This article analyses the margin of manoeuvre of Portuguese executives after the onset of the sovereign debt crisis in 2010–2015. To obtain a full understanding of what happened behind the closed doors of international meetings, different types of data are triangulated: face‐to‐face interviews; investigations by journalists; and International Monetary Fund and European Union official documents. The findings are compared to the public discourse of Prime Ministers José Sócrates and Pedro Passos‐Coelho. It is shown that while the sovereign debt crisis and the bail‐out limited the executive's autonomy, they also made them stronger in relation to other domestic actors. The perceived need for ‘credibility’ in order to avoid a ‘negative’ reaction from the markets – later associated with the conditions of the bail‐out – concurrently gave the executives a legitimate justification to concentrate power in their hands and a strong argument to counter the opponents of their proposed reforms. Consequently, when Portuguese ministers favoured policies that were in congruence with those supported by international actors, they were able to use the crisis to advance their own agenda. Disagreement with Troika representatives implied the start of a negotiation process between the ministers and international lenders, the final outcome of which depended on the actors’ bargaining powers. These strategies, it is argued, constitute a tactic of depoliticisation in which both the material constraints and the discourse used to frame them are employed to construct imperatives around a narrow selection of policy alternatives.

Crisis, by its very nature, requires decisive intervention. However, important questions can be obscured by the very immediacy of the crisis condition. What is the nature of the crisis? How it is defined (and by whom)? And, subsequently, what forms of knowledge are deemed legitimate and authoritative for informing interventions? As we see in the current pandemic, there is a desire for immediate answers and solutions during periods of uncertainty. Policymakers and publics grasp for techno-scientific solutions, as though the technical nature of the crisis is self-evident. What is often obscured by this impulse is the contingent, conjunctural and, ultimately, social nature of these crises. The danger here is that by focusing on immediate technical goals, unanticipated secondary effects are produced. These either exacerbate the existing crisis or else produce subsequent crises. Equally, these technical goals can conceal the varied, and often unjust, distribution of risk exposure and resources and capacities for mitigation present within and between societies. These socio-political factors all have important functions in determining the effectiveness of interventions. As with climate change, the unfolding response to the COVID-19 pandemic underscores the importance of broadening the knowledge base beyond technical considerations. Only by including social scientific knowledge is it possible to understand the social nature of the crises we face. Only then is it possible to develop effective, just and legitimate responses. | PLURALISING KNOWLEDGE IN UNCERTAIN TIMESThe current global COVID-19 pandemic brings into sharp focus the problems of risk, uncertainty, knowledge and cultural values in times of crisis. Those of us studying climate change are well familiar with these problems. The challenge here is not only how to govern a scientifically, technically or medically defined risk. It is to ask what is obscured by defining that risk in such technical terms. It is also to understand how different governing strategies are interpreted and acted upon by other actors, individuals and organizations. Crises are inherently unstable periods, but periods in which decisive action is required. In the rush to ameliorate the symptoms, the contingent, conjunctural, and social nature of the crises are easily obscured. If so, then there is a substantial danger that short-term measures beget even greater longer-term problems. If potential secondary effects are not fully considered and anticipated, there is a risk that reactive-as well as preventive-measures will result in severe unintended consequences. Only by broadening the knowledge base beyond the technical in a transparent and plural manner can the social nature of the crisis be grasped.Only then can the nature of the normative choices be revealed. The questions to be asked, therefore, are "a crisis of what?" and "a crisis for whom?" Social scientific knowledge is crucial for understanding and mitigating crises. Social sciences can reveal secondary social and psychological effects of ...

Despite forces struggling to reduce global warming growing stronger, there has been mixed success in generating substantive policy implementation, while the global spread of the coronavirus has prompted strong and far-reaching governmental responses around the world. This paper addresses the complex and partly contradictory responses to these two crises, investigating their social anatomies. Using temporality, spatiality, and epistemic authority as the main conceptual vehicles, the two crises are systematically compared. Despite sharing a number of similarities, the most striking difference between the two crises is the urgency of action to counter the rapid spread of the pandemic as compared to the slow and meager action to mitigate longstanding, well-documented, and accelerating climate change. Although the tide now seems to have turned towards a quick and massive effort to restore the status quo—including attempts to restart the existing economic growth models, which imply an obvious risk for substantially increasing CO₂ emissions—the article finally points at some signs of an opening window of opportunity for green growth and degrowth initiatives. However, these signs have to be realistically interpreted in relation to the broader context of power relations in terms of governance configurations and regulatory strategies worldwide at different levels of society.

The COVID-19 pandemic is a global event, but what became apparent almost immediately was that while the virus seems indiscriminate, vulnerability and the capacity to mitigate its impact are not spread equally, either between or within countries. Years of austere neoliberalism in Europe have exacerbated inequality and precarity, acting as a ‘pre-existing condition’ onto which the virus has now landed. The question we ask is: when the pandemic subsides, can the underlying conditions of contemporary neoliberalism remain? And what may replace it?