ABSTRACT Concurrent crises represent a significant challenge for disaster and public health governance. Activated in response to one threat, governing institutions may be distracted or stretched thin during an emergent crisis. In such crises, governments and communities rely heavily on non‐state service providers such as non‐profit organizations and religious groups. To examine the role of non‐state providers during concurrent crises, we engaged in original survey research, secondary data analysis, and field interviews focused on the overlapping challenges of the COVID‐19 Pandemic and the 2021 Texas Winter Storm Uri as well as the pandemic's delta wave and Hurricane Ida. We considered the impact of local non‐profit capacity on community recovery, the ability of institutions to adapt, and the implications of reliance on non‐state providers for public accountability and resource allocation. Our findings supported the hypothesis that non‐profit assets augment the role of government in responding to crises. We did not find that concurrent crises weakened the ability of non‐profit groups to respond, but instead found evidence consistent with organizational adaptation. We found that closer ties to government were associated with increased transparency/accountability as well as allocation of resources based on standardized measures of need.
ABSTRACT While AI in disaster management has been widely reviewed, current research often overlooks how domestic AI disaster research portfolios can be systematically mapped and compared with international patterns. To address this gap, we develop a systematic mapping framework encompassing implementation years, funding sources, disciplinary fields, disaster types, operational stages, and thematic foci. Using the 309 government‐funded AI projects for disaster management in Taiwan as a case study, we demonstrate how this approach not only identifies key convergences and divergences with international trends but also highlights the configuration of national research priorities. Our findings indicate that the project timeline of Taiwan broadly aligns with global trends, with a notable surge in activity around 2018. However, limited attention has been given to the humanities and social sciences, emerging hazards, and post‐disaster recovery. We further synthesize key priorities and underexplored areas. Moreover, academically driven projects dominate the portfolio and demonstrate innovation, but they may face challenges in practical application due to insufficient coordination with government agencies. By providing a replicable framework for cross‐national comparison, this study offers a transferable approach for other nations to evaluate their national AI disaster research agenda.
ABSTRACT Disasters and crises disrupt lives and test the capacities of governments and organizations. While their immediate aftermath is often marked by uncertainty and disruption, recurrent patterns in how individuals are affected give rise to foreseeable hardships. Yet these human consequences, and what they imply for crisis leadership, remain underdeveloped in the crisis literature. This article advances a Human‐Centered Crisis Expectations Model that conceptualizes, from the perspective of those affected, the crisis management challenge as an equation composed of six interrelated elements: primary exposure, damage and loss, procedural burden, social recognition, hope and perspective, and context. Together, these elements offer a human‐centered evaluative logic for understanding and guiding crisis leadership. The model serves as both an analytical framework and a normative guide, suggesting that perceived effectiveness depends on the extent to which these elements are recognized and addressed throughout the full trajectory of a crisis—beyond the acute phase and well into recovery, which may extend over years depending on the scale and impact of loss and disruption. The article concludes by discussing implications for research, policy, and practice.
Hybrid crisis governance – combining hierarchical control with networked collaboration – has gained increasing attention in the public policy and crisis management literatures. Yet, the concept of hybridity remains crude and underdefined, limiting its analytical utility. To address this gap, we conducted a systematic review of how hybrid governance was applied during the COVID‐19 pandemic in Europe. Following the PRISMA 2020 guidelines, we screened 337 records and selected 20 studies for thematic synthesis. Our analysis identifies three distinct types of hybrid crisis governance: temporal, concurrent and integrative. Temporal hybridity refers to sequential shifts between control‐based and collaborative modes over time. Concurrent hybridity captures the parallel coexistence of control and collaboration with limited integration. Integrative hybridity denotes the blending of control and collaboration into fused forms such as controlled collaboration or collaborative control. This typology advances conceptual clarity in both crisis management and public governance by offering a structured analytical vocabulary for hybrid crisis governance. Assessing the strengths and limitations of each type of hybridity, we argue that effective crisis governance depends on a context‐sensitive capacity to recalibrate governance modes in response to shifting constraints and demands.
ABSTRACT This article explores decision‐making processes in crisis situations by proposing an interpretive framework grounded in multiple criteria of rationality. Crises, characterized by uncertainty, urgency, and ethical dilemmas, require critical choices that go beyond standard procedures. To investigate the dynamics that unfold in crisis decision‐making, the study examines the management of the 2023 floods in Ravenna, focusing on the controversial decision to deliberately inundate certain agricultural areas in order to protect the historic city center. Adopting a multi‐perspective thinking approach, the article develops three alternative interpretations of the same decision, showing how different forms of rationality often coexist in practice. The empirical analysis is based on semi‐structured interviews with key actors, complemented by official documents and media reports. The findings reveal the complexity and ambiguity that characterize decision‐making in crisis situations, in which multiple criteria of rationality intertwine rather than exclude one another.
