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 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.

Emergency preparedness planning in developed countries: the Swedish case

“…However, when a society encounters a major crisis, the politics or policy makers do not face those crisis; in contrast, political rivalries about the interpretation of fastmoving emergencies and their effects are part of the drama that crisis management entails in modern civil society. Public leaders must manage crises in the context of a political, legal, and moral order that forces civil society actors to trade-off considerations of effectiveness and efficiency against other embedded values (Boin et al, 2005).…”

“…With these developments, the importance of actors as a mediating force between citizens and the state is most likely weakening. One explanation for this phenomenon is reported by Boin et al, (2005), who suggest that unnecessary friendliness and conformity affecting actors in the system because of groupthink leads to contagious optimism about the actors' ability to see through a crisis successfully. The interviews suggest that building essential elements is challenging because there is uncertainty about where a process starts or where it ends.…”

Upsetting the agenda: the clout of external focusing events in the European Council

“…Further, research in this area is scarce. Scholars have focused on single events, such as the Three Mile Island incident (Baumgartner and Jones 1993) or the 9/11 attacks (Birkland 2004), demonstrating how these cases have acted as reinforcing mechanisms for 2 Some authors advocate a distinction between crises and focusing events (Nohrstedt and Weible 2010), but the dividing line is not entirely clear, and the two are sometimes considered nested categories (Birkland and Nath 2000;Faulkner 2001) or simply referred to interchangeably (Boin et al 2005). For the purposes of this article, the two concepts are used as synonyms.…”

Cross border Classical Swine Fever control: Improving Dutch and German crisis management systems by an integrated public-private approach

“…One of the most important aspects in crisis management decision making is the assessment of the optimal use of data and communication channels (Rosenthal et al, 2001;Boin et al, 2005;Rodriguez et. al., 2007;McConnell and Drennan, 2007;Kouzmin and Rosenthal, 1997).…”