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The poliheuristic theory of decision (PH) is placed in its proper historical context through a brief diachronic overview of the evolution of the foreign policy decision-making tradition from Snyder, Bruck, and Sapin to the present. The PH program is examined and contextualized in synchronic fashion via juxtaposition with three parallel lines of theoretical and empirical foreign policy decision-making research: cognitive institutionalism, problem representation, and decision units. These approaches are found to exhibit different methodological strengths and weaknesses and to emphasize different aspects of the decision-making process. Substantial complementarities exist, suggesting that the potential for synergy and cross-fertilization is great.

Can governments learn? The title of an influential monograph by a leading political psychologist (Etheredge, 1985) posed this seemingly simplistic question. At first glance, the obvious answer to such a blunt question would appear to be 'of course'. Governments (and government agencies) persist in spite of, or in some cases because of, dynamic and often hostile political environments. This would seem to indicate that a significant degree of learning is taking place. Yet many scholars, including Etheredge 1985 himself, are markedly skeptical about the learning capacity of policy‐makers and governmental organizations and argue that governments learn poorly or slowly at best (Sabatier, 1987; Lebovic, 1995: 835). How can this be? Is this apparent paradox an artefact of the ways in which scholars define and operationalize the concept of learning?Part one of the article will present a brief and selective survey of the diverse inter‐disciplinary literature on policy and political learning. This preliminary conceptual analysis identifies several difficult issues. Among the most serious is the ontological question (who or what learns?) and the problem of distinguishing learning from other types of political change, which raises thorny normative and methodological questions.The second part of the article brings the concept of crisis into the learning equation. It has been hypothesized by a number of scholars (George, 1980; Goldmann, 1988; Young, 1989; Olsen, 1992) that conditions associated with policy crises, and their aftermath, may facilitate learning and change and contribute to overcoming the governmental inertia and political dynamics which often inhibit learning under 'normal' conditions. For example, it is argued that the experience of crises may contribute to a posture of cognitive openness conducive to individual and collective learning. Crisis experiences tend to re‐order the political agenda, stimulate an appetite for change and reform on the part of the electorate and the mass media and, thus, create moments of political possibility, 'policy windows' (Kingdon, 1984), which create opportunities for agile reformers before they close. A 'balance‐sheet' approach is used in order to examine the plausibility of the crisis‐learning hypothesis. This entails posing twin questions. First, what are the characteristics of crisis situations (or political systems which have experienced crises) likely to promote governmental learning? Secondly, what are the characteristics of crisis situations (or political systems which have experienced crises) likely to create obstacles to learning?Some preliminary thoughts on how to go about conducting empirical research in this area, and some reflections upon the results of the conceptual analysis, are presented in the last two sections of the article.

In this paper, an analytical framework is developed in order to investigate the role of information in crisis decision-making. Three theoretical nodes (information management functions) emerge from a discussion drawing upon earlier contributions by scholars such as Snyder and Diesing (1977) and George (1980), and more recent works by Vertzberger (1990) and Jönsson (1990). Search is an actor-oriented node focusing on the collection of data about the operational environment. Processing is conceptualized as a form of political argumentation in which raw data are transformed into higher order working propositions about an actor or a situation. Communication is a dyadic node in which the distribution of information within and the conveyance of meaning between state actors are problematized. These analytical tools are tested in an empirical application: Swedish decision-making during the `Whiskey on the Rocks' crisis' (1981).

As fundamental tests of presidential leadership and organizational capacity, crises can make or break an administration. This article presents a conceptual analysis of what makes any crisis situation challenging to deal with, and it develops a set of analytical steps that can help crisis managers diagnose particular crisis situations they might face. The proposed crisis navigation framework brings together case research studies and theories of organizational processes, so that those assuming responsibility for steering the government and society through crises—including the Obama administration—have a useful point of entry into the growing crisis management literature.

This article presents the case for a comprehensive and multidimensional security concept, including a prioritized environmental component. Following a brief overview of the current state of the security debate, two very different lines of criticism against the notion of linking environment and security are presented and critiqued. The `orthodox' view argues that a relatively restrictive definition of security should be maintained in order to protect the conceptual and substantive integrity of security studies as a discipline. The `radical' view reflects a distaste for the normative and ontological implications of the security discourse and argues that it is inappropriate to `securitize' non-military social or environmental issues. In the last part of the article, the advantages of a comprehensive security concept are outlined, in a context emphasizing the desirability of an intellectual partnership between academics and practitioners geared towards the generation of more balanced, integrated and environmentally sound security policy-making.

This article describes the Crisis Management (CM) Europe program that seeks to produce scientific knowledge that can be used also in order to train practitioners to cope more effectively with national & regional crises. Initiated in 1997 with a focus on the Baltic Sea area, the program has recently been broadened to cover all of Europe. The program documents & analyzes specific cases of national & regional crises. It relies upon a contextually grounded process tracing strategy for case reconstruction & dissection derived from relevant literatures in political science, psychology, & organizational sociology. To facilitate comparison & cumulation of case findings, a systematic four-step research procedure has been developed. Ten analytical themes of potential interest to both scholars & practitioners are identified as targets for structured focused comparison. More than a hundred cases have been studied by researchers working in research teams based in many European countries. Training tools have been successfully deployed in training practitioners from more than a dozen countries. An ongoing dialogue between academics & practitioners from across the continent promises to make a contribution toward bridging the gap between these two different communities. 94 References. Adapted from the source document.