ABSTRACT What happens when artificial intelligence (AI) produces authoritative but false information in public decision‐making? This article examines an AI‐induced crisis in a Norwegian municipality where bureaucrats relied on ChatGPT‐generated content in a report to determine whether eight schools were to be permanently closed. The content was presented as legitimate research but was in fact hallucination by the AI technology, leading to an acute crisis demanding a response from different public actors. We find that the involved actors managed reputation and accountability in response to the AI‐induced crisis in quite inconsistent and contradictory ways, shaped by their institutional roles and differing interpretations of accountability. Building on the empirical findings, we introduce the concept of the double black box to illustrate how overlapping technological opacity and governance opacity can complicate transparency and obscure accountability for public decisions.
ABSTRACT Since its creation in 1979, the Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) has faced various lines of criticism from the public, state and local officials, and members of Congress. As of this writing, FEMA's future faces considerable uncertainty. Everything from eliminating the agency altogether to re‐elevating it to an independent, cabinet‐level agency seem to be possible policy outcomes. This uncertainty stems largely from federal policymakers' varying beliefs and interpretations of what FEMA does, should do, and can do. To better understand congressional perspectives about FEMA, the authors reviewed ten years of congressional hearings to understand how Congress conceptualizes FEMA and its role, along with their critiques of the agency. This paper found that while there is bipartisan praise of FEMA by members of Congress they are also concerned with issues related to ongoing reform and response, programmatic challenges, contracting problems, fiscal accountability and financial stewardship, capacity to fulfil agency responsibilities, and FEMA's role within the federal system. These findings suggest comprehensive federal emergency management reform is needed.
ABSTRACT The article examines how ‘soft’ information functions in rational organisations that emphasise hard information, and how this affects safety. Drawing on fieldwork in a high‐security prison, we analyse how frontline personnel interpret soft information about potential disturbances. We identify three coexisting institutional logics shaping these interpretations: precaution, laissez‐faire and legality. Based on these logics, we find a tension between anticipation and verification in organisational responses, where verification tends to dominate. Verified information drives formal response and information must typically conform to the format of an incident report to be considered valid by decision‐makers. As a result, incidents often need to materialise before formal action is taken. We introduce the concept of ‘response‐activating text’ to describe documents that trigger organisational action. The study highlights how historically rooted legal norms shape the handling of soft information, raising the question of whether the dominance of legal logic may come at the expense of safety.
ABSTRACT Ample scholarship examines the extent to which public policies in representative democracies reflect the priorities and needs of the public, often finding that individuals are unaware of many policy issues and policy responses. This may be especially true when issues of risk and scientific uncertainty are involved, which can be difficult for individuals to understand. Less is known, however, about the dynamics of public awareness on highly salient issues that require public compliance to be successful. To this end, we examine the extent to which uncertainty about policy mandates and recommendations that reduce COVID‐19 pandemic risks exists, along with the patterns of uncertainty across states and demographics. Uncertainty among the public is a critical link toward understanding policy compliance among individuals because awareness of policy information precedes compliance. We analyze these questions of policy uncertainty in the context of the COVID‐19 pandemic in the United States (US). Because COVID‐19 mitigation hinged on public uptake of various non‐pharmaceutical (e.g., mask wearing, social distancing) and pharmaceutical (e.g., vaccination) interventions, the pandemic provides a highly salient context for assessing public awareness of policy interventions. We draw on a representative survey of adults in six US states to understand the degree of public uncertainty about COVID‐19 policies in their states. We find that uncertainty at the individual level is associated with information seeking behaviors and socioeconomic variables, and that uncertainty is linked to policy compliance.
By conducting content analysis and social network analysis of media coverage of four historical disasters (i.e., the 2011 Joplin Tornado, 2013 Moore Tornado, 2017 Hurricane Harvey, and the 2023 Maui wildfire), this study uncovered characteristics of cross-sector disaster collaboration networks. Findings showcase common patterns of network structure, centralization, brokerage roles and disaster tasks by horizontal social sectors (government, nonprofit, faith-based, and private) and vertical geographic regions (local, state, national) across the four disasters. Results identify important actors and indicate areas where disaster roles and tasks overlap, as well as areas that are overlooked. By providing some generalizations and implications in terms of roles and task capabilities of each sector and region, and the specific gaps that emergent disaster groups could fill, this multi-hazard study could help researchers and emergency managers optimize disaster response and recovery efforts.
