Communications in crisis: the politics of information-sharing in the UK’s Covid-19 response

Abstract

Since its restructuring at the turn of the century, UK Civil Contingencies has promoted information-circulation as the primary means of binding together multi-agency emergency response assemblages. Breaking from the top-down hierarchical diagram of governance which characterised Civil Defence, a more agile and resilient approach to emergency response was envisioned to address the forms of threat anticipated in the 21 century (Zebrowski 2016). Key to this new design was the role of information circulation in enhancing collaboration within and across responder agencies. Enhancing quality and access to information would permit decision making power within emergency events to be devolved to local responders. Rather than imposing command and control from the top-down, Information and Communications Technologies (ICT) would permit emergency responses to self-organise from the bottom-up: promising to improve the speed and efficiency of emergency responses (Zebrowski 2019), while also inspiring myriad critiques of the professed ‘neoliberal’ responsibilization of emergency response. Viewed from our ongoing qualitative research within the UK’s Covid-19 response it is clear that this informational vision of emergency response has fundamentally broken down. The calamitous management of the response in the UK has been defined by centralised, top-down decision-making and serious impediments to the free flow of information between different levels of government and emergency responders. While such propensities are far from a new aspect of UK resilience practice (Sage, Fussey, and Dainty 2015), their occurrence has intensified and expanded during Covid-19. This is perhaps all the more notable given the UK’s efforts over the past decade to position itself at the vanguard of a professed new resilience paradigm of ICT, centring around the primary object of analysis of our research and analysis here: a collaborative emergency response platform called ResilienceDirect. In this short contribution, we reflect briefly on how this informational vision of emergency response has been undermined within the UK response to Covid-19. We argue that the reemergence of command-and-control approaches to emergency governance has marginalised the role of local responders and undermined the effectiveness of the UK’s Covid-19 response. Our analysis is informed by interviews we have conducted with 41 emergency response professionals involved in the UK Covid-19 response between August and December 2020. A concluding section will reflect on the implications of this analysis for emergency policy and understandings of neoliberal resilience and security.