Explaining success and failure in crisis coordination

Abstract

In virtually every assessment of responses to large‐scale crises and disasters, coordination is identified as a critical failure factor. After the crisis, official committees and political opponents often characterize the early phases of the response as a ‘failure to coordinate.’ Not surprisingly, improved coordination quickly emerges as the prescribed solution. Coordination, then, is apparently both the problem and the solution. But the proposed solutions rarely solve the problem: coordination continues to mar most crises and disasters. In the absence of a shared body of knowledge on coordination, it is hard to formulate a normative framework that allows for systematic assessment of coordination in times of crisis. As coordination is widely perceived as an important function of crisis and disaster management, this absence undermines a fair and balanced assessment of crisis management performance. This paper seeks to address that void. We aim to develop a framework that explains both the failure and success of crisis coordination. We do this by exploring the relevant literature, reformulating what coordination is and distilling from research the factors that cause failure and success.