The Digitisation of Health and Democracy: COVID-19 and the governing of future emergencies in the UK and Taiwan

COVID-19 has dramatically demonstrated the intensifying and expanding role of digitisation in responding to new disease outbreaks and in mediating life during public emergencies. In many countries worldwide, digital interventions during the pandemic have been heavily employed to ensure collective safety and to safeguard community health and health systems during key intervals of the pandemic. The pandemic has demonstrated how the rollout, coordination and communication of digital services and interventions during outbreaks can enable or erode key areas of compliance, trust and ethics between populations, governments, and healthcare systems during health emergencies, as well as have a significant negative as well as positive impacts on the health and wellbeing of affected populations.

Digitisation featured heavily in the pandemic responses for example, in both the UK and Taiwan and these responses were often presented as critical means to mitigating the impacts of the pandemic in each country, illustrated by the UK's NHS COVID-19 digital contact tracing app (part of the more extensive Test and Trace programme) and Taiwan's Electric Fence quarantine maintenance system. However, despite widespread uptake of digital interventions in the UK and Taiwan, both countries leveraged differing and often at times, divergent approaches, actors, rhetoric and rationalities in national digital responses towards containing and mitigating COVID-19, resulting ultimately in markedly different outcomes and experiences of the pandemic. Although the UK and Taiwan have now removed many of the emergency measures and mandates imposed to contain COVID-19, each country's lessons learned from the pandemic and evidence that supported the overall effectiveness of these digital responses within political regimes and democratic cultures in both sites remains insufficiently studied. Notable still, a comparative and interdisciplinary assessment of these national experiences during COVID-19 which considers the relationships between the digitisation of health and democracy, citizen participation and engagement with government in digitally-enabled countries in the West and East, remains scarce.

This ESRC-NSTC UK-Taiwan networking project works to address and understand these research gaps underscored by COVID-19. Our research team brings scholars and experts from three UK Russell Group universities: University College London, King's College London and the University of Oxford, and National Taiwan University working across the disciplines of anthropology, epidemiology, sociology, global health, and communication studies to consider and comparatively discuss the range of digital technologies used to contain, mitigate and monitor COVID-19 in both respective political regimens. Through this networking grant, we will organise a series of online meetings and stakeholder workshops, and conduct onsite visits in Taipei and London to assess and understand the impacts of digital technology in these cross-cultural contexts. As part of our research agenda, we will engage the representatives from the governments, big-tech companies, and NGOs to deepen this cross-country collaboration. Theoretically, the project will facilitate an interdisciplinary and international dialogue of critical data studies by working at the intersection of global health, digitisation, and citizen science. Empirically, this ESRC-NSTC-supported project will lay the foundation for sustainable and ongoing partnerships among social scientists in the UK and Taiwan (which include the development of visiting researcher and teaching exchange pathways between University College London, King's College London, the University of Oxford and National Taiwan University), and will further offer practical policy recommendations in examining the central role in which digital interventions play in responding to future emergencies, risks and hazards in both the UK and Taiwan.