Revisiting Crisis Governance: Toward Collaborative Crisis Management

Abstract

This chapter attends to three main modes of crisis governance: centralization, decentralization, and collaborative crisis management (CCM). While the first two modes focus almost exclusively on government actors, CCM goes beyond them by involving private sectors and civil society. CCM is a more robust form of crisis governance since it combines knowledge and resources from multiple actors, which is a key to managing the more complex nature of modern crises. This chapter uses the case of Indonesia in dealing with the COVID-19 pandemic to show the dynamics of crisis governance. Indonesia moved from a centralized mode of crisis governance toward a more decentralized one. Simultaneously, there were several collaborative initiatives involving multiple stakeholders to deal with the crisis, such as in the case of SONJO. The case illustrates that while CCM provides a more effective response, it has some limitations as it has a smaller scale, may create internal conflict, lacks sustainability, and has a nonbinding character. The experience of Indonesia lends the lesson that for CCM to be robust crisis governance, and there needs to be a clear arrangement to boost its scale, manage internal conflict, improve sustainability, and induce a more permanent and binding framework.