The Social Sciences in a Time of Crisis: Indonesia’s Response to the COVID-19 Pandemic

This journal article updates and expands on previous work conducted as part of the regional project on “The role of Social Sciences in COVID-19 Responses in the ASEAN Region”, jointly organized by the Global Development Network (GDN) and the Asia Research Centre, Universitas Indonesia, which resulted in a brief report by the authors (Permana and Rakhmani 2022).

In brief, this article examines the influence of the social sciences on policymaking during the first wave (2020 to 2021) of the COVID-19 pandemic in Indonesia. It explains two broad orientations of the social sciences: technocratic, which was incorporated into elite-driven institutionalized responses that, at times, did not fully address urgent healthcare needs; and critical, which provided timely digital health information for the wider public. On a practical level, though, the two orientations can be intertwined. The article argues that further understanding of social scientists’ relationship to power is needed in efforts to make the social sciences more beneficial to the people rather than to the elite.

Read and download the journal article here.