Original Article

Global Framings of Pandemic

Recovery: Insights Across

The Journal of Environment & Development 2026, Vol. 0(0) 1–34 © The Author(s) 2026

Conservation, Development

and Health Fields

Article reuse guidelines:
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DOI: 10.1177/10704965251407170

journals.sagepub.com/home/jed

Rachel Carmenta , Liana Anderson, M. Teresa Armijos, Victoria Lugo, Hazel Marsh, Maria Eugenia Ulfe Young, and Roger Few1
Abstract
In many contexts recovery from COVID-19 is ongoing. The impacts of the pandemic were diverse and their distribution uneven, which may in part explain the diversity in the ways in which its recovery has been framed. Numerous framings concerning what constitutes ‘recovery’, what its pursuit should entail, who (or what) it should target and whose vision the notion of recovery should represent have been expressed by various fields of study. An assessment of the way in which diverse fields (e.g. health, conservation and development) have represented the priorities of recovery from the COVID-19 pandemic is so far not available. This knowledge gap is important since understanding the threads in common, and those distinct between fields, may help move towards a more integrated appraisal of the multiple priorities salient to recovery. Integration however also involves representing diverse knowledges, values and lived experiences and supporting disaster-resilient communities requires being attentive to the voices of the most marginalized. Due recognition of and engagement with these groups is essential for enhancing the justice and equity of recovery-focused interventions, and can help ensure that interventions do not presume, misplace or misrepresent local priorities. With growing recognition of the need for decolonial, grounded and co-developed responses to processes of recovery, nature futures and global development there is a need to understand how COVID-19 recovery has been conceived and articulated across fields, and crucially, the extent to which it has included the perceptions of socially, economically and politically marginalized groups. We analyzed 30 papers (10 per field), and asked (1) How does COVID-19 recovery tend to be framed within these fields, including the representation of intersecting risks? (2) Where is there divergence and congruence in recovery discourses across these fields, and what would an integrated understanding of recovery look like? (3) To what extent are local voices reflected or acknowledged in these international framings? We found that while perspectives differed, all highlighted how COVID-19 exposed pre-existing interconnected crises. Many framed the root cause as flawed economic growth models, which was considered in need of various degrees of transformation combined with more integrated governance. Crucially, few framings had strong representation of local, or marginalized voices and relatively few papers actively grounded their calls, or prominently advocated for such practices. Our findings point to a need for more cocreated knowledge generation and agenda setting for COVID-19 recovery, and disaster recovery more broadly.
Keywords
risk, resilience, disaster, one health, sustainability science, decolonial, inclusion
Introduction
Since its global outbreak in 2020, the COVID-19 pandemic has created multiple burdens across sectors and scales, for both people and nature (Forster et al., 2020; Loh et al., 2021; Onyeaka et al., 2021; Power et al., 2020). The peak of infections has since passed and the global health emergency was declared over in May 2023 (UN, 2023). However, in August 2024 the UN reported that infections were again rising, expressing concern that more severe variants may be on the horizon (UN, 2024). Regardless of the current number of infections, COVID-19 is not over in the sense that recovery from COVID-19 remains ongoing – recovery is a long-term process rather than an end-state. Impacts of the pandemic have included the health burdens and mortality associated with the disease itself, as well as additional and wide-ranging impacts that were generated through the control measures put in place to reduce its transmission. Some impacts were considered positive, for example, the deceleration of the metabolism of the economy alleviated associated environmental pressures, carbon emissions, noise pollution and enforced a slow-down to the pace of life for some (Labib et al., 2022; Loh et al., 2021). Yet, burdens were also widespread, for example, environmental harms were reported in some regions, including possible increases in deforestation (Ce´spedes et al., 2023; Ferrante & Fearnside, 2020) and a suite of impacts magnified the vulnerabilities of already marginalized groups, for example through unequal access to health care and magnified poverty and exposure (Hassan et al., 2021; Patel et al., 2023; da Silva et al., 2020). The concept of the pandemic being a ‘leveller’ was short-lived and has been justly critiqued and subsequently rejected (Ali et al., 2020).
The diversity of impacts and their differentiated distribution may in part explain the apparently mirrored diversity that exists in the various discourses and framings surrounding COVID-19 recovery. The magnitude and severity of the pandemic, combined with the scale and breadth of its impacts led-to numerous framings (and associated interests) concerning what constitutes ‘recovery’, what its pursuit should entail, who (or what) it should target and whose vision the notion of recovery should represent. Framings of recovery can be markedly divergent, it may be defined and represented as being achievable through rebuilding the buoyancy of the economy, or recovery may be seen to require a fundamental recalibration of values, new social organization forms and or an associated easing of economic throughput (Castro et al., 2020; Furman et al., 2020; Giurca et al., 2022). Notably, the distinctions between the various recovery framings are likely influenced by factors such as scale, sector, vested interests, power, and knowledge of, and exposure to, pre-existing risks and vulnerabilities (Few et al., 2020, 2021).
Sectoral approaches to understanding, responding to, and assessing global crises such as environmental degradation, disaster risk, inequities of development, and public health emergencies, are still prevalent despite much research and many calls recognizing the need for more integrated and holistic approaches (Carmenta, Barlow, et al., 2023; Carmenta & Vira, 2018; Henig & Knight, 2023; Liu et al., 2015; Reed et al., 2017). Whilst different fields have distinct priorities, concerns, approaches and methods, it is increasingly understood that system-level, cross-sectoral and integrated knowledge, responses and governance arrangements are necessary to adequately govern socio-natural systems (Ratima et al., 2019; Sachs et al., 2022; Schipper et al., 2021). For example, the sustainable development goal agenda is inherently focussed on cross-sectoral links (Lim et al., 2018), the planetary health agenda recognizes the interconnection between environmental integrity and human health (Robinson et al., 2022), and the conservation community are calling for integrated (cross-sectoral) approaches to achieve better (i.e. more sustainable and more just) outcomes for people and nature (Mansourian & Parrotta, 2018; Reed et al., 2016). An assessment of the way in which diverse fields (e.g. health, conservation and development) have represented the priorities of recovery from the COVID-19 pandemic is so far not available. This knowledge gap is important since understanding the threads in common, and those distinct between fields, may help move towards a more integrated appraisal of the multiple priorities salient to recovery.
Integration however is not only achieved by working across sectors to move beyond siloed understandings, but also involves integrating diverse knowledges, values and lived experiences which engages the notion of an intersectional lens (Carmenta et al., 2022; Ratima et al., 2019). An intersectional lens is considered imperative when it comes to supporting communities to become disaster-resilient and requires being attentive to the voices, values and priorities of the most marginalized, particularly when they may be hardest hit by intersecting risks (Crenshaw, 2013; Droz et al., 2023; Nanthini & Nair, 2020; Salman, 2020; Whetstone & Demiroz, 2023; Zafra-Calvo et al., 2020). All too often the voices, values and knowledges of marginalized groups such as women and girls, Indigenous Peoples, and other groups facing systemic discrimination due to factors such as race, religion, poverty or sexual orientation are afforded least visibility and recognition, meanwhile these groups tend to experience the heaviest burdens of environmental changes, often that they have done little to create (Carmenta et al., 2021; Fanning & Hickel, 2023; Hickel et al., 2022; da Silva et al., 2020; Mallard et al., 2021). Enabling voice, and due recognition to these groups is essential for enhancing the justice and equity of recovery-focused interventions, and can help ensure that interventions do not presume, misplace or misrepresent local priorities. With growing recognition of the need for decolonial, grounded and co-developed responses to processes of recovery, nature futures and global development (Benjamens et al., 2021; Carmenta, Za¨ hringer, et al., 2023; Kothari, 2021; Kothari et al., 2019; Pereira et al., 2020) there is a need to understand how recovery is conceived and articulated, and the extent to which it includes the perceptions of socially, economically and politically marginalized groups.
