The Politics of Crisis Management Policies

One major, rarely noted, policy developments of the last two decades has been the rapid and significant institutionalisation of crisis management policies and tools across domains and levels of government. Despite a very rich literature on both crisis management and crisis politics, the role of crisis management as a public policy remains underexplored. How do crisis management policies shape the politics of crises, i.e. the ways in which policy-makers deal with crises? This paper analyses the politics of crisis management policies. It defines crisis management as a set of institutionalised policy instruments intended to prevent, prepare, respond to, and learn from crises. By doing so, it shifts the focus from the political activity of responding to crises to the politics of crisis management policies. It adopts a perspective based on the analysis of public policy tools, considering how those tools were elaborated, and how they constrain policy-making and implementation because of their design and values. this paper suggests that crisis management policy tools shape crisis politics in three ways. First, the widespread diffusion of crisis policy instruments can be interpreted in terms of ‘governing by the crisis.’ Although the immediate crisis exploitation strategies would not apply here, the institutionalisation, crisis policies rather than relying solely on an ad-hoc approach can be interpreted as a ‘meta’ strategy to govern by crises as the widespread diffusion of crisis tools has consequences for how crises are framed (or not) and understood as problems to be acted upon. It turns the state into a crisis manager, constantly looking ahead to prevent disruptions. It offers a strategy for putting crises on the agenda while minimising their disruptive potential. Second, in terms of ‘governing the crisis,’ the existence of crisis tools shapes policy responses and constrain policy-makers by orchestrating the space, time, and the politics of crisis. First, crisis management tools imply a spatial redistribution of power, as it shifts from regular policy-making loci to crisis control room or high-level politics. They also organise the temporality of crisis by identifying pre, during, and post-crisis measures. Finally, crisis tools constrain the role of policy-makers in order to minimise the scope for extraordinary emergency politics – not that they always prevent it nor remove the ability to play politics in times of crises, but they are precisely meant to ensure a democratic control over crises, thus shaping the outcomes of crisis ‘firefighting’. Third, in terms of ‘governing during crises’, the overall existence of crisis policy tools contributes to building up capacities for policy-making activities to sustain or resist crises or turbulences more generally. In this respect, they contribute to policy robustness as preparedness plans or mitigation measures intend to minimise the impact of a crises, and therefore the possibility of a disruption on a given field. In a way, the whole point of crisis management tools could be to make ‘governing during crises’ possible.