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Since the last century, many wars and violations of Human Rights were direct reasons that set the pace to develop Human Rights laws, especially after the end of World War II and the holocausts associated with it. One of the critical Human Rights is that ‘to life’, relating to the right ‘to health’, hence the fundamental accessibility to healthcare services and products. Nonetheless, the last decades have witnessed a significant growth in pharmaceutical patents leading to increased drug prices. Overshoots in prices prohibit access to medicine. Disputes between States, pharmaceutical corporations, patients, and investors have occurred, some of which were not purely related to monetary aspects but also to Human Rights, such as the right to ‘access to medicine’. These disputes are controversial. The applicable legal regimes are patent laws (e.g., the TRIPS Agreement) and International Human Rights Law (IHRL) including the European Convention on Human Rights (ECHR), European Social Charter, and more. However, it is up to the courts to decide on whether to consider IHRL in the legal decision process. The question turns to whether they consider the two regimes to be intersecting or independent. This thesis tackles the area of intersection between patent law and the right to ‘access to medicine’ in cases of pandemics such as inter alia HIV/AIDS and COVID-19. It investigates whether the right to ‘access to medicine’ exists as a human right by law, to jump to examine whether solutions like Compulsory Licenses (CLs) and patent exceptions are suitable. Then it answers the question whether there should be defragmentation of laws or not. The work analyzes available caselaw to seek a balance between patent laws and the human right to ‘access to medicine’ during pandemics. Caselaw shows that the conflict makes the overlap of laws confusing and in need of determining the set of relevant provisions in the applicable norms. The question on defragmentation in answered by focusing on Section 5 of the TRIPS Agreement and some provisions in IHRL instruments. The thesis proposes a defragmentation of applicable laws that aids in looking at previous solutions to reach the sought balance, and it sheds the light to give recommendations. The work finally recommends being proactive, for times of pandemics like the COVID-19 outbreak, and working on the realization of a unified and harmonized EU patent law to keep up to the objective of delivering quality vaccines/antivirals, on time, within budget, and with supporting applicable laws. 

The COVID-19 pandemic has dramatically demonstrated the importance of epidemic models in understanding and predicting disease spread and in assessing the effectiveness of interventions. The overarching topic of this thesis is stochastic epidemic modelling, with the main focus on the role of the underlying social structure in infectious disease spread. In Paper I we study the spread of stochastic SIR-epidemics on an extended version of the configuration model with group structure. We present expressions for the basic reproduction number R0, the probability of a major outbreak and the expected final size, and investigate random vaccination with a perfect vaccine. We weaken the assumptions of earlier results for epidemics on this type of graph by allowing for heterogeneous infectivity both in individual infectivity and between different kinds of edges. An important special case of this model is the spread of a disease with arbitrary infectious period distribution in continuous time. Paper II concerns multi-type competition in a variant of Pólya's urn model with interaction, where balls of different colours/types annihilate upon contact. The model dynamics are governed by the structure of an underlying graph. In the special case of a cycle graph, this urn model is equivalent to a planar growth model with competing pathogens. It has earlier been shown that in the two-type case, indefinite coexistence has probability 0 for any (finite and connected) underlying graph, while for K ≥ 3 types the possibility of coexistence depends on the structure of this graph. We show that for K ≥ 3 types competing on a cycle graph, there is with probability 1 eventually only one remaining type. In Paper III we study the real-time growth rate of SIR epidemics on random intersection graphs with mixed Poisson degree distribution. We show that during the early stage of the epidemic, the number of infected individuals grows exponentially and the Malthusian parameter is shown to satisfy a version of the Euler-Lotka equation. These results are obtained via an approximating embedded single-type Crump-Mode-Jagers branching process. In addition, we provide a lower bound on the cumulative number of individuals that get infected before the branching process approximation breaks down. In Paper IV we consider stochastic SIR epidemics on inhomogeneous random graphs with degree-dependent contact rates. In this model, the per-neighbour contact rate of an individual decrease but its overall expected contact rate increases with its expected number of neighbours. We provide the basic reproduction number R0, the probability of a large outbreak and the final size of an epidemic. We show that reducing heterogeneity in contact rates results in a higher value of the basic reproduction number R0, and demonstrate that this result does not generally extend to the probability of a major outbreak and the final size.