Concerns over the ambiguity around what is meant by social marginalization and marginalized groups have been raised, particularly with the proliferation of interest in the term and the considerable amounts of public spending and aid directed at reducing ‘social marginalization’ (Fluit et al., 2024). We consider the unifying definition of social marginalization given by Fluit et al. (2024) to adequately capture our application of the term, as follows: ‘a multifaceted concept that refers to a context-dependent social process of “othering” – where certain individuals or groups are systematically excluded based on societal norms and values – and the resulting experience of disadvantage. As such, social marginalization comes with restricted access to resources such as education, healthcare, and employment, while increasing exposure to various adverse socio-structural life outcomes, including poverty, discrimination, and social isolation. Crucially, both the process and outcomes of social marginalization can vary significantly across diverse social, cultural, and historical contexts’. The COVID-19 expe- rience(s) offers a unique insight to assess the degree to which (i) fields of study converge and diverge in the content and priorities reflected in their framings of recovery, and (ii) the extent to which these global framings of recovery are informed by, or recognize, and propose to enact and deliver to, the inclusion of grounded voices and realities, and particularly those of marginalized groups.
Grounding international framings of recovery in local realities and experiences is important because of the longevity and influence that discourses can hold (Roe, 1991). Our concept of framing overlaps with the concept of discourse, but is distinct in that discourses are often more directly coercive and utilized by powerful actors, whilst framing refers more to the way in which logics are constructed and arguments built. Crucially, with both discourses and framings, when local realities and priorities are not reflected, harms can be perpetuated and misguided interventions developed and deployed (Skutsch & Turnhout, 2020), new threats can emerge, and resources be wasted. Further, framings can tend to hold traction regardless of the degree to which they resemble fact or involve inclusion of voices, yet they can create ‘sticky’ institutional lock-in that is hard to release once established (Delabre et al., 2020). Framings hold implications for intervention design and delivery, and it is therefore essential to examine their content (Adams et al., 2004; Carmenta et al., 2025; Howe et al., 2014). Further, as the view of a problem is influenced by power, voice it’s perception and access to platforms, framings can serve to enable the status quo whilst invisibilizing peripheral views and thus perpetuating their under-represented nature. This tendency is particularly concerning when interventions are likely to be targeted and operational in the landscapes and territories of peripheral groups.
Our intention is to address these gaps – specifically to identify the ways in which COVID-19 recovery has been articulated across the divergent fields of conservation, development studies and global health, and the degree to which these framings have sought to be inclusive of the voices (e.g. the differentiated needs, visions, priorities and values) of marginalized groups. We recognize that these are three specific fields among many, but we have selected them as particularly relevant to the formation of framings that might be seen as offering alternatives to ‘business-as-usual’ recovery approaches. They are also salient because of their close interconnection and potential for system feedbacks which means identifying areas of convergence and defining their distinction could be useful for all sectors. We characterize and compare the ways in which COVID- 19 pandemic recovery is framed (i.e. what does it focus on) and the recovery priorities that are foregrounded. We explore the possibility of synthesizing across these framings (e.g. identify where most divergence and where congruence exists), identifying themes in common that might help to generate an understanding of what a more integrated recovery discourse would look like. Such an initiative is important given the current gap in such appraisal across these fields, because uniting efforts across shared understandings might bring leverage and collaborative effort which is deemed necessary in the broader field of sustainability. Crucially, we situate the inclusion of local narratives, voice and place-based experience as central to integration, and thus critique the extent to which ‘local’ priorities are reflected, or not, in the global discourses identified (Estrada-Carmona et al., 2024).
This review was therefore guided by the following research questions: (1) How does COVID-19 recovery tend to be framed within the fields of (i) health, (ii) development studies, and (iii) conservation, including the representation of intersecting risks? (2) Where is there divergence and congruence in recovery discourses across these fields, and what would an integrated understanding of recovery look like? (3) To what extent are local voices reflected or acknowledged in these international framings?
Methods
We conducted a review of three broad fields, specifically: (i) global health (hereafter health); (ii) development studies (hereafter development) and (iii) conservation. Given our interest in framings rather than (the apparently) objective results of empirical work, we restricted our analysis to focus on non-empirical papers (i.e. Commentary, Letters, Perspective, Policy analysis and Review papers) in the peer-reviewed scientific literature. In order to capture a range of papers representative of (but not exhaustive) the fields of interest, we combined a key-word search within Scopus, with our own knowledge of the literature to produce the final set of papers for review (Supplemental Table 1). We used the same set of key words across all searches, but introduced the key words (i.e. conservation, development or health) to produce variants that enabled us to access and retrieve distinct literature sets, as follows: TITLE-ABS-KEY (( [conservation, development, health]) AND (covid OR c-19 OR covid-19 AND recover*) AND (tropic*)). The COVID-19 pandemic was first reported in December 2019 after an outbreak ofa cluster of pneumonia cases in Wuhan China. Searches were therefore duly set from January 2020 to Feb 2024. Initial lists of papers returned through searches were then shared in consultation between the coding co-authors (Conservation (RC); Development (MTA); Health (RF)) to remove any duplications and only those papers which considered the concept of recovery were retained. The intention was not for a full systematic review, but rather a more qualitative narrative review (albeit with a systematically applied data extraction template) in order to understand and characterize the breadth of ways in which the priorities around COVID-19 recovery have been represented across fields. We therefore limited the number of papers reviewed in detail to 10 per field, which appeared adequate to capture the key features of the recovery framings across the multiple fields and began to indicate saturation had been reached. To avoid bias in selecting papers, for each field, the 10 papers were selected at random from the search result lists per field. A total of 30 papers were reviewed (Table 1).
Our focus was solely on the way COVID-19 recovery was framed and articulated (i.e. described, defined, detailed), and did not extend to consider the various burdens recognized in these framings, nor the ways in which blame for the pandemic was presented, or suggestions for how future pandemics may be avoided – unless these were inherently part of the recovery narrative. The review was limited to the peer-reviewed academic literature published in English, generating caveats due to the omission of potentially relevant articles in the grey literature, or contributions in non-English languages. However, since we were interested in the global framings of international communities this decision was appropriate.
An overarching data extraction framework was applied in order to ensure comparability across the data and enable a synthesis phase in which insights across fields could be evaluated collectively and data will be made available upon request. We paid particular attention to the representations of pathways to recovery by documenting who was represented as responsible for recovery delivery, the scale of social targeting – which also represents the degree to which stakeholder-specific needs were recognized, the degree of transformation required, recognition of the imperative to include marginalized voices (i.e. understanding and designing recovery from the bottom-up) and the intersecting risks that were noted. Using our framework combined with thematic analysis of the data extracted, it was then possible to identify three key emergent framings of COVID-19 recovery that appeared representative for each field. Thematic
Table 1. List of Papers Reviewed for each of the Fields of Health, Development and Conservation	
# Authors	Title	Journal	

