Managing Transboundary Crises:Identifying the Building Blocks ofan Effective Response System

Chris Ansell,* Arjen Boin**,*** and Ann Keller****

*Department of Political Science, University of California, Berkeley, CA 94720 1950. Email:cansell@berkeley.edu**School of Governance, Utrecht University, Utrecht, The Netherlands***Public Administration Institute, Louisiana State University, Baton Rouge, LA. E-mail: a.boin@uu.nl****School of Public Health, University of California, Berkeley, CA 94720 7360. Email: annk@berkeley.edu

In recent years, crises have become increasingly transboundary in nature. This explora-

tory paper investigates whether and how the transboundary dimensions of crises such as

pandemics, cyber attacks and prolonged critical infrastructure failure accentuate the

challenges that public and private authorities confront in the face of urgent threats. We

explore the transboundary dimensions of crises and disasters, discuss how an increase in

‘transboundedness’ affects traditional crisis management challenges and investigate what

administrative mechanisms are needed to deal with these compounded challenges.

Building on lessons learned from past crises and disasters, our goal is to stimulate a

discussion among crisis management scholars about the political-administrative capabil-

ities required to deal with ‘transboundary’ crises.

1. Introduction: the rise oftransboundary crises

I n recent years, crises and disasters have become

increasingly transboundary in nature. A series of con-

tingencies – think of the Y2K threat, the 9/11 attacks

and transport bombings in Europe, the BSE, SARS and

H1N1 epidemics, large-scale natural disasters such as

Hurricane Katrina and the California wildfires, the Ash

crisis and the BP oil spill – have confronted national

governments around the globe with a set of specific

challenges. Whether we talk about epidemics, energy

blackouts, financial crises, ice storms, oil spills or cyber

terrorism – the characteristics of these crises are strik-

ingly similar: they affect multiple jurisdictions, undermine

the functioning of various policy sectors and critical

infrastructures, escalate rapidly and morph along the way.

All crises and disasters typically require a rapid

response, which must be delivered under conditions

of collective stress and deep uncertainty (Barton, 1969;

Rosenthal, Charles, & ’t Hart, 1989). These challenges,

we argue, become harder to manage when a crisis

spreads across geographical borders and policy bound-

aries. When this happens, more participants become

involved. These participants tend to be more dispersed,

have more divergent agendas and are less well ac-

quainted with each other.

This poses both notable management challenges as

well as an analytical challenge. On the management side,

dispersed participants must rapidly share information

and coordinate their actions across the boundaries

between organizations, professions and political juris-

dictions. Analytically speaking, we do not understand

very well the kinds of organizational factors that will

produce reliable performance across a network of

actors. Although the literature tells us a good deal

about how to foster reliable performance in single

organizations, we know much less about how to do

this when organizations are uncertain about who their

partners in a crisis might be.

& 2010 Blackwell Publishing Ltd. DOI: 10.1111/j.1468-5973.2010.00620.x

Journal of Contingencies and Crisis Management Volume 18 Number 4 December 2010

This paper investigates the under-researched man-

agement demands that stem from transboundary crises.

Building on theoretical insights and empirical findings in

political science, public administration, organization

theory, systems studies, public health studies, disaster

sociology and crisis management studies, our goal is to

highlight the crucial challenges associated with managing

transboundary crises and identify research questions

associated with these challenges. Our approach is

synthetic and our goal is theory building rather than

theory testing.

We begin by outlining the transboundary dimensions

of crises and disasters. We then discuss how an

increase in these dimensions affects the political-

administrative challenges posed by crises (Section 2).

In Section 3, we define and describe four core organi-

zational capacities that appear to be critical for meeting

these ‘transboundary challenges’. We study the litera-

ture to see whether it is realistic to expect these

capacities in our public response networks. We end

with a research agenda, identifying urgent research

needs and outlining gaps in the literature.

