Suchergebnisse

This article utilises a leadership perspective to analyse the ambiguous outcome of the 2009 UN climate summit in Copenhagen (COP-15). Considering follower perspectives and using survey data gives a fuller picture of the importance of leadership in international negotiations and of the role played by leadership the COP-15. In addition to the insights generated concerning the dynamics that led to the Copenhagen Accord, we contribute to the scholarship by illustrating the importance of an analytical framework that incorporates the demand and supply sides of leadership, the interplay of leadership visions and forms, and the fit between these elements. The implications for future UNFCCC climate negotiations are considered. (Environmental Politics / FUB)

This article probes the warning‐response failures that left the city of New Orleans vulnerable to catastrophic hurricanes and the inability of local, state, and federal authorities to mount an adequate response to the consequences unleashed by Hurricane Katrina. Through an empirical exploration with the help of three broad explanatory 'cuts' derived from the relevant interdisciplinary literature – psychological, bureau‐organizational, and agenda‐political – the authors seek to shed light on the sources of failure that contributed to the various levels of governments' lack of preparedness and the inadequate collective response to a long‐predicted, upper‐category hurricane. The article concludes by addressing the question of whether the vulnerabilities and problems that contributed to the Katrina failure are amenable to reform.

While some of the future impacts of global environmental change such as some aspects of climate change can be projected and prepared for in advance, other effects are likely to surface as surprises -- that is situations in which the behaviour in a system, or across systems, differs qualitatively from expectations. Here we analyse a set of institutional and political leadership challenges posed by 'cascading' ecological crises: abrupt ecological changes that propagate into societal crises that move through systems and spatial scales. We illustrate their underlying social and ecological drivers, and a range of institutional and political leadership challenges, which have been insufficiently elaborated by either crisis management researchers or institutional scholars. We conclude that even though these sorts of crises have parallels to other contingencies, there are a number of major differences resulting from the combination of a lack of early warnings, abrupt ecological change, and the mismatch between decision-making capabilities and the cross-scale dynamics of social-ecological change. Adapted from the source document.

In this article, we utilize the Collaborative Governance Databank to empirically explore core theoretical assumptions about collaborative governance in the context of crisis management. By selecting a subset of cases involving episodes or situations characterized by the combination of urgency, threat, and uncertainty, we conduct a plausibility probe to garner insights into a number of central assumptions and dynamics fundamental to understanding collaborative crisis management. Although there is broad agreement among academics and practitioners that collaboration is essential for managing complex risks and events that no single actor can handle alone, in the literature, there are several unresolved claims and uncertainties regarding many critical aspects of collaborative crisis management. Assumptions investigated in the article relate to starting-points and triggers for collaboration, level of collaboration, goal-formulation, adaptation, involvement and role of non-state actors, and the prevalence and impact of political infighting. The results confirm that crises represent rapidly moving and dynamic events that raise the need for adaptation, adjustment, and innovation by diverse sets of participants. We also find examples of successful behaviours where actors managed, despite challenging conditions, to effectively contain conflict, formulate and achieve shared goals, adapt to rapidly changing situations and emergent structures, and innovate in response to unforeseen problems.

AbstractStudying collaborative governance has become a booming business. However, the empirical literature still struggles to produce robust generalizations and cumulative knowledge that link contextual, situational and institutional design factors to processes and outcomes. We still have not mustered the broad and deep evidence base that will really help us sort fact from fiction and identify more and less productive approaches to collaboration. The current empirical evidence in the study of collaborative governance consists chiefly of small-N case studies or large-N surveys. The challenge is to move from case- based, mid- range theory building to more largeN- driven systematic theory- testing, while also retaining the rich contextual and process insights that only small-N studies tend to yield. This article, and the articles in the accompanying special issue, introduces an attempt to provide this middle ground – the Collaborative Governance Case Database. The database has been developed to serve as a free common pool resource for researchers to systematically collect and compare high- quality collaborative governance case studies. This article is an introduction to the database, exploring its design, opportunities and limitations. This article is also an invitation; inviting all researchers to freely use the cases in the database for their own research interest and to help strengthening the database by adding new cases there are eager to share with colleagues.