Health
1H Fakhruddin et al., 2020	Are we there yet? The transition from Progress in Disaster Science response to recovery for the
COVID-19 pandemic	
2H Sachs et al., 2022	The Lancet Commission on lessons for The Lancet the future from the COVID-19	
	pandemic	
3H Hoernke 2020	A socially just recovery from the	Journal of the Royal Society
COVID-19 pandemic: A call for	of Medicine
action on the social determinants of
urban health inequalities	
4H Shipton et al., 2021	Population health post-pandemic:	Public Health in Practice
Critiquing the economic approach to	
	recovery	
5H Patel et al., 2023	Reimagining the journey to recovery: PLOS Medicine
The COVID-19 pandemic and global
mental health	
6H Gostin et al., 2023	Human rights and the COVID-19	The Lancet
pandemic: A retrospective and prospective analysis	
7H Ehrenburg et al., 2021	Efforts to mitigate the economic impact Infectious Diseases of of the COVID-19 pandemic:	Poverty
Potential entry points for neglected tropical diseases	
8H de Leon et al., 2021	Beyond building back better: Imagining a The Lancet Planetary Health future for human and planetary health	
9H Hassan et al., 2021	Hindsight is 2020? Lessons in global Nature Medicine health governance one year into the
pandemic	
10H Jacob et al., 2020	Building resilient societies after COVID- The Lancet Public Health 19: The case for investing in maternal, neonatal, and child health	
Development		
1D Zavaleta-Cortijo, 2020	Climate change and COVID-19:	The Lancet
Reinforcing indigenous food systems	
2D Sacks, 2021	COVID-19, climate change, and	The Lancet Planet Health
communities	
3D McClelland et al., 2020	Recovery for development: A multi- The Journal of Development dimensional, practice-oriented	Studies
framework for transformative change post-disaster	

Table 1. (continued)	
# Authors	Title	Journal	
4D Omukutti et al.,	Systems thinking in COVID-19
2021	recovery is urgently needed to
deliver sustainable development for women and girls	The Lancet Planet Health	
5D Gupta et al., 2020 COVID-19, poverty and inclusive development	World Development	
6D Henson and	The development impacts of COVID
Kambhampati,	19 at home and abroad: Politics and	European Journal of
Development Research	
2020	implications of government action		
7D Leach et al., 2020 Post-pandemic transformations: How and Why Covid-19 requires us to rethink development	World Development	
8D Van Barneveld et al., The COVID-19 pandemic: Lessons on 2023	building more equal and sustainable
societies	The Economic and Labour
Relations Review	
9D Mattar, 2021	Climate justice: Priorities for equitable
recovery from the pandemic	Climate Policy	
10D Marks and Toye, Community economic development: A	Canadian Journal of	
2020	viable solution for COVID-19
recovery	Nonprofit and Social
Economy Research	
Conservation		
1C Rodriguez, 2021	Nature and humanity	Parks	
2C Zahawi, R. A. et al., Potential impacts of COVID-19 on
2020	tropical forest recovery	Biotropica	
3C Bhammar, H. et al. , Framework for sustainable recovery of
2021	tourism in protected areas	Sustainability	
4C Markandya, A. et al., COVID, the environment and food
2021	systems: Contain, cope and rebuild
better	Frontiers in Environmental Science	
5C Saxena, A. et al., Forest livelihoods and a ‘green
2021	recovery’ from the COVID-19
pandemic: Insights and emerging research priorities from India	Forest Policy and Economics	
6C Galanakis, C. M.	Bio-economy and green recovery in a
et al., 2022	post-COVID-19 era	Science of The Total Environment	
7C Sandbrook, C.,	Biodiversity conservation in a post-
et al., 2022	COVID-19 economy	Oryx	
8C Kothari, A., 2021 Half-Earth or Whole-Earth? Green or transformative recovery? Where are the voices from the Global South?	Oryx	
9C Cooke, S. J. et al., Ten considerations for conservation
2021	policy makers for the post-COVID-
19 transition	Environmental Reviews	

Table 1. (continued)
#	Authors	Title	Journal	
10C	Werikhe, A., 2022	Towards a green and sustainable recovery from COVID-19	Current research in environmental sustainability	

analysis was done by the lead author upon multiple reads and iterative attempts at organizing the data, three sets of discussion were held between all coding co-authors (RC, RF, MTA) to ensure that the thematic analysis was representative of the fields to which we each held the greatest insight. Within each framing there were often multiple pathways to recovery represented, but whilst the pathways were often distinct, other characteristics may be held in common. We drew these attributes together in a synthesis phase in which we identified areas of overlap and differentiation across fields from the material reviewed.
We developed two scaled dimensions as heuristic tools to organize our thematic analysis. The Transformation scale describes a shift which moves from ‘incremental’ – that is small shifts in the status quo (business-as-usual) to ‘system-wide’ which is a higher degree of change and involves calls for system-wide or paradigm shifts in norms, practices, institutions and values as articulated by the Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services (IPBES) transformations working group. The scale of Targeting distinguished between a site-level, differentiated and/or socially targeted emphasis to those framings that were concerned with recovery at a broader, national, and/or whole-society in a non-differentiated approach.
Results
Characterizing COVID-19 Recovery Framings Across Fields
Our analysis yielded a number of key distinctions that were apparent in framings of COVID-19 recovery both within and between fields. We sought to identify the leading features of these framings, whilst recognizing that in so doing we omit degrees of overlap that existed between some of the details which become subsumed within these broader features.
Health Framings. Within the health literature the three key themes of COVID-19 recovery were: (1) Equity dimensions; (2) Health Care Gaps; and (3) Pandemic Preparedness (Table 2).
Equity dimensions were an explicit [papers H3, 4, 6, 8] or implicit [papers H2, 5, 9, 10] concern within the health field. In most cases the health framing typically took a more expansive view of human and societal wellbeing, locating health needs within the wider challenge of recognizing the fundamental social purpose of economic recovery. This covered calls for a renewed focus on the social determinants of health, rooting
Achieved through., (paper #)	Delivered by	Scale of social targeting: Need	Degree of transformation	Inclusion of marginalized ‘voice’	Intersecting risks	
Equity						
Address social	Governments - public	Global scale.	High in socially progressive	Need for enabling	Mostly not, but some	
determinants	health, planners,	Generally a strong	sense: Equity oriented	voice,	feature of climate-	
(3H)	International actors	emphasis on	discourse involves	participation of	related hazards and	
Social purpose of	(e.g. WHO, UN and	targeting, either	transformation of health	communities	environmental	
economic	World Bank)	on vulnerable	systems toward focus on	referred to in all	threats	
recovery (4H, 8H)		groups or women	greatest needs, reducing structural inequities; and	4 papers		
Rights-based approach (6Η)			away from economic priorities that undermine
public health			
Health care gaps (st	:rategic need)					
Mental health (5Η)
Maternal, child	Governments - public health, planners;	Global scale. Whole society, often	Health care gaps discourses mainly refer to	Mostly missing explicit mention	Not expressed	
health (IOH)	International actors	combined with	strengthening specific			
Neglected tropical diseases (7Η)	(e.g. WHO, UN and World Bank)	targeting, particularly women	health sectors to bolster primary/preventive health; though some transformation in sense of shifting priorities and social targeting			
Table 2. Framings of COVID-19 Recovery Within the Health Literature
(continued)
The Journal of Environment & Development 0(0

et al.

