AG44 - Gouverner dans la crise. La matérialité de l’action publique dans les contextes extraordinaires 2/2

This communication focuses on the implementation of social housing distribution policies, in particular the rehousing of residents living in buildings threatening to collapse, in a context of a protean and prolonged housing crisis in Algeria. It analyzes how street-level bureaucrats and elected officials responsible for receiving social housing requests respond to them, while these actors have few material resources to allocate and limited discretionary power at their disposal. By examining the resource distribution network and its constraints, this communication intends to question the means of government and domestication of the social question in a context of the legitimacy crisis of state’s representatives.

 

This communication aims to analyze the different containment policies and their impacts on marginalized urban communities in Morocco. Particular attention will be paid to how "Stay at home" program has impacted people's everyday lives in poor neighborhoods and informal settlements (Zaireg 2020). Indeed, the implementation of the various lockdowns has revealed significant urban segregation characterized by a dichotomy between, on the one hand, the densely populated informal urban areas populated by the poorest populations whose income is mainly derived from informal economic activities (street vendors, cleaning ladies, etc.) and the modern urban areas. Containment policies have only deepened the gap between these two zones, exposing public authorities to a genuine governance challenge in poor neighborhoods, in which it was not feasible to apply the prevailing sanitary rules strictly, out of fear of social upheavals. Based on an urban spatially-based study of the lockdown's forms of governance, this communication will seek to enrich the concept of "authoritarian urbanism" (Bogaert, 2018). My objective aims mainly to shed light on the dynamics of the conflicts and the power balance established in the confrontation between the State as an administrator of the urban order and a population living in marginalized urban areas struggling to survive in their daily life.

 

Shortly after the outbreak of the Covid-19 crisis in Egypt, the Doctors’ Union called on the authorities to integrate health workers who died of the virus into the "Martyrs' Fund", initially created in 2018 for soldiers, policemen and civilians who died in the "war on terror". In support of this demand, the Union has picked up the official rhetoric, stating that doctors form a "white army" and sacrifice themselves for the nation just like security forces officers. Through the study of the public debates and negotiations between the Union and various state representatives (Presidency, Ministry of Health, deputies of the People's Assembly) and the observation of the different strategies put in place by the Union to claim the rights of martyred doctors, this communication seeks to understand how the Covid-19 crisis is articulated by these different actors to the security crisis represented by the fight against terrorism in Egypt.

 

This paper examines how transnational circulations of actors, objects and norms frame the health sector in the Syrian and Iranian contexts marked by long-lasting health, political, economic and social crises. In both contexts, social care provision relies heavily on local and international doing “good” practices.  This paper will discuss how critical junctures emphasize exchanges and interdependencies between the different scales of health governance and normalize networks of interactions between actors of the “good”.