Democracy and Public Health in Asia
The Democracy in Asia project was launched by the Brookings Foreign Policy program in 2020 to explore the state of democracy in the Indo-Pacific region and examine the role and influence of democracy in the Asian context. The first phase of the project (2020-2021) resulted in a collection of policy briefs examining the health of democratic governance in Asia and identified several common challenges impacting the successes and health of democracy. In the second phase of the project (2021-2022), Brookings scholars and outside experts focused on four of these challenges: corruption, disinformation, inequality, and public health. Syaru Shirley Lin of the Center for Asia-Pacific Resilience and Innovation (CAPRI) led the CAPRI research team to organize the public health working group. The research and analysis of this project have been compiled into a single volume, Democracy in Asia, that highlights both the significant progress and remaining work to be done in shoring up democratic performance in Asia.
In leading the public health working group for this project, CAPRI considered myriad issues in public health that became evident during the COVID-19 pandemic. Given the many ways in which technology and data have been used in the pandemic, the working group sought to examine how Asia-Pacific democracies have harnessed the power of technology and innovation to protect public health while still giving priority to personal privacy. Drawing on its network of regional specialists, CAPRI recruited five scholars to offer their insights on the pandemic responses in Australia, India, Japan, South Korea, and Taiwan. The authors’ diverse backgrounds resulted in a group of papers with different perspectives. Three papers (on India, South Korea, and Taiwan) focused on technology use and data privacy, and two papers (on Australia and Japan) offered broader case studies on the countries’ pandemic responses, including the employment of technology and innovative public policy.
Read CAPRI’s chapter “Democracy and public health in Asia“ and preface by Syaru Shirley Lin summarizing the findings of the public health working group on technology use, data acquisition, and democratic governance during the COVID-19 pandemic.