Paper short abstract:

This paper reflects on the Ebola Response Anthropology Platform’s experiences providing rapid response advice to government and international agencies on the Ebola outbreak. It asks how epistemic communities mobilised in response to the outbreak and how the politics of knowledge influenced policy.

Paper long abstract:

By September 2014, it was clear that conventional approaches to containing the spread of Ebola in West Africa were failing. Public health teams were often met with fear, and efforts to treat patients and curtail population movement frequently backfired. Both governments and international agencies recognized that anthropological expertise was essential if locally-acceptable, community-based interventions were to be designed and successfully interrupt transmission. The Ebola Response Anthropology Platform was established against this background. Drawing together local and internationally-based anthropologists, the Platform provided a co-ordinated and rapid response to the outbreak in real time.

This paper reflects on the experiences of working with UK DfID, the WHO and other agencies over the last year and asks: how did the politics of (expert) knowledge influence the design and implementation of policy? Did existing ethnographic knowledge of the region end up re-enforcing or challenging epidemiological approaches to transmission? In answering these questions this paper will explore how the Platform and other epistemic communities developed and interacted to produce knowledge and policy over the course of the outbreak, and how the role of anthropology was conceived within that.