Horizontal Partnership or Vertical Integration? Civil Society Response to the COVID-19 Pandemic and the Challenge Beyond in India and China

Wenjuan Zheng, Stanford University

Under conditions of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, along with state failures, transnational collaboration seems to offer a natural and viable solution to the global challenges. Yet, “global civil society” fails to live up to their promise because they have been under attack by the rise of political populism. Using comparative case studies of a notable international NGO (INGO) working on women and labor issues across India and China through interviews and archival research, this paper provides preliminary results of what factors promote and hinder transnational collaboration during the ongoing pandemic. Through a comparative case study of India and China, I argue that the enactment of INGO laws prior to the crisis has destroyed the foundations for effective collaboration. While China ramped up a regulatory regime to curtail civic associations’ activities via a rigid and comprehensive law reform in a short period of time, India, a democratic country adopted an adaptive control that targets different organizations and implements the policy change in a gradual manner. The approaches result in different dynamics of response to the crisis at the local level, but the convergence of the use of regulation as a political control tool is detrimental to civil societies. This study makes a significant contribution to our understanding of transnational collaboration during extreme events in a comparative perspective.

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 Presented in Session 188. Pandemics and Society