Global Social Policy in Times of Crisis: Covid-19 and the Role of International Organizations

Beginning as a health emergency, the Covid-19 pandemic has soon developed into a dramatic multidimensional crisis. Countries' responses to contain the virus - including lockdowns and border restrictions - have set in motion an economic downturn on par with the global financial crisis of 2008. The crisis has generated new inequalities and exacerbated old ones, and has exposed dramatic gaps in social protection, challenging the role of the welfare state.

At the same time, the pandemic has been credited with opening a potential window of opportunity for the welfare state. All over the globe, countries have responded with an unprecedented amount of social policies to counter the negative effects of the crisis on people‘s livelihoods, and international organizations have provided various proposals for action. However, despite far-reaching visions of using the crisis to "build back better" and enacting a recovery that addresses these long-standing issues of inequality and poverty, it is uncertain if measures proposed and implemented in countries worldwide comprise mere stopgap measures of a temporary nature or more far-reaching departures from the status quo in social policy.

While we particularly welcome investigations of international organizations' ideas and prescriptions and their role in global crisis governance, we are also open to papers that speak to other dimensions of social policy in times of Covid-19, such as on challenges to national social policy institutions or national responses. The panel thereby provides a space for discussing the (shifting) role of social policy in the pandemic and IO agency in crisis contexts.