2. Defining transboundary crisis:characteristics and trends

2.1. The transboundary dimensions of crisis

We speak of crisis when a threat is perceived against

the core values or life-sustaining functions of a social

system, which requires urgent remedial action under

conditions of deep uncertainty (Rosenthal et al., 1989).

Crises are ‘inconceivable threats come true’ – they tax

our imagination and outstrip available resources. Policy-

makers typically experience crises as ‘rude surprises’

that defy conventional administrative or policy responses,

causing collective and individual stress (LaPorte, 2007; cf.

Barton, 1969; Dror, 1986; Janis, 1989).

Crises differ from complex emergencies (hostage

takings, explosions, fires) that occur with some regularity

and, therefore, provide operational agencies enough past

experience to prepare for future events. In a crisis, past

experience provides policymakers with little guidance.

Policymakers, under these circumstances, face impossi-

ble-choice dimensions: everybody looks at them to ‘do

something’, but it is far from clear what that ‘something’ is

or whether it is even possible without causing additional

harm or damage (Boin, ’t Hart, Stern, & Sundelius, 2005).

Crises and disasters have, of course, always been

with us. Yet the political and administrative challenges

are likely to deepen as their character changes (Beck,

1992). It is not just that the crises of the near future will

be increasingly frequent and generate higher impact, as

is often argued (Posner, 2004; Power, 2007). This may

be true, as the agents of adversity are likely to gain

destructive potential as a result of climate change,

terrorism and new technologies (Rosenthal, Boin, &

Comfort, 2001). We are talking about a deeper, more

structural shift that can alter the nature of crises and

crisis management: crises appear to be increasingly

transboundary in nature.

We can describe the transboundary nature of any crisis

or disaster in terms of three dimensions – the higher a

crisis scores on each dimension, the more transboundary

it is.

The first dimension refers to political boundaries.

Many crises fall within a geographically bounded poli-

tical jurisdiction, such as a town (a factory explosion)

or a country (a political crisis). Some crises cross-

territorial boundaries and threaten multiple cities,

regions, countries or even continents. A financial crisis

and a pandemic are textbook examples of crises that do

not respect national borders and wreak havoc across

the world.

A crisis can cross-political boundaries vertically and

horizontally. When lower levels of government (cities,

counties, provinces, states) are overwhelmed by a

crisis, for example, they may require assistance from

higher levels of government (national, regional, inter-

national). This is the vertical dimension of transbound-

ary activity. A crisis can also spread horizontally across

the boundaries between two political jurisdictions

operating at the same level of government – like

two cities or two nations. We expect transboundary

crisis management to be more difficult when both

vertical and horizontal coordination is required

(Chisholm, 1989).

The second dimension is functional. A crisis can fall

neatly within a policy area (think of a prison riot). Many

crises, however, jump functional boundaries, threaten-

ing multiple life-sustaining systems, functions or infra-

structures. For instance, crises cross from a financial

system into an industrial system (the credit crunch

putting US car makers under siege), from private to

public (the BP oil spill), from one sector of industry to

another (a crisis in the car industry affects the steel

industry). Crises that cross-functional boundaries are

difficult to manage because they often involve systems

with different logics and operating imperatives. When

systems fall under the purview of different organiza-

tions, political interests and professional norms tend to

diverge. Because systems are often only loosely or

incidentally coupled and may be designed to function

independently, crises that cross-functional boundaries

often surprise their operators and constituents.

The third dimension is time. Some crisis events are

clearly demarcated in time: they have a defined begin-

ning and ending. Many crises, however, transcend such

time boundaries. Their roots run deep (like in the 9/11

crisis) and their effects are felt years down the road

(the financial crisis, global climate change) (Birkland,

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2009). This may be because they are not single events,

but rather a concatenation of related events. Or it may

be that a crisis has multiple effects that appear on

different time scales. An oil spill, for example, may have

immediate effects on shore birds and marine mammals,

while effects on other marine life take longer to appear.

