Arjen Boin

Preparing for Critical Infrastructure Breakdowns: The Limits of Crisis Management and the Need for Resilience

Modern societies are widely considered to harbour an increased propensity for breakdowns of their critical infrastructure (CI) systems. While such breakdowns have proven rather rare, Hurricane Katrina has demonstrated the catastrophic consequences of such breakdowns. This article explores how public authorities can effectively prepare to cope with these rare events. Drawing from the literature on crisis and disaster management, we examine the strengths and weaknesses of traditional approaches to crisis preparation and crisis response. We argue that the established ways of organising for critical decision-making will not suffice in the case of a catastrophic breakdown. In the immediate aftermath of such a breakdown, an effective response will depend on the adaptive behaviour of citizens, front-line workers and middle managers. In this article, we formulate a set of strategies that enhance societal resilience and identify the strong barriers to their implementation.

A Heuristic Approach to Future Disasters and Crises: New, Old, and In-Between Types

Disasters and crises have been part of the human experience since people started living in groups. Through the centuries, however, new hazards and risks have emerged that have added to the possibilities of new disasters and crises arising from them. Only a very small fraction of risks and hazards actually lead to a disaster or crisis, but they are usually a necessary condition for such surfacing. New types have emerged while older ones have not disappeared. The development of synthetic chemicals in the 19th century and nuclear power in the 20th century created the risk of toxic chemical disasters and crises from radioactive fallouts. Ancient disasters such as floods and earthquakes remain with us today. This chapter raises the question of whether we are at another important historical juncture with the emergence of a new distinctive class of disasters and crises not seen before.

The Crisis Approach

Disaster researchers do not make much use of the term “crisis” and when they do, it is often used as a synonym for “disaster”. We argue that the use of these terms implies differences in analytical perspective. In this chapter, we outline the crisis approach and explain how it is different from a disaster approach. The crisis approach is fundamentally interdisciplinary in nature, drawing together insights from public administration, sociology, psychology and political science. We explicate the underlying assumptions of this approach and show that this approach helps to recognize the most important challenges for political and administrative leaders during crises and disasters. We argue that the crisis and disaster perspectives are largely complementary and mutually informative.

Crisis simulations: exploring tomorrow's vulnerabilities and threats

In the wake of the 11 September 2001 attacks, crisis management has become reprioritized in both the public and the corporate sector. The authors argue that crisis simulations can and should be a crucial feature of preparatory efforts to deal with crises. Drawing from crisis management literature, and their own experience with crisis simulations, they explore how different types of crisis simulations can help crisis managers to prepare for “traditional” disasters as well as modern crises and contingencies.

Critical Infrastructures under Threat: Learning from the Anthrax Scare

Conventional thinking in emergency and crisis management focuses on the application of codified procedures to unforeseen contingencies. Modern societys increased dependence on critical infrastructures and the emerging vulnerabilities of these large-scale networks create challenges that are hard to meet with conventional tools of crisis management. This article discusses the inherent vulnerabilities and explores the requirements of effective preparation for escalatory network breakdowns.

Terrorism and Critical Infrastructures: Implications for Public–Private Crisis Management

The spate of terrorist attacks in New York, London and Madrid has raised some significant issues for the public management of critical infrastructures. In many countries, privatizations in the 1980s and 1990s have transferred key elements of the critical infrastructure to private companies. Because these infrastructures are of major significance to our societies and economies, they must be protected against prolonged periods of breakdown. The ‘new’ terrorism has the potential to do just that. The management of this new threat is a complex task, which invariably will be undertaken by both public and private actors. They must deal with the core challenges of the prevention of attacks, effective communication of information across organizational boundaries and the ‘ownership’ of crisis decision-making. This article considers these issues within the context of the broader research areas of public management and crisis management.

Protecting the Union: Analysing an Emerging Policy Space

Abstract Recent organizational, institutional and policy developments signal a new type of co–operative policy activity at the European level and suggest the emergence of a new policy space in the European Union. What binds together the activities in that space is a common concern for the protection of the EU citizen. This new policy space crosses sectoral boundaries, draws in a number of governmental and societal actors, and comprises a variety of institutional venues. Moreover, its dimensions span the internal and external divide in EU policies. This article serves as an introduction to a special issue on the topic of the EU’s emerging protection policy space. It first discusses the empirical parameters of this emerging space, before outlining a set of research questions and surveying the theoretical landscape for addressing these questions. It concludes by introducing the articles that comprise the special issue.

Explaining success and failure in crisis coordination

Abstract In virtually every assessment of responses to large‐scale crises and disasters, coordination is identified as a critical failure factor. After the crisis, official committees and political opponents often characterize the early phases of the response as a ‘failure to coordinate.’ Not surprisingly, improved coordination quickly emerges as the prescribed solution. Coordination, then, is apparently both the problem and the solution. But the proposed solutions rarely solve the problem: coordination continues to mar most crises and disasters. In the absence of a shared body of knowledge on coordination, it is hard to formulate a normative framework that allows for systematic assessment of coordination in times of crisis. As coordination is widely perceived as an important function of crisis and disaster management, this absence undermines a fair and balanced assessment of crisis management performance. This paper seeks to address that void. We aim to develop a framework that explains both the failure and success of crisis coordination. We do this by exploring the relevant literature, reformulating what coordination is and distilling from research the factors that cause failure and success.

Securing Safety in the Dutch Prison System: Pros and Cons of a Supermax

In the Western world, prison systems have to deal with the inherent tension between the need for safety and the aim to offer rehabilitative opportunities to prisoners. Conventional prison wisdom tells us that safety concerns tend to constrain opportunities for rehabilitation, while treatment programmes undermine safety. The small group of violent and escape-prone prisoners found in most prison systems poses a special problem. In theory, two policy options exist in order to deal with this problem: (i) disperse high-risk prisoners throughout the system, or (ii) concentrate high-risk prisoners in a so-called supermax prison. The Dutch prison system has long shifted between concentration and dispersion. In 1993, a supermax was built. This article explains why this shift occurred and how penal experts have dealt with issues of safety and treatment in this new supermax.

The New Public Management ‘Revolution’ in Political Control of the Public Sector: Promises and Outcomes in Three European Prison Systems

The ‘new public management’ (NPM) promised a revolution in the way executive politicians control public services. This article looks at the effects of NPM forns on political control, especially ‘arms-length’ executive agencies, contracting with private firms and performance measurement in the prisons domain. These reforms promised politicians strategic control and disengagement from day to day issues, and a harnessing of competitive forces to break up traditional, unresponsive, public sector monopoly provision. We compare three jurisdictions that are conventionally seen as having embraced NPM to differing degrees: England & Wales (a relatively high NPM reformer where a package of measures was introduced), the Netherlands (an intermediate case) and Germany (where much variety is evident within an, overall, relatively low NPM reformer). The ‘promises’ of NPM control were in many aspects not fulfilled and the prison systems that made less use of such structures did not seem obviously to have suffered as a result. Indeed, some of the consequences, especially the detachment of executive politicians from day to day management, may have weakened the legitimacy of control systems, potentially making executive politicians’ task even more difficult.