Crisis management has become a defining feature of contemporary governance. In times of crisis, communities and members of organizations expect their leaders to minimize the impact of the crisis at hand, while critics and bureaucratic competitors try to seize the moment to blame incumbent rulers and their policies. In this extreme environment, policy makers must somehow establish a sense of normality, and foster collective learning from the crisis experience. In this uniquely comprehensive analysis, the authors examine how leaders deal with the strategic challenges they face, the political risks and opportunities they encounter, the errors they make, the pitfalls they need to avoid, and the paths away from crisis they may pursue. This book is grounded in over a decade of collaborative, cross-national case study research, and offers an invaluable multidisciplinary perspective. This is an original and important contribution from experts in public policy and international security.
Crisis management has become a defining feature of contemporary governance. In times of crisis, communities and members of organizations expect their leaders to minimize the impact, while critics and bureaucratic competitors make use of social media to blame incumbent rulers and their policies. In this extreme environment, policymakers must somehow establish a sense of normality, and foster collective learning from the crisis experience. In the new edition of this uniquely comprehensive analysis, the authors examine how strategic leaders deal with the challenges they face, the political risks and opportunities they encounter, the pitfalls they must avoid, and the paths towards reform they may pursue. The book is grounded in decades of collaborative, cross-national and multidisciplinary case study research and has been updated to include new insights and examples from the last decade. This is an original and important contribution from experts in public policy and international security.
Can governments learn? The title of an influential monograph by a leading political psychologist (Etheredge, 1985) posed this seemingly simplistic question. At first glance, the obvious answer to such a blunt question would appear to be ‘of course’. Governments (and government agencies) persist in spite of, or in some cases because of, dynamic and often hostile political environments. This would seem to indicate that a significant degree of learning is taking place. Yet many scholars, including Etheredge 1985 himself, are markedly skeptical about the learning capacity of policy‐makers and governmental organizations and argue that governments learn poorly or slowly at best (Sabatier, 1987; Lebovic, 1995: 835). How can this be? Is this apparent paradox an artefact of the ways in which scholars define and operationalize the concept of learning? Part one of the article will present a brief and selective survey of the diverse inter‐disciplinary literature on policy and political learning. This preliminary conceptual analysis identifies several difficult issues. Among the most serious is the ontological question (who or what learns?) and the problem of distinguishing learning from other types of political change, which raises thorny normative and methodological questions. The second part of the article brings the concept of crisis into the learning equation. It has been hypothesized by a number of scholars (George, 1980; Goldmann, 1988; Young, 1989; Olsen, 1992) that conditions associated with policy crises, and their aftermath, may facilitate learning and change and contribute to overcoming the governmental inertia and political dynamics which often inhibit learning under ‘normal’ conditions. For example, it is argued that the experience of crises may contribute to a posture of cognitive openness conducive to individual and collective learning. Crisis experiences tend to re‐order the political agenda, stimulate an appetite for change and reform on the part of the electorate and the mass media and, thus, create moments of political possibility, ‘policy windows’ (Kingdon, 1984), which create opportunities for agile reformers before they close. A ‘balance‐sheet’ approach is used in order to examine the plausibility of the crisis‐learning hypothesis. This entails posing twin questions. First, what are the characteristics of crisis situations (or political systems which have experienced crises) likely to promote governmental learning? Secondly, what are the characteristics of crisis situations (or political systems which have experienced crises) likely to create obstacles to learning? Some preliminary thoughts on how to go about conducting empirical research in this area, and some reflections upon the results of the conceptual analysis, are presented in the last two sections of the article.
This article probes the warning-response failures that left the city of New Orleans vulnerable to catastrophic hurricanes and the inability of local, state, and federal authorities to mount an adequate response to the consequences unleashed by Hurricane Katrina. Through an empirical exploration with the help of three broad explanatory 'cuts' derived from the relevant interdisciplinary literature -psychological, bureauorganizational, and agenda-political -the authors seek to shed light on the sources of failure that contributed to the various levels of governments' lack of preparedness and the inadequate collective response to a long-predicted, upper-category hurricane. The article concludes by addressing the question of whether the vulnerabilities and problems that contributed to the Katrina failure are amenable to reform.
This article describes the Crisis Management~CM! Europe program that seeks to produce scientific knowledge that can be used also in order to train practitioners to cope more effectively with national and regional crises. Initiated in 1997 with a focus on the Baltic Sea area, the program has recently been broadened to cover all of Europe. The program documents and analyzes specific cases of national and regional crises. It relies upon a contextually grounded process tracing strategy for case reconstruction and dissection derived from relevant literatures in political science, psychology, and organizational sociology. To facilitate comparison and cumulation of case findings, a systematic four-step research procedure has been developed. Ten analytical themes of potential interest to both scholars and practitioners are identified as targets for structured focused comparison. More than a hundred cases have been studied by researchers working in research teams based in many European countries. Training tools have been successfully deployed in training practitioners from more than a dozen countries. An ongoing dialogue between academics and practitioners from across the Continent promises to make a contribution toward bridging the gap between these two different communities.The governments of today's Europe operate in domestic and international political settings which have been profoundly altered by the end of the Cold War, the collapse of the Soviet Union, and the significant steps taken in the last decade toward European integration. Many of these changes have been positive and perceptions of military threat have lessened in many-but not all-corners of the Continent. Political and economic liberalization and democratization have changed the face of Europe and Churchill's iron curtain is no more. As old threats have receded, new ones linked to transnational social, economic, political, ecological, and technological processes have emerged and joined old scourges in wreaking Authors' note: The authors wish to thank Paul 't Hart, the editors of ISP, and the anonymous reviewers for useful comments and suggestions. Thanks also to our many CM Europe collaborators for countless inspiring conversations. We wish to acknowledge the generous support of the Swedish Agency for Civil Emergency Planning and the Swedish National Defence College, which have greatly facilitated our regional research and training activities.International Studies Perspectives~2002! 3, 71-88.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.
hi@scite.ai
10624 S. Eastern Ave., Ste. A-614
Henderson, NV 89052, USA
Copyright © 2024 scite LLC. All rights reserved.
Made with 💙 for researchers
Part of the Research Solutions Family.