Unpacking Creeping and Transboundary Crises

The notions of creeping crises and transboundary crises are widely used and highly evocative. Yet, when applied to specific cases, almost all crises end up being classified as ‘creeping’ and ‘transboundary’. Crises that erupt suddenly, without being somewhat creeping, are rare. It is almost impossible to find a crisis that remains perfectly confined to a geographical area and a single functional sector. As a result, the classificatory criteria become blunt – and therefore of limited analytical value. This problem stems largely from the fact that both concepts, as currently defined and employed in the literature, are composite categories that bundle together multiple dimensions. In this paper, we seek to unpack these two concepts, identifying the specific elements that constitute them. The notion of transboundary crisis conflates at least two components that are not necessarily connected: (1) the involvement of multiple decision-makers and jurisdictions (the idea of “polycentric” crises); (2) contagion effects, whereby a crisis can spread to other contexts. Furthermore, the concept of transboundary can refer to both political-geographical boundaries and policy boundaries (but these are two different and orthogonal dimensions). Likewise, the prevailing definition of creeping crises includes both threats that arrive stealthily (without being noticed) and threats that are ‘in plain sight’ (of which everyone is aware). Creeping crises can then develop along either linear trajectories (snowball crises, which increase progressively and steadily in severity) or non-linear trajectories (wave-like crises, with peaks and troughs). These are analytically distinct dynamics that might be better treated separately. Drawing on several empirical examples, the paper begins by dissecting the concepts of creeping and transboundary crises and uses this analytical exercise to reflect more broadly on the criteria and conceptual lenses through which we analyze and classify public crises.