Table 2. (continued)
Achieved through., (paper #)	Delivered by	Scale of social targeting: Need	Degree of transformation	Inclusion of marginalized ‘voice’	Intersecting risks	
Pandemic preparedness and prevention
Multisectoral	Governments - public
pandemic	health, planners;
planning	International actors
(IH, 2H)	(e.g. WHO, UN	and
Risk information/	World Bank)
communication system (IH)
Multi-lateral
cooperation, finance (2H,9H)	Global scale. Whole society, often combined with targeting	High in technical sense: Argues for governance, communication and financing systems that are oriented toward pandemic prevention and disaster risk reduction rather than reactive response	Missing explicit mention	Natural hazards and climate change or absent	

recovery in firmly addressing differentiated health needs, and taking a rights-based approach including through gender equity. There was a strong focus on ensuring recovery targeted the needs and rights of those most vulnerable in society [H3, 4, 6]. Such approaches were understood as requiring a socially progressive shift in the present priorities of health systems, enabling them to move towards a focus on greatest needs and reducing structural inequities, and away from the economic priorities that undermine public health provision. Whilst the framing was around equity and health, it included emphasizing the need to shift the paradigm from economic growth to transformation toward a more sustainable, Sustainable Development Goals (SDG) oriented vision for development [H8] – a focus that was also prevalent in the Development papers.
Though the arguments were framed mainly in terms of the delivery agents identified as relevant, such as governmental agencies (public health, planners, social care etc.) and aid or development agencies (multi-lateral, bilateral, non-governmental), there was some reference to the need for public inclusion in shaping recovery processes. For example, three papers [H3, 6, 8] referred explicitly to the importance of enabling the ‘voices’ of marginalized groups in decisions related to health, including on housing [H3] and in the development of preparedness and response plans [H6]. Yet, despite this recognition, none of these papers outlined how such inclusion could take place.
The second distinct framing of COVID-19 recovery within this field concerned health care gaps, notably the importance of strategically strengthening them. This approach was the fundamental framing within one third of the papers [H5, 7, 10], and was strongly reflected in another [H2]. The framing centred on how the pandemic highlighted specific needs within health provision whilst simultaneously highlighting the potential gains, generally and for future epidemic crises, if these gaps were addressed and health care systems strengthened. A number of specific gaps within heath care systems were within mental health services, maternal and child health, neglected tropical diseases, and primary health care respectively [H2, 5, 7, 10]. Whilst the papers took a whole-society approach to these needs, they also recognized how these gaps are particularly significant for certain population groups. The arguments mainly referred to targeting certain health care sectors that have been relatively weak, rather than a full systemic transformation, though there was a degree of fundamental shift implied in the rebalancing of priorities and greater social targeting.
Perhaps expectedly, several of the papers from the health field focussed their attention around a framing of pandemic preparedness and prevention. Interestingly, strengthening resilience to future pandemics was in most cases advocated as achievable through integrated approaches extending beyond the health sector and this idea of integration was central to three [H1, 2, 9] and implicit in two [H5, 6] of the papers. Specific topics covered multisectoral pandemic planning, disease risk information and communication systems and adapting the organization of international cooperation and finance mechanisms to deliver these objectives. Again, this was a whole-society generally non-differentiated approach, but with recognition that some social targeting would be important to ensure the most vulnerable would be protected [H2, 9]. Since most of these measures were either demonstrably weak or non-existent at the time of COVID-19, enacting them would represent a system overhaul, or transformational change in a managerial and technical sense. For example, in relation to creating governance, communication and financing systems oriented toward pandemic prevention and disaster risk reduction, rather than a more reactive response to crises [H1, 2, 9]. In terms of voice, two of the papers made links to topics of inclusion, with one paper highlighting cases of exclusion of marginalized groups (such as migrants) from disease control responses [H1], and another alluding to the imperative of inclusivity of target groups in decision-making [H2], calling for primary health systems with strong relationships at community level.
Development Framings. Within the development literature the three key themes representing COVID-19 recovery were: (1) Integrated and Multi-dimensional approaches; (2) Co-production of knowledge and (3) Justice and Equity (Table 3).
Nearly half (D3, 5, 7) of the papers explicitly emphasized Integrated Systems Thinking as necessary to a COVID-19 recovery pathway. Also represented as a multidimensional focus underscoring the need for improved access to health, wellbeing and environmental sustainability over growth (D3, 4, 5, 7). However, these articles note that the level of transformation required to achieve recovery in the long-term would demand considerable changes in the economic systems away from Development models that prioritizes economic growth. Within the transformations noted, some were more radical than others, ranging from communing based to green growth and degrowth. An important element in the transformations suggested were changes to people’s relationship with the environment to live ‘sustainably’ while also improving access to health (D3, 4, 5, 7). Most papers call for high-level targeting, recognizing the needs of marginalized groups within broader society and sometimes with a more specific focus (including on Indigenous Peoples, women and girls). Recovery focused on the marginalized was deemed essential to achieve inclusive and equitable development.
Another key recovery framing centred on Co-production of knowledge to achieve future resilience. Although the level of targeting and the groups targeted varied (e.g. local vs. regional scale, indigenous communities or/or women), in this framing all themes prioritized the need to co-produce knowledge at different scales. Co-production is considered essential because it enables recovery strategies created in locally relevant ways, underpinned by community capacities and knowledge while also considering the impacts of climate change. For example, one of the papers emphasized indigenous knowledge and food systems for future recovery and resilience (D1) while another focused on the role of community leadership and the co-production of knowledge and solutions for preparedness and response (D10).
The third framing related to Justice and equitable development. In this framing the focus was explicitly on achieving more inclusive, just and sustainable societies while substantially improving targeted financing projects. Improved targeting was deemed necessary both for women and girls as well as for marginalized groups in general. Two papers in this theme focussed on the needs of women and girls (D4, 8), recognizing them as important target groups, two are more ambitious in scope and extend the recognition of other marginalized groups specifically noting the disproportionate
Table 3. Framings of COVID-19 Recovery from the Development Literature	•	
Development literature		
Achieved through., (paper #)	Delivered by	Scale of social targeting: Need	Degree of transformation	Inclusion of marginalized ‘voice’	Intersecting risks		
Integrated and multi-dimensional approaches
Multi-dimensional	Governments - regional and
environment,	local recovery planning, local
health, wellbeing,	decision makers.
economy and	International actors (e.g.
governance	WHO, UN and World Bank)
(3D, 5D, 7D)
Gender, health and
finance (4D)
Co-production of knowledge
Co- production of	Governments - regional and
context specific	local recovery planning, local
responses -	decision makers. International
environment,	actors (e.g. WHO, UN and
biodiversity, food	World Bank) Multisectoral
systems (ID)	beyond health sector
Co-production
community/local economic
development (2D)
Co-production of knowledge for future responses and resilience (6D)	Strong focus on system changes (acknowledges macroeconomic factors as root cause of vulnerability) at national international scale with attention to marginalized communities (inc. Women and girls)
Whole society but includes targeting community level leadership and enhancing indigenous knowledge	Rethink framings for/of development beyond growth to more radical responses with calls to a reconfiguration of statecitizen relations and to a lesser extent, some mention of radical transformations (e.g. green, just transformations, degrowth) to reduce structural inequities and prioritize wellbeing
Medium level transformation: Discourses mainly refer to strengthening specific sectors to access to health though some transition by shifting priorities and social targeting	Mostly implied
Common and largely explicit with a mention of community knowledge	Climate-related and other hazards, poverty (D5, 7) and gendered violence (04)
Climate change and related hazards	The Journal of Environment & Development (	
(continued)	•	

