When Worlds Collapse into Each Other: The Quest for Successful Crisis Management entangled between Public Administration and Politics in the New Era

When Worlds Collapse into Each Other: The Quest for Successful Crisis Management entangled between Public Administration and Politics in the New Era of Transboundary Adversities - An Examination of the Change in the Relationship between Public Servants and Politicians in the Face of Transboundary Crises


As modern crises easily transcend traditional geographical, functional, and temporal boundaries, traditional political-administrative systems struggle to keep up with their dynamics. Yet, political and public-administrative leaders are held accountable for failures in crisis management. In the face of public pressure, the relationships between bureaucrats and politicians, at the heart of the state, are politicised, strained, and put to the test.
Combining insights from the public administration, organisation/management and broader political literature on crises, the research examines how exactly the bureaucratic-political relationship, conceptualised through the Public Service Bargain (PSB), changes in the specific context of highly politicised adversities. It advances a simple analytical framework through which crisis management is separated into three rough phases, namely the pre-crisis, acute crisis response and post-crisis phases. Along these three phases, which encompass eight crisis management functions (preparation, detection, sense-making, decision-making, coordination, meaning-making/communication, mitigation/crisis termination, and learning), the change in the relationship between civil servants and the wider political system is inspected. In particular, it is examined whether politicisation is likely to occur and which variations of the PSB between politicians and public administrators are desirable across these eight tasks. In careful consideration of the pre-existing system characteristics, individual history, and global embeddedness of the country, as well as the eventual crisis outcome, the performance of conducting these tasks within different arrangements is empirically scrutinised across various countries and endured crises.
For this, data is gathered from semi-structured interviews and analysed through qualitative content analysis in order to arrive at a more systematic understanding of how transboundary crisis management can be conducted in the interplay between politics and public administration. As it, in this way, also aims to ascertain which arrangements are conducive to efficient crisis management, it additionally provides policy advice to bureaucratic and political decision-makers calling increasingly for help in the face of this new type of crises.