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National civil protection systems have been developed and implemented each time a crisis unfolds with different degrees of success in responding and solving the crisis. However, crises are increasingly not confined by national borders and challenge the states' capacities to adequately respond and thus calling for a crisis management governance that goes beyond the nation-state. In this respect, the European Union has developed its civil protection policy and through the Civil Protection Mechanism established forms of cooperation among the participating states of the Mechanism. In this paper, through the lenses of Europeanisation, we aim at uncovering the influences the Mechanism exercises on the Norwegian and Italian civil protection systems and, at the same time, we seek to spot out which kind of influences these states have on the Mechanism's development. Europeanisation has been widely used as an analytical framework to mainly explain how national contexts are shaped by EU developments, but it is equally important to understand, as well, how national context shape European developments. Our data stem from document analysis and semi-structured interviews with civil protection officers at national and EU levels.

This is the first study of police decision-making regarding the use of firearms in the Norwegian context; its purpose is to study how police emergency response officers make decisions on the use of firearms, and to understand the contextual factors underlying these decisions. The data stem from document analysis based on developed categories, and interviews with police officers with experience in using firearms during their service, analysed by the Systematic Text Condensation method. The findings show that when handling armed confrontations, police officers draw upon recognition from previous experience and use a combination of analytical and intuitive decision-making, and that the basis for decisions to fire are situational cues to which the officers respond. Key contextual factors are the stressful conditions and the commonly short distances when shots are fired. A finding in this study is that Norwegian police officers frequently hold their fire until a threatening situation has materialized into an attack, and potentially find themselves in imminent danger as a result. ; publishedVersion

Purpose
The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate how the contingency approach to disaster preparedness inhibits proactive management of slow-onset disasters, such as El Niño, with the purpose of advancing disaster risk theory.


Design/methodology/approach
This study draws on fieldwork data from Nariño, Colombia, combined with secondary data and a review of the literature on El Niño and disaster preparedness.


Findings
Disaster managers in Nariño do have contingency plans for El Niño events at their disposal. Yet, these plans do not come into play before impacts reach a certain severity. This "contingency approach" to disaster preparedness appears to stem from the assumption that disaster must come before response, effectively inhibiting proactive responses to El Niño impacts.


Research limitations/implications
Attributing observed cases of droughts and oral accounts of impacts to the El Niño phenomenon is methodologically challenging. To overcome this, the aim of this study is not the documentation of subjective attributions. Instead, the focus is on bringing to the fore key dilemmas that preparedness professionals may face when they prepare for disasters with a slow onset.


Practical implications
Developing prevention and preparedness conceptualisations that focus on preemptive measures should ensure a more proactive response to slow-onset disasters.


Originality/value
Whether slow-onset disasters lend themselves to the same types of risk reduction strategies applied to rapid-onset disasters is a theoretical and practical issue that has not been explored sufficiently in the disaster risk literature.

Crisis studies increasingly focus on developing proactive strategies to minimize the effects of unwanted occurrences and contingencies. Preparedness constitutes a key component of this approach, as many crises are difficult to prevent. However, at the conceptual and practical levels, it remains difficult to distinguish preparedness from other crisis‐related concepts. This study draws on an extensive survey of the preparedness literature with the goal of elucidating its defining attributes. The results show that preparedness can be minimally characterized as measures that are of an active, continuous and anticipatory nature. Contextually definitions, however, may also include social, planned, non‐structural or enabling conceptual attributes.

AbstractThe concepts of communication and trust play a central role in crisis management. There is a complex nexus between communication and trust building in crisis management, as different activities and processes result in communication and trust building in crisis management. This article argues that communication and trust are two sides of the same crisis management coin: each complements the other. To this end, we reflected on how crisis communication and trust factors could be a tool to amplify or attenuate the level of attention given to creeping crises and how such factors could influence creeping crisis management difficulties. We then proposed a crisis management typology to aid crisis managers in managing the difficulties associated with creeping crises.

In most industrialized countries, the end of the Cold War marked a change in focus from preparedness for war to an increasing focus on civil society's own vulnerability and safety. To meet new threats and changing risks, there is also a need for new analytical concepts. Societal safety is a concept developed in Norway during the last decade. It could be defined as: 'The society's ability to maintain critical social functions, to protect the life and health of the citizens and to meet the citizens' basic requirements in a variety of stress situations'. It aims to be a systematic approach for understanding, mitigating and responding to social problems such as extraordinary stresses and losses, interferences in complex and mutual dependent systems, or lack of trust in vital social institutions. Future threats to society are not limited to specific sectors or areas, but stem from complex interactions amongst economic, technological, social and cultural factors. Thus, the main challenges to improve societal safety will be the ability to coordinate, organize and assign clear roles to different actors at the international, national and local levels. Societal safety has interfaces with other safety‐related areas such as national security, sustainable development, human security and incident management (handling of isolated accidents, common illness and ordinary criminal acts). Societal safety is, however, a sensitive political issue containing dilemmas and value choices that are hardly possible to perceive or solve as pure scientific problems.

AbstractCrisis and disaster research has extensively contributed to theoretical, conceptual, methodological and empirical advances in the understanding of resilience, vulnerability, social capital and risk awareness. These concepts identify complex social phenomena, which are intensified, in both positive and negative terms, by crises and disasters. However, the accumulation of knowledge about these notions has produced a vast range of definitions, which affects the way they are used in the study of crises and disasters. This paper sets a research agenda, by promoting a conceptual model to help simplify and make more researchable these complex concepts. This model stems from a triangulation of methods, with the goal of providing more researchable definitions of these notions and of illustrating linkages among them, seldom addressed in the way this model suggests, in the context of the crisis management cycle.

AbstractWhile there is still a vast body of scholarly research in crisis and disaster management that considers social capital an asset for lessening negative impacts from crises, this paper investigates an underexplored aspect of social capital—its microlevel positive and negative instances in the crisis response—a quite neglected phase of the crisis management cycle when it comes to studying the role of social capital. To underline social capital's double‐edged aspects, this paper draws from the handful of studies that focus on individual social capital in crisis response, to systematize their findings according to bonding, bridging, and linking social capital and positive and negative impacts. In addition, the paper considers these findings to analyze the 2011 Utøya terrorist attack in Norway, to uncover new positive and negative effects of individual social capital, thus contributing to pushing the research agenda toward a more critical appraisal of individual social capital.