Abstract

This article builds on the field of collaborative crisis management, a mix of collaborative public management (CPM) and crisis management (CM). A field that often focuses on large-scale threats, sometimes labelled societal challenges, whose impacts are broad and cross-cutting and impacts many actors in society and drives demand for collaboration. In this study, we are interested in events that have broad and disastrous impacts on society, high degrees of uncertainty and potentially cascading effects and we study this through an in-depth case study of collaborative crisis management tasked with contingency planning for dam failure risk in a large river basin in central Sweden. We find that there was a lack in reach of the collaboration potentially limiting capacity and capacity building in ways that can limit preparedness and increase vulnerability in a crisis situation. We also found that contingency planning was treated as a demarcated project with a beginning and an end and not entirely as a continuous process. Both these observations go against the basic principles of contingency planning. Hence, there is a need to acknowledge and abridge varying levels of organisational capacity and build/maintain awareness within and between the organisations and actors involved. This study shows that the practice of cross-sector collaboration and contingency planning is both complex and complicated. The article has the potential to aid policy-makers in the field to pinpoint central aspects of cross-sector collaboration and contingency planning that needs to be addressed in order to mitigate limits to preparedness and increased vulnerability in a crisis situation. A deeper knowledge on these challenges and problems can also support progress towards the UN Sustainable Development Goal 9 (especially in relation to the aspect of building resilient infrastructure) through its empirical focus on infrastructure failure in terms of dam failure.

摘要

本文建立在协作危机管理领域，即协作公共管理 (CPM) 和危机管理 (CM) 的混合体。该领域通常关注大规模威胁，有时被称为社会挑战，其影响广泛且跨领域，影响社会中的许多参与者并推动合作需求。在这项研究中，我们对对社会具有广泛和灾难性影响、高度不确定性和潜在连锁效应的事件感兴趣，我们通过协作危机管理的深入案例研究来研究这一点，该案例研究的任务是对大坝溃坝风险进行应急计划瑞典中部的一个大河流域。我们发现，缺乏合作可能会限制能力和能力建设，从而限制准备工作并增加危机情况下的脆弱性。我们还发现，应急计划被视为一个有开始和结束的划定项目，而不是完全作为一个连续的过程。这两种意见都违背了应急计划的基本原则。因此，有必要承认和减少不同级别的组织能力，并在相关组织和参与者内部和之间建立/保持意识。本研究表明，跨部门协作和应急计划的实践既复杂又复杂。该文章有可能帮助该领域的决策者确定需要解决的跨部门合作和应急计划的核心方面，以减轻危机情况下准备工作的限制和增加的脆弱性。对这些挑战和问题的更深入了解还可以通过其对基础设施故障在大坝故障方面的实证关注来支持联合国可持续发展目标 9（特别是在建设弹性基础设施方面）的进展。