Contribution Requirements and Redistribution Decisions: Experimental Evidence from Bangladesh uses a controlled experiment to assess the effects of requiring co-funding to development programs on the efficiency and distribution of benefits within the community. Market Access and Quality Upgrading: Evidence from Randomized Experiments tests if increasing reward to quality produce improves profits, agricultural productivity, and input use, using a randomized experiment in Uganda. How do community contribution requirements affect local public good provision? Experimental evidence from safe water sources in Bangladesh evaluates how community contribution requirement –in cash and labour– change take-up and impact of a development intervention through a randomized experiment of water source construction. Do community water sources provide safe drinking water? Evidence from a randomized experiment in rural Bangladesh exploits a random experiment to analyse how effectively the construction of community water sources improves drinking water quality. Predicted COVID-19 fatality rates based on age, sex, comorbidities, and health system capacity extrapolates adjustments to estimate COVID-19 fatality rates from high-income to lower-income regions. The Macroeconomics of Pandemics in Developing Countries: an Application to Uganda models how optimal pandemic containment varies from high- to lower-income countries.

This comparative study explores parental involvement during the process of mainstreaming Early Childhood Education (ECE) in Dhaka, Bangladesh. Using an ethnographic approach with emphasis on a subtle realist ontology it compares two ECE centers operationalisations of parental involvement and staff's experiences of this aspect of their work. Findings showed that the centers had to navigate cultural underpinnings of parental mistrust and knowledge deficiency in their operationalisation of parental involvement. The centers navigated the cultural conditions by allowing parents CCTV access, or by providing parental education and workshops via scaffolding techniques of experts to gain an audience amongst parents. The center's proactive or reactive approach during the initial stages of parental involvement resulted in various implications for the continuous collaboration between staff and parents at the center. The study contextualises parental involvement within the broader Bangladeshi society, suggesting that the ECE centers becomes an external societal actor interfering in home life, creating a collision between cultural understandings of the home (poribar/bari) and the ECE center, which presented hindrances to parental involvement. The study additionally discusses implications of the Covid-19 epidemic and suggestions for the future of ECE mainstreaming in Bangladesh.

Collective intentionality lies at the heart of solidarity and social action. Collective intentions refer to thinking in a “We-mode” oriented toward the social group, contrary to individual-oriented thinking in “I-mode”. Theories in philosophy and sociology have long recognized the importance of collective intentions for solidarity. Yet, less is known about how collective intentions affect solidarity on different levels of analysis. The dissertation aims to introduce collective intentions to sociological research and to close the research gap by studying the relationship between collective intentions and solidarity. In study I, we study collective intentions in small group dynamics via an online experiment. We find that collective intentions are strongly related to solidarity and emerge through social interactions in groups. Study II uses computational text analysis and qualitative in-depth reading to investigate how US governors draw on collective intentionality to mobilize people during the COVID-19 pandemic. We find that political leaders evoke collective intentionality by emphasizing unity, vulnerability, action, and community boundaries. While Democratic governors emphasize a shared agency between government and citizens, Republican governors highlight more of a top-down approach to governmental action. Similarly, study III examines political leaders’ use of collective intentionality and the distribution of governmental and civic roles across nine countries during the coronavirus pandemic. While all political leaders highlight the importance of unity, solidarity, and social action in public speeches, I find that political leaders’ narrative on the distribution of governmental and civic roles does not align with existing patterns across party lines. Finally, study IV focuses on whether politicians’ use of collective intentionality in times of crisis influences peoples’ solidary intentions and behavior in an online experiment. We find no evidence that collective intentionality in political speeches affects solidarity, suggesting that collective intentionality cannot be built through speech acts only, without being based on shared we-experiences, community, and trust. Taken together, the studies in this dissertation contribute to research on collective intentionality and solidarity. Within social group interaction, collective intentionality fosters social cohesion and solidarity. In crises, collective intentionality provides insight into the group boundaries, responsibilities, and distribution of roles.

