Suchergebnisse

The European Union continuously faces transboundary crises (TBCs), such as the 1996 and 2000 outbreaks of 'mad cow disease', or the 2015 refugee crisis. Within this context, European Union agencies (EAs) have emerged as technical repositories that are capable of addressing such crises more efficiently than intergovernmental cooperation. However, their effective implication in transboundary crisis management largely varies, as many different degrees of involvement can be observed. Different angles can be adopted to make sense of variation in the response of agencies to TBCs; hence, this study focuses on the role of EA management boards. These boards epitomize the unique nature of EU institutions, in that they represent the Member States and integrate their network capabilities into a single entity. Our study assesses perceptions of board members concerning three aspects related to the capacity of agencies to respond to TBCs: decision-making, coordination and resources, based on a survey distributed among board members and a biographical database.

European Agencies (EAs) have a significant influence on policy-making and decision-making in key areas, whether we are talking about the daily lives of the citizens or about crisis management. The emergence of EAs was an institutional response to the need for policy coordination in the EU΄s system of governance. The last decade has created a new reality for the European Union, characterized by successive external transboundary crises. The increasingly urgent need for a European crisis response could signal a more active role for European agencies. During the global financial and public debt crisis, part of the EU's response was to set up three new European Agencies. The refugee crisis further strengthened existing agencies, such as EASO and FRONTEX. EU agencies are already playing an increasingly important role in shaping European policies as solutions to crises. Through the experience of the ongoing pandemic crisis of COVD-19, this policy brief seeks to highlight the importance of European Agencies in an effective European response to crises and to contribute to the discussion about the future role of EAs in transboundary crisis management.

This study explores the way in which European governance seeks to address transboundary crises. Transboundary crises pose a particular challenge for administrative systems as costs and benefits are unevenly distributed, organisational and jurisdictional competencies over- and underlap, and as problem definitions and solutions are usually disputed. Boundaries are essential for the identity of national states, they are critical for determining the jurisdictional competence of organisations and they are critical for administering individual phenomena. Transboundary crises, in contrast, do not respect such boundaries. Crises themselves might be disruptive, but might be contained within certain boundaries. In the context of transboundary crises, disruption crosses jurisdictional boundaries. Furthermore, decisions in one place do not just affect the quality of the crises in that particular locality, they also affect the nature of the crisis in other jurisdictions. Transboundary crises are said to be of particular relevance to the contemporary context of governance as processes of globalisation have increased vulnerabilities to crises. Furthermore, the rise of multi-level and supra-national forms of governance reduces states' ability to tackle crises within their own boundaries (Boin et al. 2013). In other words, transboundary crises present a central challenge to any contemporary system of governing. This study is particularly interested in the ways in which the EU as a system of multi-level governances organises crisis management regimes to address certain types of transboundary crises. The question of how the EU addresses transboundary crises has become increasingly pertinent since the financial crisis is said to have brought about a new era of 'emergency politics' (White 2015). The financial and sovereign debt crises highlighted the vulnerability of the EU and its member states to transboundary crises. It also highlighted the tensions that emerge from seeking to develop coordinated responses in the context of an ...

Transcrisis aims to develop a solid understanding of the role of leaders in managing transboundary crises and the requirements for ensuring an effective and legitimate crisis response. One of the seven crisis-management tasks that leaders need to perform is meaning-making. Meaning-making refers to the necessity to formulate a key message that offers an explanation of the threat, actionable advice, and a sense that leaders are in control of the situation (Boin, Cadar & Donnelley, 2016). Adequate meaning making is key to dealing with a crisis in an effective and legitimate fashion. This is especially important during transboundary crises as cultural, national, legal boundaries make shared meaning making more difficult and less routine. The aim of meaning-making is twofold: first, to ensure that leaders 'get a firm grasp on what is going on', second for leaders to develop a clear idea of 'what might happen next' (Boin et al, 2005: 140). Sense making is a crucial task in any crisis situation because it helps central decision-makers clarify their underlying assumptions on how the world works, and contemplate the value of different solutions before decisions are actually made. In case of transnational crises, meaning making should in part also occur across boundaries so a mutual understanding of the situation amongst different stakeholders may develop, or differences in view are revealed. Although meaning making is often portrayed as one of the earlier phases in crisis management, in reiterated decision-making games associated with prolonged crisis situations, it should be a continuous process. Meaning making is a difficult task and even more complex in case of highly complex, transboundary crises like the Euro crisis. The threat, complexity and calls for urgent and decisive action that accompany such crises may tempt leaders to skip crucial parts of the meaning making effort and quickly jump to discussing possible solutions (Van Esch and Swinkels, 2016). Adding to these difficulties is the fact that leaders ...

If the world of crisis is changing, it is crucial to understand how policymakers perceive these new, transboundary threats. This article explores how policymakers made sense of such crises in 81 cases. The findings indicate that how much time urgency and surprise the policymakers perceived accompanied a transboundary threat helped to shape the nature of their decision‐making process and how they managed the crisis. The data suggest that researchers and practitioners can gain an idea of how a crisis is likely to be managed by ascertaining how policymakers are viewing the triggering event.

