About Governance and the Pandemic

The pandemic caused by COVID-19 is bringing greater attention to the public a series of questions on how public health is dealt with at various levels of local, national, and international governance. It is also bringing to the surface a series of simmering conflicts, as well as generating new ones.

On this website, we ask country experts a series of questions on different themes. The first in our series are: Questionnaire #1: Whose Jurisdiction? Law in Books and in Action and Questionnaire #2: Civil Society & Marginalised Groups. From this we hear from them what has happened and what is happening in their contexts and, since we keep the questions the same for each theme, the expert responses are comparable across jurisdictions. Users are invited to navigate the various responses and compare them.

The Governance Programme at the Institute for the Study of Muslim Civilisations of the Aga Khan University wishes to freely offer this opportunity to both the experts and the wider public. The team devised (and keeps devising) a series of questionnaires to identify common trends and specific challenges of various governance systems: watch this space!

About the Governance Programme

Running since 2015, the Governance Programme explores what governance looks like in Muslim contexts. The Programme examines how religion and culture – as well as broader structural and historic factors – shape the pathways of public decision making, the development of law and institutions, economics, and social change in Muslim majority societies.

The Programme also encourages and adopts a comparative approach and engages with non-Muslim majority societies to identify commonalities and differences in the management of states, societies, and economies.

In keeping with its mission statement, the Programme aims at

Improving the quality of life by promoting the public good in Muslim contexts.