How and under what conditions does citizen-led social and political action contribute to empowerment and accountability? What are the strategies used, and with what outcomes, especially in settings which are democratically weak, politically fragile and affected by legacies of violence and conflict? The A4EA programme has explored these questions in Mozambique, Myanmar, Nigeria and Pakistan over five years between 2016-2021. This paper presents the key findings and policy and practice implications from this research across the themes of space for citizen action; citizen-governance relations; women’s political participation and collective action; citizen-led strategies for empowerment and accountability; and enabling citizen action. It also shares important lessons drawn from A4EA experience on conducting and communicating research in complex political contexts like these, and for research consortia. Whilst the research conclusions are drawn from A4EA’s four focus countries, in an increasingly fragile and authoritarian world, the findings are becoming pertinent for more and more contexts across the globe.

Since long before the Covid-19 pandemic emerged in 2020, civic space has been changing all over the globe, generally becoming more restricted and hazardous. The pandemic brought the suspension of many fundamental freedoms in the name of the public good, providing cover for a deepening of authoritarian tendencies but also spurring widespread civic activism on issues suddenly all the more important, ranging from emergency relief to economic impacts. Research partners in the Action for Empowerment and Accountability (A4EA)'s Navigating Civic Space in a Time of Covid project have explored these dynamics through real-time research embedded in civil society in Mozambique, Nigeria, and Pakistan, grounded in a close review of global trends.

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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