Table 3. (continued)
Development literature	
Achieved through., (paper #)	Delivered by	Scale of social targeting: Need	Degree of transformation	Inclusion of marginalized ‘voice’	Intersecting risks	
Justice and equity Policies and finance	Governments - regional and	Whole society with a focus on	Medium transition level: Argues	Common but	Climate-related	
for inclusive	local recovery planning, local	targeting vulnerable and	for policies that focus on	variable, both	hazards,	
development (9D,	decision makers.	indigenous peoples	changes in the financial and	implicit and	poverty,	
IOD)
Rights-based - focussing on indigenous peoples and other marginalized groups (8D, IOD)	International actors (e.g.
WHO, UN and World Bank)		economic system and environmental sustainability towards more inclusive/ equitable development	explicit calls	gender-based violence	

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burden of ill-health and economic hardship, on black, brown and Indigenous peoples (D8, 10). This latter article, calls for community centred and radical transformation of the status quo for ongoing recovery post COVID-19 pandemic.
Overall, within the three framings, there was a persistent call to move away from the current dominant development model towards development beyond growth (D3, 5, 7, 8, 10) that aims to be more inclusive and equitable. Such a recovery strategy would redress the inequalities and gendered impacts of COVID-19 (D5, 6, 8, 9) and necessarily prioritize responses beyond business-as-usual (D3, 5, 6, 7, 8). Some emphasized a reconfiguration of labour relations (D3, 5, 7, 8) state-citizen relations (D5, 7), values and economic priorities. Most importantly all emphasized a focus on the needs of the most vulnerable through different mechanisms to tackle gender-related, and other social inequalities. The majority (6) of the papers called for recovery planning that also considered future preparedness to system shocks (D2, 3, 7), involving leadership and voices of the vulnerable at the local level (D3, 4, 6, 8). Several of the papers dealt with the implications of debt and microeconomic policies on recovery for local communities (D3) women and girls and other marginalized groups (D4, 9), such as Indigenous Peoples, afro-descendants, youth and migrants (D2, 5, 10). There was a clear emphasis on equity and justice for recovery across the papers.
Despite the focus on the needs of the marginalized, calls to directly involve the voices of these groups ranged from implicit to more targeted calls. Only three papers (3D, 4D and 10D) present ways in which those voices could be included.
Conservation and Sustainability Framings. Within the conservation and sustainability literature there was evidence of three broad recovery framings: Conservation; Decoupling environment and development; and Green-economy combined with the SDGs respectively (Table 4). Not surprisingly, the conservation frame was most prominent overall and found in 50% (n 5) of the papers. This framing highlighted the biodiversity and environmental crises as the key intersecting and underlying risk. It emphasized the opportunity to learn from and extend the environmental benefits of the ‘anthropause’ that COVID-19 provided, through foregrounding conservation in recovery strategies. Although conservation was fundamental in this framing, the strategies to achieve it varied, and included tree planting, nature protection, and income generation – so that nature protection provides positive income flows, and the engagement of local and marginalized groups. The scale of recovery was general, with an emphasis on the tropics and site-level and the actors responsible for delivering recovery strategies were governments, conservation practitioners and scientists. Transformations were more towards the incremental side of the transformation scale – seeking strategies such as area protection and payments. Although some sources called for superseding economic values with environmental ones, clear pathways for doing so were absent. The need for inclusion of marginalized groups was reflected in two of these papers – and regarded as fundamental to forms of recovery with any capacity to achieve justice and sustainability.
Green economy, combined within an SDGs approach was another clear recovery framing within three papers among the conservation and sustainability literature. These

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Table 4. Framings of COVID-19 Recovery from the Conservation Literature
Conservation literature
Achieved through..	Scale of social
(paper #)	Delivered by	targeting: Need	Inclusion of marginalized
Degree of transformation ‘voice’	Intersecting risks	
Conservation framing
Protection,	Conservation	Varied, from site
restoration and	practitioners;	level to a general
replanting (2C)	Governments;	either global or
Income generation	Scientists	tropical regions
(3C)	focus with some
Considering	emphasis on
recovery as	forests
principally a conservation
challenge (7C,
9C)
Indigenous co
creation (8C)	Routine site level	Explicit call. Seen as	Biodiversity crisis
conservation action	fundamental to the	and lack of
largely the emphasis	possibility of defining	action
a truly sustainable recovery Some call for transformations, including from economic to environmental priorities, and for governance to centre the voices and the contributions of the global south	
(continued)

Conservation literature	
Achieved through., (paper #)	Delivered by	Scale of social targeting: Need	Degree of transformation	Inclusion of marginalized ‘voice’	Intersecting risks	
Green economy wit	hin SDGs					
Forest conservation	Business; Civil society; Development	General focus or tropics	Calls for transformations away from BAU towards nature-	Some mention of local engagement -	Deforestation and the	
(IC)	partners;		based green economy, to	particularly in terms of	environmental	
Health emphasis	Governments;		rethink and rebuild a more	learning from past	crisis	
(IC)	International actors		sustainable future	decades of community		
Carbon neutrality focus (5C, IOC)	(e.g. WHO, UN and World Bank)		Manage forests as complex adaptive social-ecological systems responding to cross-scalar social- ecological feedbacks	based management and using inclusive approaches		
Decoupling environment and development					
Pursuit of	Business;	General global or	Calls for transformation in	Not specified	Global	
integrated wins	Governments;	developing	both rural and urban		environmental	
(4C)	International actors	country with	contexts. Such as land		change and	
Bio-economy and integration (6C)	(e.g. WHO, UN and World Bank)	emphasis on most marginalized	rights, gender quality, health equity, reforestation and wastereduction, GHG emissions reductions. Embedded in system-wide transformation such as a one-health approach, moving away from consumption culture		climate change	
Table 4. (continued)
The Journal of Environment & Development 0(0

