Crisis Management

Crisis and the Modern Society

Public authorities face a variety of crises, such as natural disasters and war, financial meltdowns and terrorist attacks, epidemics and explosions, and infrastructural dramas and failures of information and communications technology (ICT). Crises are not routine events (e.g., fires or traffic accidents). Crises are inconceivable events that often take politicians, citizens, and the media by complete surprise.

Crises create tough challenges for public authorities and their organizations. Citizens expect public authorities to safeguard them from the threat, make critical decisions, and implement them—under considerable time pressure and in the absence of essential information about causes and consequences. Two factors make it increasingly hard to meet these challenges.

First, the very qualities that increase welfare and drive progress in modern societies make them vulnerable to crises. Modern society has become increasingly complex and integrated. Complexity makes it hard to fully understand emerging vulnerabilities, which, as a result, can go long unrecognized; attempts to deal with them often produce unintended consequences (fueling rather than dampening the crisis). Tight coupling between a system's component parts and those of other systems facilitates the rapid proliferation of disturbances throughout the system. Crises may thus have their roots far away (in a geographical sense), but they can rapidly snowball through global networks, jumping from one system to another and gathering destructive potential along the way.

All this makes it very hard to recognize a crisis before its consequences materialize. When a crisis begins to unfold, policymakers often do not see anything out of the ordinary. Hidden interactions eat away at the pillars of the system, but it is only when the crisis is in full swing that policymakers can recognize it for what it is. Once a crisis has escalated into view, authorities can only try to minimize its consequences.

Second, the contested nature of crisis complicates the situation. A crisis rarely, if ever, “speaks for itself.” The definition of a situation is, as social scientists say, the outcome of a subjective process and is continuously subjected to the forces of politicization. One person's crisis is another's opportunity. For public authorities, this spells trouble: Many seemingly innocent events can be transformed into crises. Western citizens have [Page 495]grown impatient with imperfections; they have come to fear glitches, and they see more of what they fear. In this culture of fear—sometimes referred to as the “risk society”—the modern mass media play an amplifying role (Ulrick Beck, 1992).

Challenges of Crisis Management

Crisis management has two dimensions. The technical-administrative dimension pertains to the coping capacity of governmental institutions and public policies in the face of emerging threats. But there is also a political dimension: Crisis management is a deeply controversial and intensely political activity. A combination of these dimensions translates into what Arjen Boin, Paul't Hart, Eric Stern, and Bengt Sundelius have identified as the five critical challenges of crisis management: sense making, decision making, meaning making, terminating, and learning.

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