The advances in digital technologies and improved digital literacy have provided myriads of opportunities for societies. Particularly in the public sphere, improved digitalisation has meant better access to information for citizens, among others. Digital technologies, such as social media, have been proven invaluable in events such as a public health crisis such as COVID-19. However, the adoption of these technologies has also brought challenges related to misinformation, where publicly available information is manipulated and disseminated for purposes that are against the public interest. This paper presents an ongoing empirical study that attempts to explore the measures taken by the public sector to manage misinformation. The study, conducted in two developing countries, explores the immediate and long-term approaches to tackling misinformation. The implication of the expected results for research and practice are also presented.

This thesis set out to examine news habits among Swedish 15-20 year olds during the spring of 2020 but then the Covid-19 pandemic hit. Following the events and its possible implications on news consumption, the focus shifted towards also looking at how young people’s news habits might change during the pandemic. This study was primarily aimed at better understanding the relationship between young people and news by implementing theories relating to their motivations and how they connect to society. The method used to examine this was online surveys. Additionally, by building on research from the 2009 Swine flu pandemic the survey aimed at improving the understanding of news’ relevance in the context of the digitized media landscape and evolved use of social media. From the results it seems respondents had a bigger need for news and information during Covid-19. Results showed that young people have an interest in news and care about what goes on in society. Factors such as political interest and education level indicated higher news consumption but not as much in relation to the pandemic. Social media was important for the overall news consumption. Those discussing current events with friends and family were also more likely to consume news to a greater extent than those who did not. This study concludes that the decline in youth news consumption previously observed, might not be as severe and that the role of social media is a crucial element. It is also evident that the Covid-19 pandemic increased young people’s news consumption and they turn to the news for information and to better understand what goes on in the world around them.

This thesis examines the exercise of emergency powers in response to the Covid-19 pandemic. The two cases of Germany and Spain applied disparate models of emergency powers while sharing common traits of federal decentralized power structures. While Spain initially centralized powers within the Spanish Government, Germany empowered the executives of the Länder and the Federal Ministry of Health. Within both countries the executive took extreme precedence, but factors such as the continuous legitimization of actions by means of the supranational WHO downplay the sovereign nature of the executive. The legislature was pacified throughout the first year of the pandemic, the frame of study, and acted to undermine its own authority. The judiciary while active suffered from its temporal role as retrospective when faced with an emergency requiring immediate action, and was further undermined by the vague legal basis of the emergency powers and the unknown nature of the threat that Covid-19 posed. These factors meant that the executive lacked scrutiny by the two other institutionally designed checks on power. Restrictions encroached so far on rights to autonomy that they were ruled unconstitutional in Spain, in Germany the third amendment to the IPA which aimed to specify the legal basis for restrictions, resulted in more stringent restrictions in the third phase of the pandemic.

The COVID-19 pandemic exposed the vulnerability of cities and set a new focus on planning sustainable and resilient cities. This thesis aims to assess the edible city, where edible plants are grown in public spaces, in terms of sustainability and resilience during the COVID-19 pandemic and evaluate its contribution to urban sustainability and resilience. Further, it explores the implications for planning an edible city. As part of this case study, 10 semi-structured interviews were conducted in two edible cities: Edible City Andernach, Germany and Incredible Edible Todmorden, England. The results of this study demonstrate that both edible cities contribute to sustainability, but each is skewed towards one sustainability dimension. Concerning resilience, the study illustrates that both cases are able to withstand the pandemic impacts and adapt particularly in their focus sustainability dimension. However, general resilience is negatively impacted by a stance of waiting-it-out. For planning an edible city, a combination of a top-down and bottom-up approach is recommended. In conclusion, this thesis shows that the edible city contributes to urban sustainability and resilience through the continuing provision of ecosystem services and co-benefits during the COVID-19 pandemic. 

In this paper we report the results of an online study conducted in Bosnia and Herzegovina during the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic (May 2020). The study examined a range of social and behavioural responses by youth from different ethnic backgrounds and across 63 cities (N = 569). More specifically, the study was focused on investigating the relationship between threat perception, public health behaviour, reported stress level and social cohesion. As expected, results indicate that higher perceived threat relates to higher compliance with health and safety measures despite extremely low levels of political trust. Surprisingly, participants reported relatively low levels of stress despite high social isolation and physical restrictions. These results could partially be explained by an increased level of family interaction. Furthermore, participants reported relatively high levels of social cohesion and common ingroup identification in a usually segregated and conflict-ridden context.