Social justice in crisis management.
By: Melanie Herrmann
Tags: Crisis Management, Social Change, Covid 19, Compassion, Data Visualization

Social justice in crisis management.

Compassion & intersectionality in times of Covid19 and climate breakdown.

You’re isolating as best as you can, while your housemate uses every chance to drag the dog out for yet another walk. Some countries put strict curfews into place and penalise breaches with hefty fines. Other governments don’t.

What is the correct behaviour? What is fair on the societal level? Covid19 is the tragedy of the commons. We have to make personal sacrifices for the greater good. We need as many as possible to comply with quarantine measures for the global community to come out okay on the other side.

I am a psychologist consulting for a tech company that has designed a lot of famous Geographic Information System platforms for social and environmental causes, such as Global Forest Watch. I see common themes across the various crises we are facing as a society.

Put simply, these themes are the very common sense ethics we teach our children: compassion and fairness. Starting off from the Covid19 crisis, let’s reflect on humane principles that ought to inform global crisis management.

Compassion and social justice in Covid19.

Not caring about Covid19 because you are young and healthy is like not caring about climate change because you are old. Compassion for our neighbours nudges us into responding to disaster in the right ways.

Unfortunately, we have seen insensitivity in the current pandemic. The media have repeatedly been non-inclusive in their reporting, reassuring the ‘young & healthy’ that Covid19 poses a low risk for them. But how does a vulnerable person feel reading such a statement?

There has also been callous finger pointing at China. Ironically, by Western people who are only just learning to sneeze into their elbow crease. Many seem to forget that it is Asia and Africa we should be looking to for expertise on epidemic management.

My teammate Camellia Williams wrote a piece the other week, pointing out that when we respond to a crisis, we need to remember compassion, data, and optimism. Optimism seems appropriate, if we look at the data, and practice compassion.

When we speak about data and compassion, we also need to acknowledge that any crisis exacerbates existing inequalities. It may seem as if an acute epidemic takes precedence over any other social injustice issue. Quite the opposite is the case though. We need to consider existing vulnerabilities as part of our crisis response.

For example, we know from past epidemics that women suffer disproportionately. That goes for immediate health impacts, but worse than that, there are ensuing economical and social ripple effects. Females will be impacted more severely by financial losses as the global economy slows down. While most of us are lucky enough to get comfy at home with a good book, others will suffer tremendously as domestic violence rates rise during lockdown periods.

Instead of getting paralysed by the complexity of the problem, we can view this as the chance to rethink systemic issues.

Crises are an opportunity to rethink our ways.

“Crises and deadlocks when they occur have at least this advantage, that they force us to think.”

The above quote is ascribed to Jawaharlal Nehru, independence activist, and subsequently, the first Prime Minister of India. Whether personal, national, or global, moments of crises uproot our daily life. The most adaptive response to a disturbance is to analyse how we can transform the system for the better.

Bill Adams regards the Covid19 crisis as a wake up call, as an opportunity to reconsider other crises we are going through, such as the conservation crisis.

Bill writes that Covid19 “has temporarily come to dominate many other concerns, especially for those (like me) who were previously largely insulated from the life-threatening challenges of war, hunger, poverty and disease (…) Certainly it is making me reconsider many things, and entertain many uncomfortable and troubling thoughts. But there is a value in being forced to think.”

If you are born, raised, and resident in a WEIRD [Western, Educated, Industrialised, Rich, Democratic] country like me, let’s entertain these uncomfortable thoughts, and examine our perspective on justice, and crisis response.

A compassionate approach to managing crises and social injustice.

This is a proposal of six principles for a compassionate approach to tackling socio-political crises. I will try to give a few examples for each, in the context of Covid19, but also in light of other social and environmental challenges. As I hope you will agree, many of them are interrelated anyways.

We are stronger together. Focus on commonalities, not differences. Connect with your emotions. Examine power relationships to redesign the system for the better. Examine your point of view and understand the lived experience of others. Practice compassion and kindness, daily.

1. We are stronger together.

Pandemics spread, by definition, across large regions, continents, or worldwide, as is the case with Covid19. We face one mutual threat as a global community. As human animals, we instinctively identify as members of groups. Hence, hashtags like #hometogether create a sense of community. They encourage us to comply with official advice to self-quarantine, and to do our best for the common good.