papers argued for recovery founded in the principles of a green economy, for sustainable, nature-based development within the context of the SDGs. Strategies included those embedded in conservation (e.g. forest management and protection, conservation of large intact habitats), stressing the interconnected nature of healthy ecosystems and public health and the need for system-wide transformations to economies and societies – guided by the SDGs. The focus was on the forested tropics in general and the actors apportioned with responsibility for delivery were diverse. Underlying and intersecting risks focus on environmental crises, and notably deforestation. The need to include marginalized voices was addressed through recognition of past experience, lessons and progress in working with communities and recognition that any recovery package must be inclusive.
Finally, a recovery framing centred on the potential of Decoupling economic activity from environmental and climatic harms was also evident (represented in two papers). It was framed largely in the context of pursuing integrated wins (the triple win of climate, conservation and development), and the possibility of developing policy pathways, including robust bio-economy models, or entirely new economic systems in order to build back better. Addressing structural issues that impair the contribution of rural communities to sustainability, such as land rights, power relations, food security and sovereignty, health equity, gender equality, agroforestry and reforestation are all featured. These are combined with calls for actions in centres of wealth such as waste-reduction (e.g. food, energy), emissions reductions, reconnecting with nature, replacing material consumer culture and developing circular bioeconomies. Whilst the degree of transformation is high, and the recognition of actions in both rural and urban settings is required, this discourse does not feature the voices of the marginalized in any clear way.
Divergence and Similarity Across Degree of Transformation and of Targeting
Our analysis demonstrates that the degree of targeting (i.e. differentiated need), and of transformation considered necessary for recovery varies within and between fields. For example, the Equity framing within the Health field, and the Decoupling framing within the Conservation field had the highest levels of targeting and of transformation, suggesting the highest degree of movement away from business-as-usual. Meanwhile, other discourses, such as Green Economic Recovery were high in terms of calling for system-wide transformations, but discussed this at the global or whole-society scale without differentiation (lower levels of targeting) (Figure 1).
Moving towards an Integrated Recovery Agenda: Finding Common Ground
Cross-Sectoral Integration is Needed. Across each of the three fields of research reviewed, certain elements of recovery framings appear common – notably integration (e.g. of sectors, scales, risks) was called for across all fields. Integration was considered vital for adequate recovery, part of which included mitigating future pandemics. Overall, the strength and the appropriateness of an integrated approach was argued for because of

Figure 1. Emergent framings of COVID-19 recovery from the fields of (i) health; (ii) development and (iii) conservation and organized along two central axis of Transformation (from incremental to system-wide) and Targeting (from none to differentiated). Note that placings are approximate to serve as a heuristic illustrating the distinctions