Crises that cross temporal boundaries are difficult to

manage because they may require first responders to

sustain the response for extended periods or because

they create uncertainty about when to stand down a

response. They can also contribute to the fragmenta-

tion of response, because different functional capabil-

ities have to be mobilized at different times.

In general, a crisis that scores high on all three

dimensions is our ideal-typical transboundary crisis.1

For the reasons suggested above, we expect a trans-

boundary crisis to be more difficult to respond to than

a crisis that scores low on each of these dimensions.

However, even two crises that score high on trans-

boundary dimensions may vary significantly in terms

of the difficulty of response. This difficulty will vary

according to the nature of interdependence among

jurisdictions, sectors and time periods. Because crises

that produce extensive or complex interdependencies

across jurisdictions, sectors or time create greater

demands for joint cooperation and coordination, we

expect them to be more difficult to manage.

The varying nature of interdependence can be de-

scribed using Thompson’s (1967) classical distinction

between pooled, sequential and reciprocal interdepen-

dence. With pooled interdependence, two jurisdictions

may together be affected by a crisis, but crisis response

does not require a coordinated response (e.g., while

Chernobyl created a more complex interdependence

on surveillance and trade, the immediate emergency

response was largely unilateral). With sequential inter-

dependence, the ‘outputs’ from the crisis response of

one jurisdiction may affect the ‘inputs’ to another

jurisdiction (e.g., the response of one country to a

novel disease outbreak or to a banking crisis will affect

whether and how it spreads to other countries). As a

result, the downstream jurisdiction has a vested inter-

est in upstream response and may strategically offer

support or advice to the affected jurisdiction. Finally,

reciprocal interdependence produces the need for a

joint response (e.g., imagine an oil spill on an interna-

tional river like the Danube). As a result, jurisdictions

increasingly have to manage their interdependence

through simultaneous coordination in real time

(Thompson called this ‘mutual adaptation’). This kind

of coordination places a heavy burden on rapid and

transparent communication and on high levels of trust,

which are difficult to establish between organizations

that do not maintain routine interactions.

In the next section, we will primarily discuss the

political and administrative challenges that appear as

crises become more transboundary in nature and as the

interdependence across jurisdictions, sectors and time

becomes more extensive and complex.

3. Political-administrative challenges

Crises pose specific political-administrative challenges

that must be addressed if the response is to be perceived

as effective and legitimate (Boin et al., 2005).2 The crisis

management literature identifies a host of challenges

(Janis, 1989; Drennan & McConnell, 2007; LaPorte,

2007; Lagadec, 2009). In this section, we discuss four

prevalent political-administrative crisis response chal-

lenges mentioned in the literature:

� coping with uncertainty;

� providing surge capacity;

� organizing a response;

� communicating with the public.

3.1. Challenge #1: coping with uncertainty

Uncertainty is a crucial challenge for crisis managers.

There are at least three types of crisis uncertainty: (1)

uncertainty about the source of the problem (What

caused this? How could this have happened?); (2) uncer-

tainty about the evolution of the problem (What is

happening, exactly? What will be next? What will the

effects be?); and (3) uncertainty about possible solutions

(How can we best mitigate or correct the problem?). In

combination, the various types of uncertainty can have a

debilitating effect on the effectiveness of crisis managers

(Janis, 1989; Weick, 1993).

When a crisis takes on transboundary dimensions, we

may expect uncertainty to deepen dramatically. The causes

of a crisis become harder to understand when a crisis

stretches across countries, policy sectors, time or all three

at the same time. This is particularly true when resolving

uncertainty involves either sequential interdependence –

where one must wait for another organization or jurisdic-

tion to reduce its uncertainty before you can reduce yours

– or where interdependence is reciprocal and two

organizations or jurisdictions must coordinate in real

time to reduce their respective or collective uncertainty.

