threat to the survival of a particular group or community. In this framework, these phenomena tend to be permeated by excessively deterministic narratives and, not rarely, involve situations whose unfoldings are marked by authoritarian approaches to confrontation, which contribute to anti-democratic and technocratic measures, silencing other types of knowledge (local, traditional), and further oppressing minority groups.

In this securitization bias, emergencies – as revealed by the pandemic – tend to be approached from a conflict and national security perspective, justifying extraordinary measures and invisibilizing other critical issues that, most of the time, are at the root of the problems in focus. In other words, the securitizing approach produces neglect, which in turn reproduces the vulnerability of certain groups. It even amplifies violence, exclusion, erosion of human rights, and promotion of policies of oppression and inequality, particularly for indigenous communities, minorities, and marginalized groups.

However, we understand that emergencies are socially constructed phenomena, open to contestation, whose experiences, perceptions, and information flows about the threats at stake are shared and negotiated among individuals, social groups, and decision makers.

In the technocratic framing, discourse of emergency as reaction predominates, in which the typical imperative is a return to pre-existing conditions. In contrast, in this socio-constructivist perspective, there is a room to accommodate a discourse of emergency as strategy, which would reinforce the unsustainability of the status quo. The framing of climate change and biodiversity loss as emergencies, in the view of Patterson et al. (2021), provide concrete examples of this attempt to create an exception to the norm, a strategy of political intervention to make an existing situation visible.

In the field of global health, the socio-constructivist perspective can drive robust analyses based on a critical view that, rather than simple health challenges, emergencies should be understood from broader social and political contexts and implications. They should be thought of as situations which require mobilization of states and societies to concretely address the socioeconomic determinants that are at the root of the problems, prioritizing creative and integrated approaches to governance. This approach also makes it possible to elucidate how neglect, in its multiple dynamics of omissions, obstructions and deliberate actions, constitutes a central axis in the production of emergencies, acting as a damage multiplier and as an important factor in the reproduction of vulnerabilities.

Moving Forward

Thank you once again to all our amazing panel members. The webinar has generated so much thought provoking insight into the concept of Emergency Framing and I am working with Piran White and João Nunes, and many of our colleagues who contributed to the workshop, on a collective paper to take these ideas forward.

Checkout the full version of Gabriela’s final summary session:

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