The financial crisis is widely said to have exposed shortcomings in the EU's capacities to address transboundary threats. National and EU regulatory regimes were left exposed, member states engaged in ill-coordinated actions, and the eventual responses raised questions about the redistributional consequences of European integration. Subsequently, the refugee crisis also highlighted shortcomings in transboundary crisis management, especially as member state positions diverged radically and solidarity was in short supply. One traditional part of the EU's raison d'être has been the coordination of member states in the face of cross-boundary challenges (see Boin and Lodge 2015: 19). It might even be said that crises and the perception of member state 'boundary loss' have been central drivers in encouraging the growing importance of European governance. However, since the financial crisis, there are growing questions whether the EU is well-equipped to deal with the kind of major societal challenges that transboundary crises represent. Indeed, the EU has been criticised for being the source of rather than the solution to transboundary crises. TransCrisis research was motivated by the interest in exploring the presence and limits of transboundary crisis capacities across EU institutions and across EU-member state relations. TransCrisis research occurred at a time of growing perception of vulnerability and uncertainty, whether it was due to global crises (the financial and refugee crises), geopolitical changes or an increasing perception that the traditional tools of managing crises had become themselves potential sources of crisis. This 'new normal' has also been characterised by a distinct political context, namely one of renationalised electoral politics, highly dispersed administrative systems and tensions between addressing short- and long-term policy goals. In particular, TransCrisis research was guided by one overarching question: How can political leaders in the EU multi-level governance system exercise ...

"Antimicrobial Resistance as a Global Health Crisis" published on by Oxford University Press.

TransCrisis: a research agenda for developing understanding of transboundary crisis management in Europe The TransCrisis project focused on transboundary crisis management capacities in the EU and its member states, focusing on how EU-level institutions, European political leaders and national governments develop and utilise these capacities in a diversity of domains. At the EU level, TransCrisis diagnosed a growing presence of decision-making processes and institutional crisis management procedures at a time of growing political debate about the legitimacy of the European Union. Building on TransCrisis The TransCrisis consortium is unique in that it brought together scholars from the fields of political science, public administration and international relations with diverse interests in crisis management, regulation and comparative politics. This allowed TransCrisis to focus on different aspects of transboundary crisis management in the EU and to draw synergies across them. In particular, TransCrisis focused on transboundary crises in three areas that had previously not been engaged with in an integrated fashion: - The traditional domains of civil protection, public health and security; - The domains broadly defined by the Single Market, namely issues arising in particular from growing market integration and interdependence; - The importance of constitutional politics in particular member states. TransCrisis highlights the importance of taking a holistic view of transboundary crisis management that incorporates both immediate 'fire-fighting' and long-term crisis management approaches that seek to build resilience. Above all, the value of TransCrisis research has been to integrate research traditionally associated with civil protection and 'societal security' domains with domains that are also characterised by transboundary crises, namely constitutional politics and integrated European markets. The tight connectedness between these three areas of transboundary crises has been a prominent feature emerging from ...

Groundwater amounts to 97% of available global freshwater resources. Emphasising the crucial importance of this in the context of increasing population, climate change and the overall global water crisis, Francesco Sindico offers a comprehensive study of the emerging body of international law applicable to transboundary aquifers.

AbstractDespite its rising relevance, the cyber crisis is a largely unexplored phenomenon empirically and conceptually. This article suggests that cyber crises can be understood specifically as transboundary crises. Through the comparative analysis of two cases of cyber crises, Estonia 2007 and UK 2017, the study investigates whether the time gap and the difference in cyberattack type between the cases (untargeted ransomware vs. targeted DDoS) correlate with variation in transboundary crisis features and crisis management challenges during the performance of central crisis management tasks in the national settings of the cases. The analysis identifies some variation between the cases in terms of transboundary crisis features but finds that the cases entailed similar prominent crisis management challenges during the performance of central crisis management tasks. Implications are discussed in terms of how to advance our understanding of cyber crises and the practical strategic management requirements they entail.

This report covers the key findings about mapping exercises and the analysis of: - the effectiveness and legitimacy of Commission, European Council, and Council of the European Union's transboundary crisis management capacity -the role of the European Commission, in which much crisis management capacity, expertise and leadership potential can be found; and the relatively recent role of European Council in providing political direction to EU crisis management efforts

In this article, we investigate the leadership response to the COVID‐19 pandemic crisis in Greece and Sweden based on the strategic leadership framework put forth by Boin, 't Hart, Stern and Sundelius. We seek to understand the contextual (institutional, administrative and political) factors explaining the differences in stringency of measures and centralization of response in Greece and Sweden, respectively. What trade‐offs did public leaders implement between effectiveness and efficiency to successfully manage the crisis? We find that reliance on expertise plays out differently in centralized and decentralized structure, while a salient lesson drawn for practitioners is that there is more than one path to successful crisis leadership response contingent on institutional capacity, bureaucratic autonomy and political system. The article concludes with implications for leadership response during crises and practical lessons for crisis managers.