Interestingly, in the case of pooled interdependence,

it might be that uncertainty is more easily managed if a

crisis has transboundary components. This can occur

because multiple jurisdictions engaged in trying to

understand the same problem may be able to create a

more accurate picture of the problem than a single

jurisdiction working in isolation. To illustrate, during the

1999 outbreak of the West Nile virus in the United

States, human cases of the disease were initially diag-

nosed as encephalitis. At the same time, a veterinary

pathologist at the Bronx Zoo was managing several

Managing Transboundary Crises 197

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deaths among birds housed at the zoo. She linked her

findings to reports of human cases and began to argue

that a single pathogen was responsible for both out-

breaks (Knight, 2002; Weick, 2006). The presence in

this example of two sectors – human and veterinary –

led to a more rapid correction of the original encepha-

litis diagnosis than might otherwise have been the case.

Notwithstanding the West Nile case, the trans-

boundary nature of problems typically complicates

problem diagnosis. Since research shows that distrib-

uted sense making is a very difficult task even for

localized crises and disasters (Turner, 1978; Reason,

1990; Weick, 1993; Hutchins, 1995; Comfort, 2007;

Militello, Patterson, Bowman, & Wears, 2007; Reddy,

Paul, Abraham, McNeese, DeFitch, & Yen, 2009), the

ways in which transboundary crises magnify that com-

plexity merit further investigation.

Consider the outbreak of a novel infectious disease,

which creates a context of epistemic uncertainty and

ambiguity (Garrett, 1994; Alkan, 2001; Barry, 2004).

Information about the number and distribution of cases

is rarely complete and little may be known about how the

disease spreads. Incomplete or contradictory signals

often prevent a clear diagnosis.3 Even when public officials

have a general understanding of how the disease spreads

(in public spaces, through modern transportation, as the

result of poor hygiene, etc.), they can never anticipate,

with any certainty, the precise channels of contagion.

The uncertainty deepens if officials are dependent on

information held by other jurisdictions or countries to

manage their own uncertainty. Information may not be

immediately forthcoming, it may follow a different meth-

odology or it may simply be misleading. When the

unfolding crisis crosses policy boundaries – something

that might happen if the suspected source of the outbreak

was bioterrorism – the zone of uncertainty further

widens. New organizations, following a different set of

aims and procedures (secrecy becoming a key con-

straint), will own pieces of the information puzzle. As

the crisis is traced back in time, and its potential

consequences stretch into the future, it becomes harder

and harder for a localized organization to make sense of

the unfolding crisis (cf. Turner, 1978).

3.2. Challenge #2: providing surge capacity

Crises push response organizations into overdrive and

require them to mobilize a substantial increase in

resources. Further, response systems must match ac-

tivities and outputs to the appropriate scale of the

crisis, something that requires adequate assessment of

the scope of the crises. Heller, Bunning, France, Nie-

meyer, Peruski, Niami, Talboy, Murray, Pietz, Kornblum,

Oleszko, Beatrice, Joint Microbiological Rapid Re-

sponse Team and New York City Anthrax Investigation

Working Group (2002, p. 1097) vividly describe how

laboratories had to ‘ramp up’ during the 2001 anthrax

attack in the United States:

Both the types of laboratory activities and their scale

changed dramatically. The sample volume increased

approximately 3,000 times for both environmental

and clinical testing. Not surprisingly, the number

of laboratories and ancillary spaces BTRL

(Bioterrorism Response Laboratory) required in-

creased almost twenty-fold, and 25 times more

personnel than originally envisioned staffed these

additional areas. New instrumentation was brought

into BTRL to attempt to process the sample volume

more quickly. To supply this dramatic surge, six tons

of equipment and supplies was needed. The scale of

the operation and the tracking needs threatened to

overwhelm support staff, and a hastily constructed

but workable database system was put into place.

