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Hi Mariko,
 
The Council on Foreign Relations (CFR)’s proposal for a  Project on COVID-19 and Democracy was shared and reviewed by you and has now been submitted to FoundationConnect. It was filed under the Asia Program in FC. However, the recommendation is to support the project through the Innovation and Incubation Fund. Although the project includes several Asian countries as case studies, its scope and focus go beyond Asia Program’s current guidelines. For ease of reference, I attach the proposal document along with the project budget again.
 
The full proposal title is “Project on COVID-19 and Its Effects on Democracy and Societies: Building Networks for Understanding and Addressing COVID-19.” The PI, CFR Senior Fellow Joshua Kurlantzick, is a prolific author, including a 2013 book, Democracy in Retreat: The Revolt of the Middle Class and the Worldwide Decline in Representative Government, one of the early works to trace the global challenge to democracy. He is a 1998-1999 Luce Scholar and has worked with both the Asia Program and the HRL Initiative. 
 
The project will take an in-depth look at each of five large democracies, namely Brazil, India, Indonesia, the Philippines, and the United States, and use the case studies as a comparative lens to examine the broad ways in which Covid-19 is impacting democracies and societies. Three (the US, India, Brazil) top the list of the countries with the largest number of confirmed COVID-19 cases, and together with Russia, account for more than half of the worldwide total. None has found an effective way to move beyond the first wave of infections. All have rising inequality, histories of serious structural racism, and increasingly illiberal (and often illiberal populist) politics. The comparative perspectives will illuminate each country’s unique situation and shared experiences with the impact of Covid-19, and the size and global importance of these countries will help the project gain a wider audience.
 
There are other projects dealing with Covid-19 and democracy. What distinguishes the CFR project is its clear-eyed focus on how illiberal or populist leaders take advantage of the Covid emergency and generally transform political and economic systems in lasting and corrosive ways, and how to foster greater scrutiny of policy choices currently being made. As Josh writes in the proposal, “Major crises—9/11, for instance—often lead to domestic and foreign policy decisions that have serious and long-term impacts, and fall hardest on the poorest and most vulnerable people in societies. These decisions may be difficult to be reversed years later, even when the policy choices are portrayed to publics as only short-term measures.”
 
Another distinctive feature of the project is its focus on inequality and structural racism, and how Covid-19 and policy responses could have an immediate disproportionate impact on marginalized groups in many societies. In all its programmings, which include roundtable meetings, CFR workshops, education outreach, as well as a wide range of project publications, the project seeks to amplify voices who have often been ignored in initial COVID-19 era policymaking, and collaborate with community, religious and civil society groups in addition to research and academic organizations. This helps alleviate our initial concern of the appropriateness of an elite institution like CFR for such an undertaking. Besides outside groups, the PI will bring together internal CFR resources such as its National program, Local Journalism Initiative, State and Local Officials Initiative, Congressional and Education programs which will further diversity representation in the US case study. CFR’s credibility and extensive contacts in the other case-study countries also bode well for the success of the project. 
 
Finally, the other side of democratic regression is democratic renewal. The project, despite making urgent and distressing warnings, also offers a more hopeful vision, the possibility of rebuilding pluralistic societies and forging political and social solutions to strengthen democracy at home and abroad. In the midst of one of the worst pandemics, it’s fitting that Luce should make an urgent needs grant to support the articulation of such hopeful vision. 
 
The total budget of this two-year project is $225,000. Because of our resource constraints, we are recommending a one-year grant of $100,000 to the Council on Foreign Relations to support the first year of project activities, and plan to make, in 2021, a second one-year grant, of $125,000 for the remainder of the project.
 
Thank you for your invaluable input and for your consideration. 
 
Ling