About the project
The crisis management capabilities of public sector administrations have been rigorously tested by a series of large-scale crises and disasters, such as the COVID-19 pandemic and extreme weather events. These events have highlighted the difficulties in delivering rapid and effective responses, with public administrations often finding their response strategies inadequate and based on outdated assumptions about the nature of crises.
When crises and disasters occur, public authorities serve as the primary responders, responsible for ensuring the continuity of critical societal functions and mitigating harm to citizens, the environment, and property. Understanding how public administrations navigate crises and develop effective responses to emerging threats is a pressing scientific and practical challenge and the core concern of this thesis.
The research objective is shaped by several concerning trends, including a lack of proactive approaches despite the availability of extensive knowledge and predictive models, as well as persistent failures in crisis learning. Seeking to better understand these challenges is essential to enhancing public sector crisis management in an increasingly complex crisis landscape.
The thesis is comprised of three papers, each placed in different contexts and highlighting distinct perspectives on addressing sudden, unforeseen events with extensive societal impacts. Collectively, these papers explore the paradoxes with integrated approaches to crisis management capabilities—understood as the ability to meet uncertain and threatening situations under high time pressure —with strategies for mitigating societal challenges with a longer time horizon. The individual papers place emphasis on the idea that responses to various crises, including the ideas about mitigating them, are shaped by socially, institutional and culturally derived knowledge and understandings.
Against this backdrop, this thesis explores the following research questions: What factors enable or constrain public sector capabilities for addressing large-scale crises? and how are different notions of resilience shaping crisis management approaches?
The argument of this thesis is that there is a need for fresh approaches that can capture the entire range of crisis management capabilities, including mitigation, preparation, response and recovery. In this, more attention is needed on the connections and potential contradictions between approaches to crisis, including a stronger attention on their different temporalities and on the knowledge and perceptions in which they are anchored.
The thesis is based on interviews with public officials in Norway and Italy, document and media analysis, and a systematic literature review. The work draws on crisis management literature, a multidisciplinary field that offers distinct perspectives, but that all provide important theoretical resources for understanding crisis management capabilities in the public sector.
Thesis supervisors
Professor Magnus Gulbrandsen, TIK Centre for Technology, Innovation and Culture, University of Oslo
Professor Glenn-Egil Torgersen, Department of Educational Science, University of South-Eastern Norway
Commentator
Associate Professor Simon Hollis, Department of Political Science, Swedish Defense University
About Lisa Scordato
Lisa Scordato is a PhD Candidate at TIK Centre for Technology, Innovation and Culture, University of Oslo. She has been employed at the Nordic Institute for Studies in Innovation, Research and Education (NIFU) since 2007 and holds a MA in Political Science from Linköping University, Sweden.
Her PhD is part of a research project funded by the Research Council of Norway (Educating for the Unforeseen: using educational science and innovation to prepare managers and employees to work with unforeseen events). The project is led by NIFU in collaboration with the University of South-Eastern Norway (USN).
This seminar marks the final evaluation prior to submission of her dissertation.
How to participate
The seminar is open to everyone. Welcome!
Meeting ID: 613 8998 7039
Passcode: 244234
The manuscript is available upon request. Please send the request to Lisa Scordato lisa.scordato@nifu.no.