Collaborative Crisis Management: Inter-organizational Approaches to Extreme Events

Public organizations are increasingly expected to cope with crisis under the same resource constraints and mandates that make up their normal routines, reinforced only through collaboration. Collaborative Crisis Management introduces readers to how collaboration shapes societies’ capacity to plan for, respond to, and recover from extreme and unscheduled events.

Placing emphasis on five conceptual dimensions, this book teaches students how this panacea works out on the ground and in the boardrooms, and how insights on collaborative practices can shed light on the outcomes of complex inter-organizational challenges across cases derived from different problem areas, administrative cultures, and national systems. Written in a concise, accessible style by experienced teachers and scholars, it places modes of collaboration under an analytical microscope by assessing not only the collaborative tools available to actors but also how they are used, to what effect, and with which adaptive capacity. Ten empirical chapters span different international cases and contexts discussing:

• Natural and "man-made" hazards: earthquakes, hurricanes, wildfires, terrorism, migration flows, and violent protests
• Different examples of collaborative institutions, such as regional economic communities in Africa, and multi-level arrangements in Canada, the Netherlands, Turkey, and Switzerland
• Application of a multimethod approach, including single case studies, comparative case studies, process-tracing, and "large-n" designs.

Collaborative Crisis Management is essential reading for those involved in researching and teaching crisis management.

Fredrik Bynander is Director of the Center for Societal Security and Chairman of the Board of the Center of Natural Hazards and Disaster Science (CNDS). Prior to this appointment, Fredrik was head of strategic planning at the Prime Minister's Office Secretariat for Crisis Coordination. His current research interests include crisis management studies, leadership succession, and foreign policy analysis. Frederik is a member of the Royal Academy of War Sciences and the Swedish Society for International Affairs.

Daniel Nohrstedt is Associate Professor of Political Science at Uppsala University, Sweden. He studies processes of inter-organizational collaboration, learning, change, and performance in the context of crisis management and natural hazards planning. His other research interests include policy process theory (particularly the Advocacy Coalition Framework), governance, policy network theory, and collaborative public management.