COVINFORM - Analysis: Community and citizen responses and impact – update M34
Creators: name: Bagkatzounis, Ioannis
name: Tsekoura, Anna
name: Konstantopoulos, Ioannis
Publisher: name: Zenodo
Year: 2023

description: This report provides an update of D6.3 “D6.3 Analysis: Community and citizen responses and impacts,” which aimed at describing and assessing community and citizen responses during the initial phases of the COVID-19 pandemic. The report has identified, summarised and compiled the key findings from the D6.1, “Baseline report: Community and citizen responses,” D6.5, “Baseline report: Community and citizen responses - update M24,” and the WP6 expert interviews that were conducted by COVINFORM target countries within the context of WP6 research activities until July 2023 (note that information regarding the updated expert interview guidelines can be found in D6.2, “Research design: Community and citizen responses” and D6.6, “Research design: Community and citizen responses - update M28”).

As stated in D6.3, it is important to conduct further in-depth empirical research and analysis of the findings which relate to community and citizen responses and impacts during the three distinct COVID-19 phases. D6.7 is the second iteration of D6.3, which provided an initial descriptive analysis of the findings of interviews conducted with representatives of civil society organisations and grassroots initiatives active in COVID-19 responses. Similarly to the preceding Deliverable, D6.7 also examines the cases of ten municipalities: Vienna, Austria; Antwerp, Belgium; Birmingham, England; Mannheim, Germany; Athens, Greece; Rome, Italy; Lisbon, Portugal; Madrid, Spain; Gothenburg, Sweden; and Swansea, Wales (UK). It furthermore reports findings for sites in which too few data had been conducted as of the time of D6.3 submission.

The scope of this deliverable is municipal/sub-municipal: it explores the way that local conditions and actors in target cities and neighbourhoods across COVINFORM countries mediated the impacts of the COVID-19 pandemic, and simultaneously contributed in shaping the relevant responses to it.

Similarly to D6.3, this report has explored the following three dimensions of Community and citizen responses:



Local baseline conditions

Changing impacts and responses throughout the COVID-19 pandemic (T1 and T2)

Conditions for vulnerable groups and targeted measures in crisis management (T0, T1, T2)


In order to provide a holistic understanding of these dimensions, COVINFORM partners have identified relevant data within the WP6 expert interviews with representatives of civil society organisations and grassroots initiatives (as first reported in D6.3), as well as data collected during two phases of desk research (as first reported in D6.1 and D6.5). COVINFORM partners adhered to a standardised template in order to guide the extraction of the relevant data within the aforementioned dimensions across target countries (see Annex 1). The countries under study are Austria, Belgium, England, Germany, Greece, Italy, Portugal, Spain, Sweden, and Wales.

The current report includes an Introductory chapter (Chapter 1), which is followed by an overview of the methods utilised to conduct the empirical research (Chapter 2). Then, an analysis is provided of the three dimensions across all the COVINFORM countries (Chapter 3). The aforementioned dimensions will predominantly emphasise commonalities and disparaties identified across the COVINFORM target countries in terms of civil society organisation and citizen responses during the three distinct pandemic phases (T0, T1 and T2). The findings of D6.7 will be explored in further detail within the context of D6.8 deliverable “Synthesis and lessons learnt on community and citizen responses and impacts – update” due in M36. Finally, the last chapter (Chapter 4) presents lessons learnt that have been identified in relation to the three dimensions of this report.