There is a general consensus that COVID-19 is rapidly and radically transforming the democratic relationship between state and society. Focusing on political and legal arrangements, some argue that the virus gives a fillip to authoritarian tendencies by eroding constitutional checks and balances, while others suggest that it will reshape the state and its constitution owing to new understandings of mutual interdependence and solidarity.

We make a different argument here: Democracy is also being transformed by significant changes in the state’s fiscal arrangements and its political economy. We do so based on scrutiny of a specific type of fiscal vehicle that crystallizes and regulates state–society relationships: Special-purpose social welfare funds. These are collected pursuant to state law to tackle the vulnerability of specific social categories, such as unorganized migrant labor in the construction sector in India or the underdevelopment of certain regions in Italy. We argue that these funds are a site through which social actors, and especially the state, define social vulnerability, and more generally welfare.

The crucial role of institutions in agricultural development has been widely discussed, be it with regard to credit or land reforms or to incentives like support prices and subsidies. The institutionalist perspective has also been extensively used for understanding the role of institutions in natural resource management. Within both areas of study, namely agriculture and environment-related issues, scholars have tended to include the international dimension when analysing the process of designing, adapting and enforcing institutions which operate nationally and regionally. In particular, some of them have observed the emergence of a so-called global phytogenetic governance, a concept ‘commonly used in the discussion of global environmental issues to denote the more or less binding application and enforcement of norms, rules, and procedures in a given issue area’ (Thomas, 2002: p. 177). The field of agricultural biodiversity is particularly interesting, because it is regulated by two broad global regimes, one pertaining to agriculture and trade and another related to environmental conservation issues. This so-called global governance, which, in turn, impacts on local realities through the action of institutions which are designed and/or implemented at the national level, attempts at balancing competing interests. Constrasting pressures are exerted on these regimes to evolve. Bringing social movements into the picture is a way of making sense of the resistance met by institutions at the local level and also of their potential role as a pressure group impinging on institutional evolution.