Effective interorganizational collaboration is a pivotal ingredient of any community or nation’s capacity to prepare for and bounce back from disruptive crisis events. The booming research field of collaborative public management (CPM) has been yielding important insights into such collaboration that as yet await transfer to the study of crisis management (CM). Also, we argue that the general CPM literature has not sufficiently addressed the distinctive collaboration challenges involved in coping with crises. This article bridges this twofold gap. Based on a systematic review of prior research in collaborative CM, this study identifies dominant areas of theoretical emphasis, methodological practices, and patterns of empirical enquiry. The article highlights areas where CPM research has potential to further inform the understanding of collaborative CM, including performance, success factors, managerial skills, and learning. The article then identifies five properties associated with CM—uncertainty, leadership, magnitude, costs, and urgency—which deserve further analysis to advance the understanding of the application of CPM principles and strategies. We conclude with outlining a research agenda and offering a set of testable propositions aimed at investigating the likelihood of effective collaboration in different types of crises and as expected indifferent CM paradigms.
This book offers a systematic, empirical examination of the concepts of disasters and sustainable economic development applied to many cases around the world. It presents comprehensive coverage of the complex and dynamic relationship between disaster and development, making a vital contribution to the literature on disaster management, disaster resilience, and sustainable development. The book collects twenty-three chapters, examining theoretical issues and investigating practical cases on policy, governance, and lessons learned in dealing with different types of disasters (e.g., earthquakes, floods, and hurricanes) in twenty countries and communities around the world
In a world characterized by complex interdependence, crises that originate in one country have the potential to rapidly diffuse across borders and have profound regional and even global impacts. The eruption of the Icelandic volcano Eyjafjallajökull in April 2010 demonstrates how rapidly a natural disaster can morph from a local crisis with local effects to a cascading crisis with international effects across multiple sectors. After spreading to Europe the ash cloud severely disrupted air travel and paralyzed the European aviation transport system. This cascading crisis caught authorities by surprise and revealed the need to improve crisis preparedness to deal with the threat of volcanic ash in particular and aviation in general at the international, EU, and national levels. In the aftermath of the event, reforms and policy changes ensued. Just over a year later, the Icelandic volcano Grímsvötn erupted, providing an opportunity to observe the revised system respond to a similar event. The origins, response, reforms, lessons learned, and questions of resilience connected to these complex negative events are the subject of this paper. The article concludes by addressing the question of whether and to what extent the vulnerabilities and problems exposed by the 2010 volcanic ash cloud event are amenable to reform.
Past research has posited that effective leadership is an essential ingredient in reaching international agreements and overcoming the collective action problems associated with responding to climate change. Despite its fundamental importance for leadership relationships, the demand side of the leadership equation has been comparatively neglected in the literature. In this study, we answer several related questions that are vital for understanding the leadership dynamics that impact the United Nations Framework Convention on Climate Change (UNFCCC) negotiations. Are there any leaders in the field of climate change and, if so, who are they? How do followers select climate leaders? What factors are important to them? Using unique survey data collected at four consecutive United Nations (UN) climate summits, Conference of Parties (COP) 14–17, this article investigates which actors are actually recognized as playing a leadership role in the UNFCCC negotiations and probes how followers select leadership candidates in this issue area. The survey findings reveal a fragmented leadership landscape, with no one clear-cut leader, and spotlight that if an actor seeks to be recognized as a leader, it is crucial to be perceived as being devoted to promoting the common good.
In this article, we utilize the Collaborative Governance Databank to empirically explore core theoretical assumptions about collaborative governance in the context of crisis management. By selecting a subset of cases involving episodes or situations characterized by the combination of urgency, threat, and uncertainty, we conduct a plausibility probe to garner insights into a number of central assumptions and dynamics fundamental to understanding collaborative crisis management. Although there is broad agreement among academics and practitioners that collaboration is essential for managing complex risks and events that no single actor can handle alone, in the literature, there are several unresolved claims and uncertainties regarding many critical aspects of collaborative crisis management. Assumptions investigated in the article relate to starting-points and triggers for collaboration, level of collaboration, goal-formulation, adaptation, involvement and role of non-state actors, and the prevalence and impact of political infighting. The results confirm that crises represent rapidly moving and dynamic events that raise the need for adaptation, adjustment, and innovation by diverse sets of participants. We also find examples of successful behaviours where actors managed, despite challenging conditions, to effectively contain conflict, formulate and achieve shared goals, adapt to rapidly changing situations and emergent structures, and innovate in response to unforeseen problems.
Drawing on the strategic surprise, warning-response, and foreign policy literature, this article argues that the September 11 terror attacks should be regarded as a strategic surprise and examines a number of key factors that contributed to vulnerability and inhibited vigilance. Three broad explanatory "cuts" derived from the literature-psychological, bureau-organizational, and agenda-political-are deployed to sift through the rapidly expanding empirical record in an effort to shed light on the processes and contextual factors that left the United States vulnerable to the attacks. The article aims to improve our understanding of generic processes and practices that enhance or detract from vulnerability and vigilance.