Responding to outbreaks through co-creative sustainable inclusive equality strategies (Resistiré)

Project funded by the European Union’s Horizon 2020 Research and Innovation Programme
Grant Agreement: 101015990
Duration: 24 months
Start date: 1/04/2021
The project official website

The Covid-19 pandemic is not only a health crisis, but also a humanitarian, economic and social crisis that is affecting everyone, but especially certain vulnerable groups. In particular, women have been hit harder than men. Some have lost their jobs, others have been victims of violence, financial difficulties or physical and mental illness.

RESISTIRÉ (Responding to outbreaks through co-creative inclusive equality strategies and collaboration) is an EU-funded project investigating how the Covid-19 pandemic has affected ‘equality’ in 31 European countries (the 27 EU countries plus Iceland, the UK, Serbia and Turkey). 

The aims of RESISTIRÉ are: 1) to understand the impact of COVID-19 policy responses on behavioural, social and economic inequalities in the 31 countries considered, based on a gender+ conceptual framework; 2) to design, conceive and pilot policy solutions and social innovations that can be implemented by policy makers, stakeholders and actors in different policy domains.

RESISTIRÉ is designed to achieve its results over the next two years through multidisciplinary research, cross-sectoral co-creation, solutions development and a comprehensive communication strategy. It proposes a cyclical approach (3 cycles), whereby the analysis process is repeated every 6 months, in order to produce new operational results and to integrate the findings made in the previous one.

Each cycle involves:
– A broad mapping of policy and social responses to COVID-19, the analysis of existing surveys and research, the conduct of workshops with civil society and interviews with public authorities, the collection of individual narratives of precarious and vulnerable individuals.
– The development of appropriate responses and operational recommendations for policy makers, stakeholders and different actors operating in the field.
– Launching pilot actions to test the potential impact of proposed solutions.
– The dissemination of knowledge, the development of policy recommendations and stakeholder empowerment actions to exploit the project results.

The RESISTIRE project, coordinated by the European Science Foundation, is carried out by a multidisciplinary consortium of ten European partners in the field of research, innovation and design, with an established network of stakeholders in the health sector. 

