Navigating Vulnerability: Structural Inequalities and Lived Experience During the Covid-19 Pandemic in Stockholm

Vulnerability in times of crisis is often understood as a temporary state emerging from the interplay between personal coping capacities, societal assistance and the nature of a given crisis (Wisner & Henry, 1993; Alexander, 2012; Kuran et al., 2020; Gaddi et al., 2021). While such a definition has received increasing support in the practitioner domain and in the research community (MSB, 2015, MSB, 2021; UN, 2017), challenges arise when this fluid concept is applied to specific real-world situations and people (Rhodin & Wedel, 2023; Hultqvist & Hollertz, 2021). These challenges were demonstrated during the Covid-19 as uneven outcomes were observed both between countries and within their populations (Beland et al, 2022). Here, Sweden constitutes a case study of a state that, with its renowned welfare system, should have capacities to pursue inclusive crisis management strategies. Nonetheless, Sweden struggled to effectively manage the Covid-19 pandemic in several areas (Deverell, 2025; Ekengren 2024). Covid-19 coping assistance was limited (Swedish Public Health Agency, 2020) and insufficiently targeted towards individuals experiencing intersectional vulnerability, despite the high mortality rates and severe socioeconomic consequences of the pandemic among these people (Government commission, 2022). To date, the obstacles to practical implementation of a more inclusive crisis assistance remain insufficiently examined (Orru et al 2022). Furthermore, few studies on vulnerability and crisis actively include voices from vulnerable individuals in their research. Against this backdrop, this paper aims to highlight obstacles to inclusive crisis management within welfare state contexts by including perspectives from both stakeholders and vulnerable individuals in the analysis. In doing so, we pursue a case study of crisis vulnerability in Stockholm during the Covid-19 pandemic 2020-2022. The paper poses the following research questions: (i) How did stakeholders and potentially vulnerable individuals perceive and navigate risk in Stockholm’s Covid-19 response? (ii) Why does the integration of vulnerability perspectives remain so challenging in practical crisis-management responses? Empirically, our study examines Swedish Covid-19 crisis management through a thematic analysis of 16 stakeholder interviews and 16 interviews capturing the lived experiences of individuals positioned as potentially vulnerable. The findings show that vulnerability during the pandemic was not simply an outcome of pre-existing social disadvantage but was actively produced through standardized crisis governance practices that failed to accommodate intersecting social positions and individual circumstances. For crisis and disaster studies, this demonstrates that vulnerability should be understood as a dynamic governance effect rather than a fixed group characteristic. For public policy, the findings highlight a central dilemma in welfare-state crisis management: policies designed for administrative efficiency and universalism can inadvertently reproduce exclusion during emergencies. By foregrounding lived experience alongside institutional perspectives, the study shows why inclusive crisis responses remain difficult to operationalize and why group-based targeting alone is insufficient. In doing so, the paper advances an intersectional, practice-oriented understanding of vulnerability with direct implications for the design of more inclusive disaster governance in welfare-state contexts.