Health systems in low and middle-income countries face a fundamental puzzle: some severely resource-constrained systems demonstrate unexpected adaptive capabilities when tested by repeated crises while others with comparable resource levels collapse. Existing theories cannot explain this variation. Resource availability approaches predict failure under extreme limitation but cannot account for adaptation despite deficits. Resilience frameworks describe desired outcomes without specifying pathways when baseline capacity is absent. Crisis management models outline learning stages but provide limited evidence on whether learning occurs in low-resource settings. This paper develops the Crisis-Induced Adaptive Capacity (CIAC) framework, a middle-range theoretical synthesis of dynamic capabilities theory, high-reliability organization principles, and crisis management scholarship. CIAC explains how adaptive capacity emerges through three mechanisms grounded in crisis responses across sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia: dynamic reconfiguration of organizational capabilities, cultivation of reliability-seeking behaviors, and institutionalization of crisis-derived learning. The framework demonstrates that adaptive capacity develops through deliberate organizational processes rather than automatically from crisis exposure. CIAC generates eight testable propositions, specifies measurable indicators for investigation, and provides methodological guidance for testing mechanisms across contexts. The framework offers researchers analytical tools for longitudinal case studies and policymakers guidance for strengthening health systems when substantial resource increases remain unlikely.
Organizations operating in high-risk environments rely on learning from real incidents, yet how evaluation practices contribute to competence development and organizational learning remains insufficiently understood. This challenge is evident in police operations, where decisions made under uncertainty have immediate implications for safety and public trust. This study examines how incident response evaluation practices shape competence development and organizational learning at the operational level of the Norwegian police. Using a qualitative design, the study draws on semi-structured interviews with operational officers and commanders, analyzed through thematic analysis. The findings show that while evaluations are widely seen as important, they are often fragmented, under-resourced, and weakly connected to systematic follow-up, limiting the transfer of learning beyond individuals and teams. To address this, the study introduces the competence development (CD) model, which explains how evaluation practices interact with organizational structures, culture, and learning processes across individual, group, and organizational levels. The study highlights the importance of leadership engagement, structured reflection, and open communication in supporting sustained learning and CD in police organizations and other high-risk settings.
This article explores the links between the management of an organization's ordinary activities and the management of crisis situations. It starts from the observation that crises, whether brutal, prolonged, or insidious, do not arise in an organizational vacuum: they mobilize the same actors, structures, and practices as day-to-day operations. The study adopts both a processual and organizational approach, considering that the ability to cope with a crisis is built and maintained in ordinary operations. Through a thematic analysis anchored in real-world cases, the article identifies five key variables linking the ordinary to the crisis: Organizational slack, the social dynamics of collective action (cooperation and trust), relational power relations, reflexivity, and abductive reasoning. We show that these collective skills, developed on a day-to-day basis, are essential for developing effective crisis management capabilities. The article concludes that crisis preparedness does not rely solely on specific plans or exercises, but on investment in ordinary practices, which shape the capacity for collective action in critical situations.
Disaster relief requires the involvement of political actors as decision-makers who may be influenced by self-serving biases or political considerations. This study extends public choice theory and introduces the role of congressional representation to examine how political considerations may impact the response of government-run disaster relief operations. We use the context of the US-based Federal Emergency Management Agency (FEMA) to test how alignment between political actors, electoral significance, and placement of congressional representation, affect the response of FEMA, measured by response time and allocation of resources. Using fixed effects models on a dataset of over 20,000 county-level disaster observations from 2002 to 2020, we find evidence that political considerations influence response to disaster relief operations. Our analysis reveals that states with greater representation on FEMA's congressional oversight committees receive increased resource allocations for operational response. We also find that response times are shorter, and resource allocations are greater for "swing" states, which carry a high level of electoral significance for political actors. While we do not observe, overall, a significant effect of alignment between federal and state-level political decision-makers on disaster relief response, we do find evidence that response varies across presidential administrations, impacting response times for disaster declarations.