News

On 7 September 2023, an event was held in Brussels involving the 5 sister projects funded under the same #Horizon call as RESISTIRÉ: RESPOND, COVINFORM, PERISCOPE and SHARE-COVID. This was a conference to explore the impact of health and policy responses to the #COVID19 pandemic on vulnerable groups. The title of the event was 'Promoting pandemic Preparedness - Health and policy responses to protect wellbeing and address social inequalities'. The conference facilitated the sharing of research findings from the five projects, with a focus on policy recommendations to improve government preparedness for upcoming crises, health-related and otherwise. Discussions focused on ...
On 20 and 21 June, RESISTIRÉ organised its Final Conference “Towards Inclusive Crisis Responses” to share the project results and reflect on the recommendations developed during the two years of research activities. The conference, held in Brussels and streamed on Zoom, gathered international experts, policymakers, activists, and representatives of NGOs, pilot projects and sister projects.Read the full programmeTo review the event, video recordings of the single sessions are available here ...
Over the two years of the project, K&I coordinated a network of national researchers in 30 countries, who collected 780 stories of intersectional inequality that formed the backbone of the research. To give these stories a wider dissemination and inspire others, a selection of them was collected in a book, titled "(Better) stories from the pandemic". The publication gathers the experiences of people who, in their own voices, tell how some of their difficulties suddenly worsened and became unbearable during the crisis. In the book, emotions emerge following a wave motion, moving from stories of pain and troubles to more ...
RESISTIRÉ is a 30-month project funded by the European Union's Horizon 2020, designed to better understand and mitigate gender and other inequalities caused by policy responses to the COVID-19 pandemic. After collecting and analysing policy responses and related data from an intersectional/gender+ perspective, the project worked to translate them into operational recommendations. At the end of the three research cycles, RESISTIRÉ produced 22 fact sheets with operational recommendations to mitigate the negative impacts that policies are likely to generate in terms of economic and social inequalities. The complete list of all operational recommendations released under the project is available here ...
RESISTIRÉ funded and monitored nine pilot projects, implemented by civil society organisations in 8 different countries, to address the negative impacts of thepandemic and explore actions to mitigate inequalities. Following the fieldwork carried out at the beginning of each research cycle in 30 countries (EU27, Turkey, Iceland, Serbia, UK), RESISTIRÉ worked to translate the collected data into operational insights, through a co-creation phase conducted by researchers and civil society stakeholders working together in "Open Studios", a means of designing innovative policies and solutions in a participatory manner. Some of the innovative solutions that emerged from the "Open Studios" formed the ...
How have the policy responses to Covid-19 increased gender inequalities? What can policymakers, employers or even civil society organisations do to mitigate theimpact of outbreak policies? Following its second research cycle, RESISTIRÉ has released a new set of 6 factsheets to support policymakers, advisers, employers, and civil society organisations in understanding the social, economic, political, and environmental effects of Covid-19 policy responses on gender equality in an intersectional perspective, and to suggest practical recommendations to mitigate these effects. These recommendations can also serve to safeguard against the societal impacts of future crises. Recommendations issued from this second research cycle focus ...
Since April 2022, the second WP2 deliverable is available. This analysis carried out during the second cycle aims to understand the extent to which National Recovery and Resilience Plans (or equivalent recovery policies in the case of non-EU countries participating in the RESISTIRÉ project) issued by individual governments have addressed gender issues and other intersectional reasons for inequality. The study also focuses on the processes that led to the development of these policies in order to understand how stakeholders were involved. Finally, it examines how civil society reacted to both the content of these policies and the process by which ...
The RESISTIRÉ team, supported by its network of national researchers in 30 European countries, concluded the second cycle fieldwork in March 2022.The research activities consisted of: the mapping of National Recovery and Resilience Plans in EU countries (or equivalent recovery policies in the case of non-EU countries participating in the RESISTIRÉproject) the update on the RAS mapped in the first cycle the collection of 300 individual narratives of people belonging to vulnerable groups workshops with civil society representatives and interviews with public authorities.The collected data were analysed and presented in the deliverables of the second cycle WP2, WP3 and WP4, ...
Concluding its first research cycle, the RESISTIRÉ project is delivering a set of 8 factsheets to support policymakers, advisers, employers, and civil society organisations in understanding the social, economic, political, and environmental effects of Covid-19 policy responses on gender equality, and to suggest practical recommendations to mitigate these effects. These recommendations can also serve to safeguard against the societal impacts of future crises. Read more about the 8 Factsheets on the website ...
During the first cycle Open Studios sessions, researchers and civil society stakeholders have assessed a set of pilot project concepts as potentially effective to reduce gender+ inequalities due to the Covid pandemic in specific domains. At the end of the process, three concepts were identified. The following are the three connected open calls launched under the first cycle: EMPLOYERS WHO CARE RESISTIRÉ will support projects contributing to the positive transformation of the homecare sector and the working conditions of domestic workers by mobilising “committed” employers as key actors of change and allies of domestic workers. GREEN SPACES AS AN ECOSYSTEM ...
Developing sustainable solutions to mitigate gender inequalities caused by COVID-19 policy responses would not be possible without the involvement of stakeholders from politics, civil society, and the non-profit sector. Listening to their stories and involving them in the design process is crucial to ensure that the solutions we propose are relevant, feasible and replicable in different national contexts. The RESISTIRÉ project was conceived specifically with this participatory approach in mind. The three cycles of co-creation that make up the project begin with in-depth research in 31 European countries, lead to collaborative elaboration of solutions in Open Studios and culminate in ...
The RESISTIRÉ team, supported by its network of national researchers in 30 European countries, concluded its research activities in the first cycle between July and August. In particular, the following operations were carried out: - The mapping of policy and societal responses to COVID-19 in Europe (containing about 600 grids covering policy and social responses) - Mapping of Rapid Assessment Surveys (RAS) available in Europe (containing a summary of nearly 300 RAS) - 8 workshops with civil society representatives - 23 interviews with public authorities - The collection of 189 individual narratives of people belonging to intersectional vulnerable groups. On ...
To what extent have COVID-19 policies impacted gendered inequalities in Europe? How have women, vulnerable groups, and society in general responded to these inequalities? The first phase of the RESISTIRÉ project cycle aims to provide answers to these questions. The team is currently implementing the research activities planned under the first cycle, organised into three main activities running in parallel and feeding results into the next project step. The three main activities are: 1) Mapping national policies to counter COVID-19 The objective of RESISTIRÉ is to understand where and how the policy responses have hurt women and other vulnerable groups, ...
On 7 and 8 April 2021, the RESISTIRÉ (Reducing gendered inequalities caused by the COVID-19 pandemic) project held an online Kick-off meeting organised by ESF. Project partners from France, Sweden, Belgium, Spain, Italy, UK, Turkey, Czech Republic, and Ireland met for the first time and discussed their contributions and how they will work together. Jeanne Lenders, Project Manager at the EC's Research Executive Agency, gave a presentation to provide a summary of the Commission's approach to the various COVID projects that were recently funded, their expectations, and recent developments on these issues. Following this, a summary of RESISTIRÉ was presented ...