The meanings of ‘recovery’: grassroots perspectives from Colombia and Peru in the aftermath of the pandemic

This article presents a critical reflection on the meaning of crisis recovery, as experienced from the grassroots. It draws insights from a programme of research with indigenous and campesino communities in Colombia and Peru, undertaken in the period following the COVID-19 pandemic. Through a flexible, qualitative approach, the teams engaged in broad-ranging discussions about people’s concerns and aspirations. These exchanges revealed how people’s pandemic stories were inherently interconnected with other, ongoing and everyday risks associated with conflict, marginalization, poverty, displacement and environmental degradation. They also underlined how misconceived it can be to view the pandemic experience as some form of break from ‘normality’, externalizing the notion of crisis in a way that fails to acknowledge the historic and structural roots of risk and vulnerability. On the other hand, we also saw how capacities for coping with the crisis were already embedded in communities, partly as a consequence of long-faced injustices, reflected for example in the resurgence of communal care and indigenous practices. These perspectives conveyed a conception of recovery not as a linear or individualized trajectory, but as a multifaceted collective process that seeks to confront the dynamics of ongoing risks and injustices.