Surge capacity may decline as a crisis spreads across

boundaries. To illustrate, public health agencies in the

United States are encouraged to locate potential surge

capacity in the form of equipment and personnel from

neighbouring locations to aid in a crisis. Typically, agencies

will create reciprocal agreements where one jurisdiction

pledges to lend resources to the other when the latter

jurisdiction faces a demanding outbreak and vice versa.

During the H1N1 pandemic, however, public health

officials’ local responsibilities prevented them from hon-

ouring such agreements – no one was available to go ‘on

loan’ to another location. Public health agencies had to

find slack resources internally and scrambled to retrain

non-infectious disease specialists for the H1N1 response

(Ansell, Keller, & Reingold, 2009). This example does not

neatly follow Thompson’s categories of pooled, sequen-

tial or reciprocal interdependence. However, it does raise

a problem of cross-jurisdictional dependence in that the

ability to plan for resources from elsewhere in a larger

network of public health actors is eroded by the trans-

boundary nature of the crisis.

3.3. Challenge #3: organizing a response

One of the most difficult challenges during crises and

disasters is to coordinate an effective response. To

counter the threat and to alleviate the consequences,

many organizations have to collaborate to identify,

allocate, transport and deliver (or apply) resources.

Simple as it sounds, many disasters – from Katrina to

Haiti – have demonstrated just how hard this can be.

The organization of an effective crisis response consists

of two crucial components. To meet the extraordinary

demands that crises and disasters impose upon a society,

its organizations will have to mobilize people, money and

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Journal of Contingencies and Crisis Management

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goods. But mobilization in itself is not enough. The efforts

of all these organizations, and all the people within these

organizations, must be coordinated to ensure an effective

response. The challenge is thus one of ‘coordinated

mobilization’. Let us unpack this concept to see how

increased transboundedness impacts on the challenge.

In virtually each and every crisis, coordination turns

out to be a substantial challenge (Quarantelli, 1988;

’t Hart, Rosenthal, & Kouzmin, 1993; Kettl, 2003). People

and organizations, with very different motivations and

resources, must suddenly work together in a stressed

environment with very little information. As emerging

crises rarely correspond exactly, or even remotely, with

the plans in place (due to their inconceivable nature), it

is not always clear who should ‘own’ the crisis. A crisis

can become a hot potato, tossed from one authority to

the other; it can also become a coveted responsibility

claimed by multiple agencies. Even when everybody

agrees that cooperation is essential, it is not always

clear who should orchestrate the cooperative effort. In

fact, the research on crisis coordination suggests that

‘less is more’: self-organization tends to work better

than imposed cooperation schemes (Kendra & Wach-

tendorf, 2003; cf. Chisholm, 1989).

Once a crisis assumes transboundary characteristics,

it is difficult to delimit its territorial, temporal or func-

tional boundaries. Not only does this murk responsibil-

ities, it also adds ever-larger number of actors in need of

coordination (the number of interaction relations rises

exponentially). Consequently, it is difficult to know who

should be mobilized and what role and priority they

should have in the response system.

Two coordination challenges become particularly

acute in a transboundary crisis. The first type stems

from the challenge of inter-jurisdictional coordination,

which has vertical and horizontal dimensions. Horizon-

tally, a city must coordinate with other cities in the

region or a nation must coordinate with a neighbouring

nation. Vertically, the same cities must coordinate with

their provincial and national governments. National

governments, in turn, may have to coordinate with

international organizations. Constraints related to the

independent sovereignty of each unit make inter-

jurisdictional coordination difficult. The second type

of coordination challenge arises from inter-sectoral co-

ordination. Although institutions representing different

functional domains may not be ‘sovereign’ in the same

sense that territorial jurisdictions are, they often differ

significantly in their logics and priorities. This problem

can become particularly acute in public–private entities.

