More than ‘self-help’: The urban governance of the Ebola outbreak in Monrovia, Liberia

• An urban Ebola response was coproduced across urban, state, and international actors. • Urbanization in Monrovia produced struggles between urban residents and the state. • These struggles shaped the potential for community action during the Ebola outbreak. • Legacies of urban authority and spatial organizing facilitated a response to Ebola. • Community action integrated into formal responses despite limited local government. By tracing logics of urban governance in Monrovia, Liberia, this paper demonstrates how an urban response to the Ebola virus in Monrovia emerged during the West African Ebola epidemic (2014 to 2016) in the context of limited local government capacity and broader structures of exclusion in the city, contributing to debates concerning how cities are governed beyond the formal-informal binary and how these urban governance mechanisms are consolidated over time. A historicized account of the governance of Monrovia is presented, where community ‘self-help’ activities arose from struggles for power and recognition between urban inhabitants and the state, traced through the country’s war, and again during Ebola in a moment of temporary institutionalization when ‘informal’ urban authorities were directly implicated in the success of the formal outbreak response. Drawing on empirical evidence from fieldwork in Monrovia including interviews with actors in the Ebola response and extensive secondary source research, this paper demonstrates how an urban Ebola response built off past choices and institutions laid down by a settler-colonial regime, making it possible for robust community action to coproduce an Ebola response across spatial scales and across formal and informal binaries even within the exclusionary status-quo of local government in Monrovia. In addition, the findings suggest that effectively responding to urban disease outbreaks in extremely resource limited settings such as Monrovia requires attention to how community level actions augment limited capacity in local government and produce a health response capable of adapting to evolving situations across time and scales.