This article explores the links between the management of an organization's ordinary activities and the management of crisis situations. It starts from the observation that crises, whether brutal, prolonged, or insidious, do not arise in an organizational vacuum: they mobilize the same actors, structures, and practices as day-to-day operations. The study adopts both a processual and organizational approach, considering that the ability to cope with a crisis is built and maintained in ordinary operations. Through a thematic analysis anchored in real-world cases, the article identifies five key variables linking the ordinary to the crisis: Organizational slack, the social dynamics of collective action (cooperation and trust), relational power relations, reflexivity, and abductive reasoning. We show that these collective skills, developed on a day-to-day basis, are essential for developing effective crisis management capabilities. The article concludes that crisis preparedness does not rely solely on specific plans or exercises, but on investment in ordinary practices, which shape the capacity for collective action in critical situations.
This special issue calls for a deeper examination of the meso‐level dynamics of crisis, using the European Union (EU) as a living laboratory to explore and define what a meso‐level analysis of crisis entails. Here, such analysis is understood as the study of processes, institutions, and mechanisms that lie between—or cut across—(a) grand theories of European integration and (b) explanations focused on the immediate, short‐term responses of EU or member‐state crisis management institutions to specific crises. This introductory article provides initial support for a meso‐level research agenda on EU crises. We frame how the EU is perceived through the analytical lens of crisis and provide a theoretically‐oriented statement of why it is valuable to study the EU through such a lens. We then summarize the main contributions from each individual contributions to this special issue and conclude with a brief statement of what we learn about meso‐level analysis of EU crises from them.
This study examines the distribution of discretionary attention among government officials facing contexts characterized by urgency and ambiguity. Specifically, researching discretionary distribution among government officials 4 years after a severe crisis, the paper offers novel knowledge of postcrisis effects. The study identifies five conceptual dimensions of discretionary distribution and applies meso‐level theorizing to account for observed variations. The research context is the Norwegian Welfare and Labor Administration that faced an administrative scandal in 2019 due to successive governments' misinterpretation and mishandling of European Union regulations, resulting in the illegal imprisonment of welfare beneficiaries. Benefiting from novel survey data (N = 466), the study demonstrates that this scandal left postcrisis effects on the discretionary distribution among agency officials, and that these effects were meditated by the organizational design of the administrative apparatus.
Climate‐driven extreme weather events are expected to increase in frequency and severity in the upcoming decade. In the United States, people experiencing socioeconomic hardships are particularly vulnerable to environmental change. There is growing evidence of the growing risks of climate change, extreme weather, and disaster events on vulnerable populations and the important role of safety nets for increasing climate resilience. However, scholarly attention to government safety nets, disaster and crisis management, and behavioral and policy responses to climate/extreme events is largely siloed, offering an opportunity to learn more about the extent of overlapping literature. This study presents a scoping review of over two decades of peer‐reviewed studies at the convergence of these literatures in the United States (n = 171). Our findings about the range, extent, and nature of peer‐reviewed research highlight opportunities for researchers to build on recent growth in the body of work and underscore the need for policymakers to develop policy and programs addressing increasingly frequent and severe climate impacts.
What explains the crisis response of central banks? The case of central banking is seldom used in the broader field of public innovation and crisis management studies. This paper examines the crisis management of the European Central Bank and the Federal Reserve through two severe crises, to draw out insights about innovation processes that occur in the public sector. Drawing on contributions from crisis management, innovation, and organizational studies, this article proposes a new concept, "reluctant innovation," to capture the meso-level dynamics that occur in and around crisis-managing organizations. At the macro level, a severe crisis creates an impetus for action, and within central banks at the more micro- level competing ideas about best policy solutions will influence policy outcomes. Yet the often-neglected meso-level, where the organization navigates its legal, political, and administrative context, will also impact both the content and the timing of policy innovation. Using public documents, media reports, and existing accounts of these two crises, I demonstrate how in both the Fed and the ECB case, there were instances in which interactions with and contestation around the legal, political, and administrative context had profound impacts on the crisis response and policy innovation of these central banks.
We live in a time of "permacrisis," which has presented an unprecedented number of challenges to the EU (Riddervold et al. 2021, 4). We see that the impact of crises on EU integration differs from one case to the other. This gives rise to the following puzzle: why did a phenomenon that is described with the same "crisis" label lead to different integration outcomes?Building on the work of Hupkens et al. (2023), this article argues that the variation in crisis outcomes can, to a large extent, be accounted for by identifying the type of crisis at stake. Drawing on over 30 semi-structured interviews with practitioners, the analysis of the EU's response to the Euro and EU migration crisis shows that there was significant variation in three key analytical crisis dimensions of severity, symmetry, and speed. This influenced the decisions made by heads of state and government regarding EU integration at the macro level, which also impacted political-administrative structures and processes at the meso level and operational capacity at the micro level.