Consider, again, the outbreak of an epidemic that

crosses geographical and functional boundaries. The

public health infrastructure is anything but a single,

well-integrated organization.4 At best, it is what sys-

tems engineers, referring to highly complex technolo-

gies, call a ‘system of systems’. For each new threat, an

emergent network of local, national and international

public health authorities, laboratories and university

research centres must be quickly cobbled together on a

temporary and ad hoc (e.g., customized) basis. Under

certain circumstances, say a particularly severe epi-

demic or a bioterrorist event, the crisis will escalate

beyond the public health infrastructure and involve the

state’s security apparatus. If the crisis continues to

escalate, other states, the federal government, private

organizations, the military and international organiza-

tions may all become key players. The responsibilities

and relations between these actors are not clearly

defined, but they must be organized in such a way

that they can work rapidly in concert.

Communication difficulties are likely to compound

the challenge, especially when there is no established,

high-status organization that can act as a hub for

information collection and dissemination. Response

organizations often develop dedicated systems of

communication, specialized for their purposes. These

dedicated systems typically produce communication

incompatibilities across response organizations

(9/11 Commission, 2002; Snook, 2000). In addition,

information is likely to flow most easily between

jurisdictions and between organizations that have had

frequent or routine contact as a result of previous

events. Prior interaction is likely to create channels of

both informal and formal communication (Kapucu,

2006). Yet transboundary crises bring together jurisdic-

tions and organizations that have not been frequent

collaborators.

Returning to the problem of mobilization, research

shows that it is not always easy to find the required

resources or personnel (every crisis is different) and

deploy them in time.5 This organizational challenge

becomes much harder when a crisis becomes trans-

boundary. An effective response to a transboundary

crisis must typically operate at multiple scales simulta-

neously. Mobilization may have to range from the local

to the international level (this happens when local

communities are asked to mobilize support for inter-

national disaster assistance). Each shift mobilizes a new

set of response institutions, requiring adaptation of

coordinating frameworks and authority relations. In

addition to the coordination problems described above,

simultaneous mobilization at multiple scales tends to

create conflicts over priorities and resource allocation

across levels. Almost by definition, coordination and

mobilization efforts necessary during a transboundary

crisis will be sequential if not reciprocal in nature. In

order to define its own role well, an organization must

have some sense of what other actors are doing or

intend to do.

The response to Hurricane Katrina exemplifies these

problems. As the impact of the disaster was experi-

enced in three different states (Louisiana, Mississippi

Managing Transboundary Crises 199

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and Alabama), the response had to be scaled up quickly.

But it was not clear from where (scaling up became

effectively impossible as the local level hardly func-

tioned). Moreover, it was hard to set priorities (New

Orleans received much attention, but other areas were

hard hit as well). International assistance was offered,

but often refused. The federal government could not

muster sufficient resources in time to avoid intense

criticism. The private sector and the response agencies

found it hard to cooperate, which resulted in sad tales

about wasted resources (Dowty & Wallace, 2010).

3.4. Challenge #4: communicating with the public(meaning making)

In a crisis, political leaders are expected to reduce

uncertainty and provide an authoritative account of

what is going on, why it is happening and what needs to

be done (’t Hart, 1993). When they have made sense of

the events and have formulated a strategy, leaders must

get others to accept their definition of the situation. If

they are not successful, their decisions may not be

understood or respected.

Public leaders are not the only ones trying to frame

the crisis. Their messages coincide and compete with

those of other parties, who hold other positions and

interests, who are likely to espouse various alternative

definitions of the situation and advocate different

courses of action. If other actors succeed in dominating

this meaning-making process, the ability of incumbent

leaders to decide and manoeuvre is severely con-

strained.

It is often difficult for authorities to provide correct

information right away. They struggle with the mountains

of raw data (reports, rumours, pictures) that are quickly

amassed when something extraordinary happens. Turning

them into a coherent picture of the situation is a major

challenge by itself. Getting it out to the public in the form

of accurate, clear and actionable information requires a

major public relations effort. This effort is often hindered

by the aroused state of the audience: people whose lives

are deeply affected tend to be anxious if not stressed.

