LIT 5: Ansell/Boin/Keller: managing transboundary crises Flashcards
Ansell: What is a transboundary crisis, in essence?
A crisis or disaster whose impact extends across political boundaries, affects multiple policy sectors or critical infrastructures, and has effects that unfold over extended periods. The higher a crisis scores on these three dimensions, the more transboundary it is.
Ansell: Give some examples of events that are considered transboundary crises.
The sources mention several examples, including pandemics, cyber attacks, prolonged critical infrastructure failure, the Y2K threat, the 9/11 attacks, transport bombings in Europe, BSE, SARS and H1N1 epidemics, large-scale natural disasters like Hurricane Katrina and the California wildfires, the Ash crisis, the BP oil spill, energy blackouts, and financial crises.
Ansell: How does an increase in ‘transboundedness’ typically affect traditional crisis management challenges?
When a crisis spreads across geographical and policy boundaries, it generally makes traditional crisis management challenges harder to manage. This is because more participants become involved who are often more dispersed, have more divergent agendas, and are less well acquainted.
Ansell: What are the three dimensions used to describe the transboundary nature of a crisis?
The three dimensions are:
- Political boundaries: Crossing territorial boundaries and affecting multiple jurisdictions.
- Functional boundaries: Jumping across policy areas and threatening multiple life-sustaining systems or infrastructures.
- Time boundaries: Having roots that run deep and effects that are felt years later, or involving a concatenation of events over time.
Ansell: Explain the vertical dimension of crossing political boundaries in a transboundary crisis.
This occurs when lower levels of government (e.g., cities, states) are overwhelmed by a crisis and require assistance from higher levels of government (e.g., national, international).
Ansell: Explain the horizontal dimension of crossing political boundaries in a transboundary crisis.
This involves a crisis spreading across the boundaries between two political jurisdictions operating at the same level of government, such as two cities or two nations.
Ansell: Why are crises that cross-functional boundaries particularly difficult to manage?
These crises are challenging because they often involve systems with different logics and operating imperatives. When these systems fall under different organisations, political interests and professional norms tend to diverge.
Ansell: What are the three types of interdependence that can exist across jurisdictions, sectors, or time during a transboundary crisis?
These are:
- Pooled interdependence: Jurisdictions are affected but do not necessarily require a coordinated response.
- Sequential interdependence: The response of one jurisdiction affects the inputs of another.
- Reciprocal interdependence: Requires a joint response and simultaneous coordination in real-time.
Ansell: What are the four prevalent political-administrative crisis response challenges identified in the literature?
The four challenges are:
- Coping with uncertainty.
- Providing surge capacity.
- Organizing a response (coordinated mobilisation).
- Communicating with the public (meaning making).
Ansell: How does a transboundary crisis typically impact the level of uncertainty for crisis managers?
A transboundary crisis can dramatically deepen uncertainty. The causes become harder to understand, and resolving uncertainty can be complicated by sequential or reciprocal interdependence. However, in cases of pooled interdependence, uncertainty might be more easily managed due to multiple jurisdictions working on the problem.
Ansell: What is surge capacity in the context of crisis management?
Surge capacity refers to the ability of response organisations to mobilise a substantial increase in resources and match activities to the appropriate scale of the crisis.
Ansell: How might surge capacity be affected when a crisis becomes transboundary?
Surge capacity may decline as a crisis spreads across boundaries. For example, during the H1N1 pandemic, public health agencies were unable to honour reciprocal agreements to lend resources as they were occupied with their own local responsibilities.
Ansell: What are the two crucial components of organising an effective crisis response?
These are mobilization of people, money, and goods, and coordination of the efforts of all involved organisations and people to ensure an effective response. The challenge is thus one of ‘coordinated mobilisation’.
Ansell: What makes coordination particularly challenging in a transboundary crisis?
It becomes difficult to delimit the territorial, temporal, or functional boundaries of the crisis, which muddles responsibilities and involves an ever-larger number of actors needing coordination.
Ansell: What are the two main types of coordination challenges that become acute in a transboundary crisis?
These are:
- Inter-jurisdictional coordination: Coordination across vertical (different levels of government) and horizontal (same level of government) political boundaries.
- Inter-sectoral coordination: Coordination between institutions representing different functional domains, such as public and private entities.
Ansell: Why is communicating with the public more difficult in a transboundary crisis?
With an increasing number of political, administrative, and sectoral authorities involved, it becomes harder to produce one clear and coherent message. This increases the chances of contradicting messages, which can heighten fear and hamper cooperation.
Ansell:
What are the four boundary-spanning mechanisms that are essential for an effective transboundary response?
These are:
- Distributed sense making.
- Networked coordination.
- Surge capacity.
- Formal scaling procedures.
Ansell: Define ‘distributed sense making’ in the context of transboundary crises.
It refers to the ability to arrive at a common operating picture by pulling together incomplete, often contradictory, and continuously changing information distributed across a large and shifting number of actors.
Ansell: What are some institutional features that support transboundary sense making?
These include:
- Detection and surveillance systems.
- Analytical capacity (experts, laboratories).
- Real-time communications for information collection and verification.
- Decision support systems to aid rapid and informed decision-making.
Ansell: How did the World Health Organization (WHO) facilitate distributed sense making during the SARS outbreak?
The WHO used the Global Outbreak Alert and Response Network (GOARN) as a central hub to coordinate and relay information. It created distinct response networks, facilitated real-time communication, and deployed field teams.
Ansell: What are some key components typically included in a prescriptive list for facilitating rapid response at the right scale (surge capacity)?
These include:
- Professional first responders who can be quickly mobilised.
- Supply chain management for rapid deployment of resources.
- Fast track procedures to adapt or work around standard operating procedures.
- An integrated command centre connected across administrative levels and sectors.
Ansell: What is ‘networked coordination’ in the context of crisis response?
It involves orchestrating, synchronising, and adjusting cooperation between mission-critical stakeholders (public, private, international, etc.) who may have never worked together before.
Ansell: What are the two opposing schools of thought regarding coordination in disaster response?
One school argues for establishing authority structures across organisations in advance, while the other advocates for enabling self-organising during a crisis.
Ansell: What is the Incident Command System (ICS) and which approach to coordination does it represent?
ICS is a common operating philosophy and architecture developed in the US to help disparate entities work together during emergencies. It adheres to the school of thought that argues for pre-established authority structures.
Ansell: What does the concept of ‘formal scaling procedures’ refer to in managing transboundary crises?
It involves the formulation of formal structures and procedures that apply to unforeseen crisis circumstances and are formally triggered according to pre-set procedures (e.g., formal disaster declarations) to manage the extreme dispersion of authority.
Ansell: Give an example of a formal boundary-spanning structure mentioned in the source.
The US National Response Framework (NRF) is an example. It outlines how authority relations can adapt to a transboundary crisis that overwhelms a single state’s response capacities.
