Government Capacity for Crisis Management: Flood Management in Germany and Norway

This paper examines crisis-induced organizational and policy learning and compares the learning output in reaction to a similar type of crisis in two different crisis management systems. To this end, the paper presents two in-depth case studies on flood crisis management and subsequent policy and organizational changes in two countries: Germany and Norway. The main research questions concern what government structures and administrative capacities were used in the studied crises, and how they were modified in the aftermath. Learning outputs are observed through the (missing) modification of administrative capacities (coordination, regulation, analysis, and delivery) that are essential to an effective crisis management system. The resulting similarities and differences of the two cases in terms of administrative capacities are used to highlight how the institutional context of the two different systems affects the governmental handling with and learning from similar events. In both countries, while floods are a common phenomenon, the studied events were unexpected at the time and thus provided ample opportunity for intra- and inter-crisis learning. The paper is based on a comparative analysis of qualitative data, which is collected from public documents, semi-structured interviews, official reports and evaluations of the floods. The analytical focus lies on the central states’ perspective and thus mainly on the strategic level. In addition to highlighting the particular empirical cases, the paper aims to provide more general insight about crisis-induced learning in terms of administrative capacities.