Speaking to the silences on community engagement in pandemic prevention, preparedness and response

Abstract

The COVID-19 pandemic catalyzed global discourse on pandemic preparedness and the role of communities in prevention, response and readiness efforts. Yet community engagement in pandemic prevention, preparedness and response (PPPR) remains narrowly framed and reduced to social mobilization, sidelining essential lessons from outbreaks that demand communities' endogenous roles in governance. In this paper, we highlight multiple layers of "silences" in literature, policy, and practice across three domains: undefined and invisible engagement structures from community health facility committees interfacing service users, leaders, and providers, to district assemblies, national health assemblies linking subnational units, and supranational civil society mechanisms; power asymmetries that positions communities as tokenistic observers rather than active, equal partners whose local insights shape decisions, exacerbated by elite capture, financial dependence, and exclusion from technical discussions under assumptions of incapacity; and evaluative logics that prioritize health outcomes over process enablers like capacity-building, clear rules of inclusion, adequate resourcing, accountability, and contextual factors. These silences misattribute institutional barriers to community inadequacies. Reversing them requires; deliberate investment in visible and functioning multi-level engagement structures with communities playing a central role in defining them; recognition of communities as equal partners in PPPR discussions and processes whose knowledge and contributions carry equal weight; and evaluation approaches that prioritises agency, accountability and contextual enablers, rather than treating community engagement as a technical intervention judged only by downstream health outcomes.