Re: <nettime> The Covid Pandemic: Seven Lessons to be Learned for a

[Prem Chandavarkar <prem.cnt@gmail.com>]

My thoughts:
I believe the Wuhan case supports the point I make.  There, local government lives in fear of an autocratic centre that is intolerant of dissent to and deviance from predetermined norms.  That is what motivated a cover up which may not have happened if there was more political freedom and local autonomy and flexibility.
I am not preaching an isolationist self-reliance at the local level.  I argue for a hierarchy of scales, going all the way from the local to the international, and suggesting that the allocation of responsibilities to each level of the scale goes by the principle of subsidiarity.  Clearly, effective communication between the different scales is key.
No doubt, effectiveness of scale must be acknowledged where it is due.  A hunt for a vaccine to the current pandemic is best done at a globally coordinated scale.  But once a vaccine is discovered, actually identifying and vaccinating people is dependent on effective local infrastructure.
Local nuance must be recognised.  To take a current situation in my home town of Bangalore.  Control has been ceded to the centre during the pandemic under the Disaster Management Act, so all response has to conform to the central government’s prescription. The central government has graded areas as red, orange and green with red being the worst case in the rate of infection, and defined actions to be taken at each level of the gradation.  All of Bangalore has been declared a red zone by central government.  Local government, who are positioned to comprehend data at a far finer grain, is arguing that infection is not evenly spread through the city, and the gradation should be done at a ward level rather than a city-wide level.  By declaring the entire city as red zone, already thin resources have been forced into being stretched city-wide, unable to take effective action where it is needed the most.  While large-scale data aggregation is very necessary, is best done at a centralised level, and will drive overall policy and fund allocation, this should not override the effectiveness of local action.  Blunting local effectiveness is most likely to happen in overly centralised regimes.
The point of local government is tied to the other point I make about an inclusive politics of recognition, and the two must be read together.  The larger the unit of governance, the more likely that people, and their hardships, will go unrecognised.  Here in India, in some activist circles, there is a call to establish a basic political unit for recognising people and interacting with them at the scale of the area covered under a voting booth.  High degrees of recognition promote high degrees of citizen participation, increasing the likelihood of an effective system of checks and balances.
Putting faith in an internationalisation of governance will create a crisis of human rights. As Nancy Fraser points out in her book “Scales of Justice”, the current global regime has patterns of injustice that are perpetrated at a global scale, and there is no effective mechanism of justice that exists at that scale to offer restitution.  Rights remain mere abstractions if not tied to a spatial entity that takes responsibility for their enforcement, and human rights in a democracy are constitutionally defined and enforced only at the scale of the nation state.  Even if we can solve Fraser’s articulation of the problem by creating a global mechanism for human rights, there is still an issue. To take the scale of the nation state, rights may be defined and enforced at the constitutional scale, but must be negotiated on a daily basis at local scales.  This mismatch means we have a system that at best can offer restitution once rights are violated, rather than taking proactive measures to inclusively endow people with rights on a routine basis.  This is where concepts such as “The Right to the City”, first articulated by Henri Lefebvre and picked up by David Harvey and others, proves so essential.  But there is still an issue.  Our current notion of human rights is predicated on the concept of citizenship, a category that is held stable at the level of the nation state through protocols controlling immigration.  This notion of citizenship cannot be literally transferred to the scale of the city without causing more problems than it solves, for the city thrives on migration and mobility.  Which is why an inclusive politics of recognition is so important, and this can happen effectively only at highly local scales.

Best,
Prem


> On 08-May-2020, at 1:15 AM, Michael Goldhaber <michael@goldhaber.org> wrote:
> 
> 
> Thanks for these clarifications, Prem. But I don’t think even your revisions take account of what the pandemic actually teaches. 
> 
> Start with Wuhan. While the lack of any sort of free press in China certainly contributed to the delayed response, local officials' first instinct was apparently and disastrously to cover up. This is, worldwide, a common reaction by local officials to all sorts of problems. In the case of the virus, around the world it includes hiding deaths, making utterly wrong local decisions on the amount of social distancing needed, how to provide for the transient populations that were so maltreated in India—and elsewhere—and on and on. 


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