The Politics of Crisis Management

Abstract

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.

Is Public Management Neglecting the State?

“…Crises test the mettle of the state's leaders and its institutions (Boin et al 2016). The state's political and administrative elites must address challenges they rarely face.…”

Hiding in Plain Sight: Conceptualizing the Creeping Crisis

“…By the time political attention reaches a tipping point that enables concerted and urgent action, there is no longer just a complex problem to solve but a crisis to manage. Crisis management is hard enough for public managers (Boin, 't Hart, Stern, & Sundelius, 2016), but these challenges are compounded by the slow onset of the crisis: media and citizens will demand to know why this long-coming crisis was not addressed earlier. The inevitable blame game will undermine the crisis management capacities of politicians that bear responsibility for the origins of the crisis (cf.…”

Preparedness: Unpacking and clarifying the concept

“…Sometimes labelled 'paradigms' (McEntire, Fuller, Johnston, & Weber, 2002), a host of suggested names are competing for dominance within the inner and outer research community concerned with these phenomena. The proposed titles of the trade include 'disaster studies' (Lindell, 2013); 'disasterology' (Alexander, 1997(Alexander, , 2000; 'emergency management' (Jensen, 2010;McEntire, 2004); crisis management (Boin, 't Hart, Stern, & Sundelius, 2005;Rosenthal et al, 2001); 'societal safety' and 'societal security' (Høyland, 2015;Olsen, Kruke, & Hovden, 2007); 'societal resilience' (Helsloot et al, 2012); 'hazards research' (Bolin, 2007); 'civil protection' and 'civil defence' (Alexander, 2002a;Quarantelli, 2000a); 'DRR' (UN, 2015b); 'disaster risk science' (Holloway, 2009); 'disaster risk management' (World Bank, 2014); and 'sustainable hazards mitigation' (McEntire et al, 2002), just to name a few. Most scholars fail to address how their frameworks align with competing paradigms and concepts by ignoring competing paradigms within their field, which leads to ambiguity and directly affects their conceptual subcategories.…”