More than ‘self-help’: The urban governance of the Ebola outbreak in Monrovia, Liberia
Bibliographic record
Abstract
By tracing logics of urban governance in Monrovia, Liberia, this paper demonstrates how an urban response to the Ebola virus in Monrovia emerged during the West African Ebola epidemic (2014 to 2016) in the context of limited local government capacity and broader structures of exclusion in the city, contributing to debates concerning how cities are governed beyond the formal-informal binary and how these urban governance mechanisms are consolidated over time. A historicized account of the governance of Monrovia is presented, where community ‘self-help’ activities arose from struggles for power and recognition between urban inhabitants and the state, traced through the country’s war, and again during Ebola in a moment of temporary institutionalization when ‘informal’ urban authorities were directly implicated in the success of the formal outbreak response. Drawing on empirical evidence from fieldwork in Monrovia including interviews with actors in the Ebola response and extensive secondary source research, this paper demonstrates how an urban Ebola response built off past choices and institutions laid down by a settler-colonial regime, making it possible for robust community action to coproduce an Ebola response across spatial scales and across formal and informal binaries even within the exclusionary status-quo of local government in Monrovia. In addition, the findings suggest that effectively responding to urban disease outbreaks in extremely resource limited settings such as Monrovia requires attention to how community level actions augment limited capacity in local government and produce a health response capable of adapting to evolving situations across time and scales.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".