Based on real-time recording and reflection of responses to the COVID-19 pandemic, this article identifies the features of ‘community resilience’ across sites in rural Zimbabwe. The findings confirm the importance of local knowledge, social networks and communication, as highlighted in the literature. In addition, a number of other aspects are emphasised, including the importance of adaptable livelihoods, innovation and collective learning. Flexible adaptation was especially important for responding to lockdowns, as livelihoods had to be reconfigured in response to public health measures. Meanwhile, innovation and shared learning was vital for generating local treatment responses to the disease. In the Zimbabwe context, these adaptation and innovation capabilities emerge from a particular historical experience where resilience in the face of harsh economic conditions and in the absence of state support has been generated over years. This is often a more resigned coping than a positive, empowering, transformational form of resilience. While adaptation, innovation and shared learning capabilities proved useful during the pandemic, they are not evenly spread, and there is no singular ‘community’ around which resilience emerges. The article therefore argues against seeing ‘community resilience’ as the magic bullet for disaster preparedness and response in the context of pandemics. Instead, the highly differentiated local practices of adaptation, innovation and shared learning—across gender, age and wealth differences—should be seen as an important complement to public, state-led support in health emergencies and so are part of a wider, plural health system.

Through a real time analysis of the Covid-19 pandemic across rural Zimbabwe, this Working Paper explores the competing narratives that framed responses and their politics. Based on 20 moments of reflection over two years, together with ongoing document and media analysis and an intensive period of qualitative interviewing, a complex, dynamic story of the pandemic ‘drama’ emerges, which contrasts with snapshot perspectives. Across the period, a science-led public health narrative intersects with a security and control narrative promoted by the state and is countered by a citizens’ narrative that emphasises autonomy, independence, and local innovation. The politics of this contestation over narratives about appropriate pandemic responses are examined over three periods – reflecting different waves of infection – and in relation to two conjunctures – an early, strict lockdown and the rollout of vaccines. Different narratives gain ascendancy and overlap at different times, but a local citizen-led narrative emerges strongly in the context of heavy-handed lockdowns, inadequate state capacity, and struggles around rural livelihoods. The pandemic has reshaped relationships between the state and citizens in important ways, with self-reliance rooted in local resilience central to local pandemic responses.