the feedbacks and connectivity between sectors. These feedbacks are relevant because, for example, a one-health approach could deliver health gains alongside gains in conservation. Further these benefits in turn could help mitigate future pandemics. COVID-19 contributed to the case for integrated governance because it demonstrated the interconnected nature of these systems and our dependencies on them.
Transformation Away from Dominant Development. COVID-19 was generally presented as a much needed opportunity to reset the course away from siloed sectoral approaches. Whilst the fields and framings did vary on the degree of transformation, generally some level of transformation was routinely called for and all papers made at least one suggestion for some form of change. Most framings highlighted that COVID-19 was insightful because it revealed the multiple crises that were already underway and demonstrated the inadequacy of the current prevailing norms, institutions, and development models which have resulted in the pandemic, and associated crises. For many of the framings, the underlying issue was considered to be the prevailing development model and dominance of the pursuit of economic growth. In general, the framings attempted to draw lessons from the pandemic that can inform future development trajectories within a recovery strategy.
Lack of Representation and Inclusion. Crucially, under-representation of local, or marginalized voices was another tendency that cut across many papers, with relatively few papers actively drawing on, or incorporating grounded voices, or prominently advocating for such practices. More common was to recognize the need for, or speak to some form of, differentiated targeting. In general, it was the Development field that distinguished the need for the inclusion of grounded voices the most, and this field also stood out as holding the recovery framings that were most transformational and differentiated. This points to a fundamental need in terms of knowledge generation and agenda setting for COVID-19 recovery, and disaster recovery more broadly. We consider this, and our other findings in the following discussion.
Discussion
The Opportunity of COVID-19 Recovery: Steering Towards a New Normal
A Moment to Reset Underlying Issues. Overall there are distinctions across fields in the way that COVID-19 recovery has been framed and apparently understood. Our findings also suggest that different fields adopted framings that, perhaps unsurprisingly, reflect their own priorities and emphasis. In this way, the COVID-19 pandemic appears to have been utilized as a window of opportunity to highlight the various issues that different fields emphasize (e.g. overconsumption, inequitable health care) as driving their cause. Recovery framings were apparently developed to emphasize given priorities (of health, conservation and development) in a moment that appeared to offer a space to take stock and rethink the future albeit in distinct ways across fields. Whilst the framings of pathways to recovery were distinct, it was apparent across all papers that COVID-19 was taken as an experience and a lens through which other existing issues (e.g. inequality; climate change, environmental degradation) could be made more visible and foregrounded.
Importantly, whilst the COVID-19 crisis may have passed, these underlying issues and intersecting risks remain, as they did before the pandemic. For example, in the health field, the pre-existing conditions perceived to be magnified through the pandemic included: a lack of social targeting; heavy emphasis on response not prevention, and the pre-eminence of economic accumulation which undermines spending in public health. The pandemic tended to be presented as yet another rationale and argument for acting on those pre-existing issues, and doing so therefore logically sits within the fieldspecific recovery strategies. Within the conservation field, the pre-existing issues included: poor land rights; pre-eminence of economic accumulation creating encroachment into remaining wild places, and ecosystem fragility, all of which demand resetting as part of a recovery strategy. Whilst in the development field the pre-existing issues that were extenuated by COVID-19 included inequity and poverty and climate- related hazards. In this way then, the pandemic became a magnifier that was seen to demonstrate the importance and indeed verify the relevance of pre-existing issues. COVID-19 recovery represents an opportunity to grasp, a moment to act, and a lesson to seize. Doing so could steer away not only from future pandemics, but also from the other various social, health and conservation related perils that were already on the table (Goniewicz et al., 2023; O’Ryan et al., 2023). The possibility of disasters offering windows of opportunity for change is not restricted to the COVID-19 pandemic, yet the longevity of any momentum built-up as a result of disasters, including the pandemic remains unclear (Birkmann et al., 2010).
Distinctions in Recovery Framings Across Fields of Conservation, Development and Health. Across the fields of health, development and conservation, we found at least nine distinct COVID-19 recovery framings, and these varied in a number of ways. In health, these were: Pandemic Preparedness; Health-Care Gaps and Equity. In development they were: Integrated thinking, Knowledge co-production and Inclusive development. In conservation they were: Green-economy, Decoupling and Conservation. A clear point of divergence across the recovery framings was the level of transformation away from business-as-usual that they represented. For instance, some framings suggested that recovery would be possible with only incremental changes to current structures and systems, whilst others made the case for complete transformation of social and economic systems to achieve recovery. Overall, the literature within the development field appeared the most transformational and also most highly targeted to the variable needs of different and distinct groups. Interestingly, divergence in framings was not only between fields, but a considerable amount of variation within fields was also evident suggesting policy messaging may be unclear.
Towards an Integrated COVID-19 Recovery Discourse
Systemic and System-Wide Change. A common theme across many of the papers was the idea of integration across sectors and recognition of multiple and interconnected risks. In order to achieve that, most of the papers promoted alternatives to the ‘mainstream’ thinking around recovery (Farhana & Siti-Nabiha, 2024) – that is, one shaped principally by the idea of restoring previous conditions through economic recovery and economic ‘re-growth’. Many concur that some form of transformation would be essential in relation to achieving recovery into the future. That means a change from what might be seen as ‘business-as-usual’ approaches, and attention to values and priorities beyond that of economic growth alone (O’Ryan et al., 2023; Schipper et al., 2021). Many constitute socially progressive, even radical versions of transformative action (Few et al., 2017), ultimately underscored by the need for systemic and system-wide change. Despite this cross-cutting recognition, there was a general lack of detail identifying the pathways or leverage points that might be available to achieve these transformations. None of the papers broke down how such transformation could take place. The work of the IPBES community on leverage points as entry points for instigating change has now been elaborated and may provide a useful way to extend the calls for recovery in to action since they define a set of strategies and actions for pursuing transformative change (IPBES, 2022). Further, the transformations assessment report explains how transformation happens, and documents how to foster, accelerate and maintain transformative change (IPBES, 2022). The Values assessment distinguished between incremental change and transformational – scale change, although acknowledge that achieving the latter can also be through a series of steps, from conducting plural valuation, through to embedding plural values in decision-making and policy reform, and potentially resulting in societal-wide shifts in norms-held and goals pursued (IPBES, 2022).
Justice and Equity. An additional unifying strand across fields of research was around justice and equity. Indeed, others have observed how justice must be placed at the centre of transformations to sustainability (Martin et al., 2020) and whilst this framing did not appear central in the conservation field, indeed the conservation community is recognizing the imperative of just conservation (Dawson et al., 2024; Martin et al., 2016). Previous scholarship has explored the tendencies of the conventional conservation effort and identified that particularly entrenched forms of practice influence the extent to which heightened justice and equity can be achieved. For example, Carmenta et al. (2025) expand on disciplinary dominance (in which the field is dominated by the more quantitative side of the natural and social sciences, overshadowing attention to nonutility maximizing decisions and intangible values), hegemonic development (the prevalence of the dominant development paradigm within which material value and consumption are considered the accolades of success, and obscuring other notions of living well or wellbeing), and convenient governance (which is that conservation so often operates within the boundaries of what donors dictate, and where it is therefore more convenient to continue business-as-usual style approaches, rather than try and antagonize the system) (Carmenta et al., 2025). Further, empirical research in other disasters has shown how a ‘human dimensions’ justice framing may be better placed to galvanize action to steer-away from future events because such a humanitarian perspective can be more salient across a wider range of stakeholder groups than framings centred on the environment or carbon (Carmenta et al., 2017). Conservation interventions pushing in to the space of enhanced equity, justice, recognition and inclusion include, for example, the Biocultural heritage territories, which are entirely informed by grounded priorities, values and conceptions of a good life (including the spiritual domain) and draw on gift and barter economies (Swiderska et al., 2022).
Missing the Most Marginalized. There was a relatively marginal emphasis in the papers we reviewed on the need for inclusivity in working across diverse perspectives and voices. However the papers tended to focus beyond the local scale, which has been argued as the scale at which integration tends already to happen, in the sense that grassroots’ perspectives and self-organized responses to crises are inherently less likely to constrained by sectoral interests or delimited by sectoral boundaries (Chapin III et al., 2016; de Moraes et al., 2023).
Overcoming the Absence of Local Voices and Associated Plural Values
Grounding Needs in Local Voices. The COVID-19 recovery framings that we identified through this review commonly referred to the need to target attention to under-served and marginalized groups. However, much less common were calls for inclusion of locally generated priorities, grounded in the voices of such groups, and few contributions detailed ‘how’ to achieve such inclusion of marginalized voices (Kothari, 2021). This gap appears to be a key need for future work on recovery, and one that is required across all fields, but particularly the conservation and health fields. Doing so is necessary because often the diverse ways of knowing, valuing and living in the world can be obscured through top-down approaches that superimpose external ideas of what recovery or a good life is (Chapin III et al., 2016; Melber et al., 2024; Rodr´ıguez, 2023). Without careful calibration with locally grounded insights such interventions can in the worse cases create harms and perverse outcomes.
Practitioners and researchers can engage in methods that serve to highlight local views, visions and perspectives and in doing so help to secure their inclusion into strategies and interventions for health, conservation, development and recovery. Methods to engage with and involve local voices to address development issues are not new and date to the 1990s when stakeholder and rightsholder participation in decisionmaking became more mainstream for many organizations and researchers (Chambers, 1994; Cornwall, 2006; Fals-Borda, 1987). Yet, top-down research and policy continues to dominate as evidenced in this review and in recent calls to decolonize knowledge production (Kothari, 2021). Involving marginalized voices in creating more plural approaches to recovery entails genuine inclusion of local community members and stakeholders at different stages of the process, such as in setting the question, methods, design and information dissemination. As noted by capabilitarian scholars, the question is not whether there should be inclusion in different forms of knowledge production but the form of participation and how that is facilitated to involve otherwise marginalized and unrecognized voices (Martinez-Vargas et al., 2022).
