Covid-19 has exposed the limitations of current social protection systems and elicited a variety of responses from civil society. This article attempts to characterise emergent agency during Covid-19 by drawing on a dataset of 200 case studies and texts on how human agency has shifted during Covid-19. The overarching finding is that while the pandemic has disrupted civil society, this disruption has also spawned the emergence of new actors, issues, coalitions, and repertoires. Larger patterns in emergent agency include civil society’s accelerated adoption of digital platforms, the critical role of communities and informal networks in Covid-19 response, the increased reliance on coalition-building, new opportunities for civic action around structural inequalities exposed by the pandemic, and the reshaping of citizen–state relations.

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Between May 2016 and March 2018, Oxfam in Iraq, together with the Iraqi Al Amal Association (IAA), collaborated on the ‘Safe access to resilient livelihoods opportunities for vulnerable conflict-affected women in Kirkuk’ project. Funded by UN Women, the project marked the first collaboration between Oxfam and IAA (a women’s rights organization working in Kirkuk). The core themes of the project were women’s rights and economic justice. It aimed to reach women who had been displaced, were returnees at the time, or members of the communities to which displaced people had moved (host communities). This Effectiveness Review focuses on investigating the impact of support to income-generating activities on the women who received this support. The evaluation used a mixed methods design. Acknowledging that different women face different barriers and may have therefore benefitted differently from the project, an initial vulnerability assessment was carried out to bring an intersectional lens to the review. Configurational analysis was used to explore the project's impact, alongside different types of qualitative analysis and descriptive statistics. Find out more by reading the full report now.