Implementation through collaborative crisis management and contingency planning: the case of dam failure in Sweden

Abstract

This article builds on the field of collaborative crisis management, a mix of collaborative public management (CPM) and crisis management (CM). A field that often focuses on large-scale threats, sometimes labelled societal challenges, whose impacts are broad and cross-cutting and impacts many actors in society and drives demand for collaboration. In this study, we are interested in events that have broad and disastrous impacts on society, high degrees of uncertainty and potentially cascading effects and we study this through an in-depth case study of collaborative crisis management tasked with contingency planning for dam failure risk in a large river basin in central Sweden. We find that there was a lack in reach of the collaboration potentially limiting capacity and capacity building in ways that can limit preparedness and increase vulnerability in a crisis situation. We also found that contingency planning was treated as a demarcated project with a beginning and an end and not entirely as a continuous process. Both these observations go against the basic principles of contingency planning. Hence, there is a need to acknowledge and abridge varying levels of organisational capacity and build/maintain awareness within and between the organisations and actors involved. This study shows that the practice of cross-sector collaboration and contingency planning is both complex and complicated. The article has the potential to aid policy-makers in the field to pinpoint central aspects of cross-sector collaboration and contingency planning that needs to be addressed in order to mitigate limits to preparedness and increased vulnerability in a crisis situation. A deeper knowledge on these challenges and problems can also support progress towards the UN Sustainable Development Goal 9 (especially in relation to the aspect of building resilient infrastructure) through its empirical focus on infrastructure failure in terms of dam failure.