Participatory action research has proven promising in the emergence of selfdetermined Indigenous research and pursuing their priorities (Blangy et al., 2024). Others have shown how interestingly technology can also be used to support representation of local realities and for communities themselves to mobilize, unite their struggles and amplify their voices (Hopke & Paris, 2021). For instance, the Haze Gazer platform was developed to capture crowd-sourced data enabling local people to share their reality of living through the catastrophic peatland fires. Through this platform their experiences were directly connected to the presidents situation room (Baraniuk, 2017). The integrated landscape approach community has also provided a number of advances and practical steps for how best to achieve inclusion across sectors and scales (Carmenta et al., 2020; Reed et al., 2016, 2019; Sayer et al., 2013). These resources detail the forms of stakeholder engagement that can enable such dialogue and how mapping common ground can serve as entry points to lay the ground-word for discussion where divergence of opinion exists. Recovery likely requires engaging not only multiple sectors in integrated approaches, but also multiple scales creating scope to connect to available models for forming coalitions of governance suited to tackle the telecoupled reality of our times (Carmenta, Barlow, et al., 2023), and organizing health, conservation and development interventions along evidence-based causal chains (Qiu et al., 2018).
Engaging Plural and Intangible Values. The plurality of values that people hold for nature, and that constitute their multi-dimensional wellbeing are important to consider when configuring recovery, and any intervention option (Carmenta et al., 2022). Too often conceptions of wellbeing are derived from external measures and tend to impose western framings of what matters to achieve a good life and recover. Moving towards plural valuation approaches to ‘measure what matters’ is essential for guiding just recovery (Hill et al., 2021; McGregor et al., 2015; Zafra-Calvo et al., 2020) because targets determine actions (Jacobs et al., 2018). Whilst plural values (i.e. the subjective and relational as well as the material) have tended to be under-represented and yet are potentially most salient to wellbeing in rural communities, and for local and Indigenous Peoples, a number of methods exist for capturing and recognizing this value plurality (Carmenta, Za¨hringer, et al., 2023; Jacobs et al., 2016). Such efforts are imperative to designing interventions and visioning recovery in inclusive ways that speak to the diverse cultural lifeways which recovery strategies often interact with. Previous work lays out a set of methods for engaging with the plural values that are held between people, place and institutions (Carmenta et al., 2023). A special issue in People and Nature entitled ‘Lost in Transition? Capturing the impacts of conservation and development interventions on relational values and human wellbeing in the forested tropics’ (V.5. Issue 6) presents a series of case studies where methods from Q method, to life histories and biocultural appraisals have been employed to give voice to those ‘fuzzier’ and often ‘intangible’ elements of wellbeing, and recovery, that matter to people locally.
Concluding Thoughts
We show that whilst fields diverged, each had framings highlighting how COVID-19 revealed the magnitude of multiple and interconnected crises that were already underway. Many framings considered the underlying issue to be the prevailing development model and its pursuit of economic growth – which was considered inadequate and in need of various degrees of transformation combined with more integrated governance. Overall, the development field appeared most transformational, and may offer insights for the fields of health and conservation given the pressing imperative for large scale, system-wide transformation to achieve sustainability (IPBES, 2022). Crucially, equity appeared a uniting concept across fields, yet few framings had strong representation of local, or marginalized voices and relatively few papers actively grounded their calls, or prominently advocated for such practices. There remains much scope for working with participatory methods and co-created knowledge generation and agenda setting for COVID-19 recovery, and disaster recovery more broadly in order to achieve the inclusion of diverse priorities, values and voices in the process.
Acknowledgements
This is an output of the Recognizing intersecting risks, capacities and pandemic recovery needs in marginalized communities of Latin America project, and we are grateful to this international partnership supported by the following funding organizations in the framework of the TransAtlantic Platform (https://www.transatlanticplatform.com/): International Development Research Centre (Canada) grant numbers 109835-002 and 109835-003; Ministerio de Ciencia, Tecnolog´ıa e Innovación and Fondo Francisco Jose´ De Caldas (Colombia) grant number 80740-094-2022; Sao Paulo Research Foundation (Brazil) grant number 2021/07660-2, the São Paulo Research Foundation (FAPESP) grant number 2021/07660-2 and CNPq Productivity scholarship (#307364/2025-9); and Arts and Humanities Research Council (United Kingdom) grant number AH/X001733/1. Universidad de Caldas (HC509; HD538) provided additional support. The opinions expressed in this work do not necessarily represent those of the funding agencies listed here.
ORCID iD
Rachel Carmenta  https://orcid.org/0000-0001-8607-4147
Funding
The authors disclosed receipt of the following financial support for the research, authorship, and/ or publication of this article: This work was supported by International Development Research Centre (Canada) grant numbers 109835-002 and 109835-003; Ministerio de Ciencia, Tecnolog´ıa e Innovación and Fondo Francisco Jose´ De Caldas (Colombia) grant number 80740-094-2022; Sao Paulo Research Foundation (Brazil) grant number 2021/07660-2, the São Paulo Research Foundation (FAPESP) grant number 2021/07660-2 and CNPq Productivity scholarship (#307364/2025-9); and Arts and Humanities Research Council (United Kingdom) grant number AH/X001733/1. Universidad de Caldas (HC509; HD538) provided additional support. The opinions expressed in this work do not necessarily represent those of the funding agencies listed here.
Declaration of Conflicting Interests
The authors declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.
Supplemental Material
Supplemental material for this article is available online.
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Author Biographies
Dr Rachel Carmenta is an environmental social scientist specialising in interdisciplinary research at the intersection of environment and development, environmental risk and the relationship between place and well-being. She is particularly interested in the design, performance and social equity of environmental governance. Her work engages with an interdisciplinary set of collaborators, scales of analysis and analytical lenses in order explore what strategies perform better to reconcile the imperatives of food production, forest protection and human wellbeing in dynamic forest agriculture landscapes of the global South.
Dr Liana Anderson is a biologist, with a DPhil in Geography and the Environment from Oxford University (2006-2011) and a Postdoc from the Environmental Change Institute (ECI) at the University of Oxford (2011-2014). From 2014 to 2025 she was a researcher at the National Center for Monitoring and Early Warning of Natural Disasters (CEMADEN) in Brazil. Since September 2025, She is a researcher at the National Institute for Space Research (INPE), Brasil. She is also a Professor in the Postgrad program on Remote Sensing at INPE, and co-leads the Tropical Ecosystems and Environmental Science Group (TREES lab).
Dr Teresa Armijos is a social scientist with an interdisciplinary background in History (BA. University of Virginia) and Development Studies (Mphil. University of Oxford and PhD. IDS, University of Sussex). Her research critically examines people’s lived experiences of environmental change. She combines approaches from environmental justice, feminist theories, political ecology and Latin American decolonial theories to study disaster risk, and the politics of human-environment relationships. Her research approach involves a careful engagement with participatory and creative methodologies to co-produce knowledge with those most affected by climate change and disasters.
Dr Victoria Lugo is a psychologist, with a Masters degree in Public Health, and a PhD in Social Sciences (Tilburg University). She is currently on faculty at the Universidad de Caldas in Manizales, Colombia and the director of the Master program in Social Justice and Peace Building. Her research interests focus on social constructionist ideas applied to conflict transformations and restoration with survivors from armed conflict.
From 2018-2019, she was the national director of the study “Creating political abilities for transitions in local territories”, a participatory action research project located in six municipalities affected by armed conflict in Colombia. From 2021-2022 was co-researcher on the project “Listening and narration: the fight of the victims in Colombia for their recognition and emotional recovery”. Currently, she is Principal investigator in Colombia on the project “Voices of recovery: recognizing intersecting risks, capacities and pandemic recovery needs in marginalized communities of Latin America (Colombia, Brazil and Peru).
Dr Hazel Marsh is a Professor of Cultural Politics in the Faculty of Arts and Humanities. Her research is interdisciplinary, and focuses on issues concerning social and cultural justice, the politics of representation, the creative arts and community action, culture and disaster risk reduction, music and social movements, conflict and displacement, education inequalities, and the contributions of Romani and Traveller groups to the societies they live in. She has worked in Venezuela, Mexico, India, Colombia, Brazil, Peru, and Britain.
Dr Maria Eugenia Ulfe is a full professor and researcher in Anthropology in the Department of Social Sciences at the Pontifical Catholic University of Peru. She holds a Master in the Arts of the Americas, Oceania, and Africa from the University of East Anglia (Sainsbury Research Centre), Norwich, England (1995). She earned a PhD in Human Sciences from George Washington University, Washington DC, United States (2005). She is an Honorary Visiting Professor at the National University of San Cristóbal de Huamanga and an Honorary Professor at the University of East Anglia (2022-2027). She was the founding director and is currently a member of the Interdisciplinary Research Group on Memory and Democracy at PUCP. She was the director of the Latin American Studies Association (LASA) Film Festival in 2020 and 2021 and Coordinator of the Academic Program for the LASA 2024 congress, and she is currently a member of the Executive Council (2025-2028). She is a member of the Executive Committee of the Memory Studies Association (MSA) and is the one leading the organization of the VIII Congress, Memories in Transit, at PUCP in July 2024. Her research focuses on the study of post-conflict societies, memory and its artistic and audiovisual representations, Anthropology of the State, care systems and gender, and experimental audiovisual methodologies.
Prof Roger Fews research centres on the connections between environmental change, risk and human wellbeing, mainly in lower-income settings. She places particular focus on vulnerability and adaptation, especially on how households, communities and institutions respond to risks and impacts from climatic and other environmental hazards, and the factors that influence, promote and constrain their responses. Much of this work lies at the confluence between research in disaster risk reduction and climate change adaptation, with linkages to themes of livelihoods/wellbeing, environmental health, water security and social justice. His concern for issues of justice, equality and sustainability has led to an increasing emphasis in recent research on the long-term processes of recovery from extreme events.