Three months after the internal funding decision, the embargo on publicizing the results of the New Frontiers in Research Fund (NFRF) 2022 Special Call has just been lifted with a government announcement. Our project, officially titled “Transparency and shared responsibility for sustainable post-pandemic recovery and evidence-informed decision-making during future global emergencies“, is among 61 “interdisciplinary, international, high-risk/high-reward and fast-breaking research” groups listed here.
We plan to use the RECOVER19 acronym, which focuses on our core research interest: “Re-Evaluating the COronaVirus Emergency Response” as a necessary foundation for effective post-pandemic recovery. The grant is based at Toronto Metropolitan University and involves five co-Principal Investigators at five other Ontario universities, as well as nine co-applicants, 13 Canadian collaborators, and ten international collaborators from across the globe.
The public research summary is copied below; this web site will soon include further details. Currently, the easiest way to follow our progress is to allow notifications from this WordPress site.
There is hardly a person or place on earth that has not been affected by the 2020-2022 SARS-CoV-2 pandemic. In most countries, socio-economic, education, and health systems experienced massive disruptions, with repercussions expected to continue for decades. While focusing on effective and sustainable recovery, we must also look back on the pandemic response of the last two years and learn from it. The UN Research Roadmap lays out a path from the lessons learned through meaningful recovery to a resilient future.
The proposed project contributes to Pillar 5: Social Cohesion and Community Resilience, Pillar 2: Social Protection and Basic Services, and Pillar 1: Health Systems and Services. Within these themes, we focus on the two research priorities 5.1 (How can communities be optimally engaged in decision-making during emergencies to strengthen social cohesion?) and 5.2 (How can governments most effectively communicate with local communities to build trust, forge consensus and promote cooperation to achieve shared goals?), while also addressing the three research questions 1.3.2, 2.3.4, and 2.5.1. This research contributes to achieving the four UN Sustainable Development Goals 3, 4, 11, and 16.
The project team comprises a diverse group of researchers from across the globe. The principal investigators are affiliated with six universities in the Province of Ontario, Canada, and represent different social and health sciences. Canadian co-applicants add expertise in governance, healthcare, law, media and communications, while international collaborators from Jamaica, Western Europe, Israel, Kenya, and Uganda specialize in behavioural sciences, economics, epidemiology, and philosophy. The project also engages non-profit and private-sector organizations in the areas of One Health, and democracy and civil society.
According to the team’s interdisciplinary composition, a set of nested conceptual frameworks and a variety of research methods will be used. A theoretical foundation in bio- and geopolitics, epistemology, and complexity theory is complemented by operational considerations around the social determinants of health and value-based governance, along with an applied framework in rational, evidence-informed and participatory decision-making under uncertainty. The methods that will be used by subgroups of researchers include critical analysis, discourse analysis, secondary data analysis and visualization, as well as oral histories and creative work.
RECOVER19 