Moreover, they do not necessarily see the government as

their ally. And pre-existing distrust of government does

not evaporate in times of crisis.

When a crisis involves an increasing number of

political, administrative and sectoral authorities, it

becomes harder to produce one clear and coherent

message that relieves collective stress and provides

people with actionable advice. In fact, the rising number

of actors increases the chances of contradicting mes-

sages, which may heighten fear and hamper coopera-

tion. Like the problems that arise from transboundary

coordination, communication during a transboundary

crisis is likely to display dynamics of sequential and even

reciprocal interdependence as multiple sources of

information will be available and messaging across

response organizations will be dynamic.

For example, during the initial response to the 2009

H1N1 outbreak in the United States, federal officials

made an early recommendation endorsing school clo-

sures as a mitigation strategy and then, only a few days

later, revised their recommendation by leaving the

decision about school closure up to local officials.

Although there were good reasons for federal officials

to hand off this decision to local authorities, the

reversal created the impression that federal officials

were uncertain about how best to respond to the

outbreak. Moreover, as counties adopted different

stances with regard to school closure, it became clear

that there was no uniform mitigation strategy within

the United States, at least up until the time when the

H1N1 vaccination became available. Consistent messa-

ging continued to be elusive in the United States when

the White House released a statement predicting

approximately 90,000 deaths due to H1N1 over the

course of the 2009–2010 flu season. Officials at the

Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC)

responded with their own much lower estimate

of 30,000 deaths. The CDC estimate created a com-

munication challenge for the White House, which

then had to defend the estimate it produced. Here,

we see that no organization can completely own the

communications space and is likely to have to respond

to the actions of other organizations as the crisis

unfolds.

4. The need for boundary-spanningcapacities

Each challenge described above is hard in itself (many

books have been written on each one of them). To

perform adequately in the face of a ‘localized’ crisis is,

in other words, no mean feat. In this section, we have

shown that a ‘transboundary shift’ compounds these

challenges, especially when such a shift produces se-

quential or pooled interdependence. In this section, we

explore what is needed to build a response system that

can reach across boundaries and bring together avail-

able capacities in an effective and timely manner.

Drawing upon crisis and disaster management re-

search, and building on insights from public administra-

tion research and organization theory, we identify four

boundary-spanning mechanisms that we believe are

essential for an effective transboundary response: dis-

tributed sense making; networked coordination; surge

capacity; and formal scaling procedures. Below, we

briefly introduce these mechanisms and discuss how

they may allow a system to cope with the challenges

posed by transboundary crises.

200 Chris Ansell, Arjen Boin and Ann Keller

Journal of Contingencies and Crisis Management

Volume 18 Number 4 December 2010 & 2010 Blackwell Publishing Ltd.

4.1. Distributed sense making

As we have seen above, a transboundary crisis makes it

hard to arrive at a common operating picture (sometimes

called shared cognition or situational awareness). Such a

picture must somehow be pulled from incomplete,

often contradictory and continuously changing informa-

tion that is distributed over a large and shifting number

of actors (Lagadec, 1997; Comfort, 1999; Weick &

Sutcliffe, 2001; Moynihan, 2008; Demchak, 2010).

The term sense making refers to a range of informa-

tional and cognitive tasks that runs from crisis detection

and tracking, through interpretation and analysis, to

decision-making. Institutional features required for

transboundary sense making would include:

(1) Detection and surveillance systems that collect basic

data about the origins, distribution and intensity of

crisis events (Jebara, 2004; Sorenson, 2000). The

literature shows that such systems exist for known

threats (think about flooding, earthquakes and

tsunamis) but remain wanting in the area of man-

made crises (such as financial breakdowns and

terrorist attacks). The core problem is that it is

impossible to develop indicators for unique crises.

(2) Analytical capacity (ranging from experts to the use

of laboratories) in order to analyse incoming data.

The art of sense making is discovering patterns in a

deluge of raw data (and an absence of ‘hard’

information). This requires a combination of human

intellect and sophisticated hardware, a combination

that is rarely available under the best of circum-

stances (Van der Walle, Turoff, & Hiltz, 2010). The

management literature suggests that ‘absorptive

capacity’ – the ability to absorb new information,

ideas and knowledge (Zahra & George, 2002) – may

be especially helpful, but it remains unclear how

such capacity can be built at the system level.

(3) Real-time communications to collect and verify in-

formation about the unfolding threat and the

damages caused. This is to a considerable extent

simply a hardware problem: it is often impossible to

communicate properly in the heat of crisis (Rey-

nolds & Seeger, 2005). Progress on technological

fixes is on-going, but the problem has not been

solved. The contemporary reliance on ever-larger

amounts of data will continue to pose a challenge to

crisis-struck information structures.

(4) Decision support systems to overcome inherent hu-

man limitations (Simon, 1997) and to facilitate rapid

yet informed decision-making. In theory, a decision

support system helps assess information, suggests

decision options and offers scenarios. In recent

years, much progress has been made in the actual

development of such systems, but a shared stan-

dard has not emerged (Comfort, 2007; Demchak,

2010; Van der Walle et al., 2010).

The literature is not particularly hopeful when it

comes to creating capacities for distributed sense

making. Because key pieces of information are usually

distributed across territorial or functional boundaries,

patterns may be particularly difficult to detect. Even if

relevant signals are detected by separate surveillance

systems, these signals may not be brought together in a

way that allows analysts to detect the relevant pattern

in time. Spotting the relevance of a bit of information

may require contextual knowledge or information that

only other response organizations possess (Turner,

1978). The difficulties that the CIA and the FBI en-

countered in detecting the pattern of terrorist activity

that led to 9/11 is one well-known example of this kind

of sense-making failure.

The World Health Organization’s (WHO) response

to the SARS outbreak provides a good example of

distributed sense making working well during a trans-

boundary crisis. WHO used the Global Outbreak Alert

and Response Network (GOARN) to provide decision

support to responders globally. The GOARN is a

network of institutions and experts who participate in

outbreak surveillance and can be mobilized for out-

break response in innumerable configurations (WHO,

2009). To rapidly increase knowledge about the cause,

epidemiology and clinical management of SARS, the

WHO relied on the GOARN to create four distinct

response networks: a senior management group that

advised the WHO on its global alerts and travel

recommendations (Michelson, 2005); a virtual labora-

tory made up of an international network of research-

ers tasked with isolating the disease agent; a network of

health officials working to establish clinical guidelines

for managing the disease; and a network of epidemiol-

ogists providing updated information about the spread

of the disease (WHO, 2003a).

During the outbreak, WHO provided real-time

communication by drawing daily information from the

field and by disseminating validated information to local

responders. The WHO gathered information from the

field through daily tele- and videoconferences with its

dispatched, operational GOARN teams. The GOARN

teams themselves could pool information across the

sites where they were working (WHO, 2003b). The

WHO made daily updates to its website to convey

the most recent information about the spread of the

disease. It also created a SARS operational team that

could provide advice to local responders around the

clock (WHO, 2003b).

This example suggests several elements that may

enhance distributed sense making during a transbound-

ary crisis. First, when many stakeholders are involved, it

may be useful to have an independent central hub that

can coordinate and relay information between them.

In this case, GOARN served this important function.

Second, this hub must play a clearinghouse role,

Managing Transboundary Crises 201

& 2010 Blackwell Publishing Ltd.

Journal of Contingencies and Crisis Management

Volume 18 Number 4 December 2010

connecting different types of information and decision-

making in a relatively seamless fashion. Third, this

independent hub needs to be scaled up to a level that

encompasses all the stakeholders involved in the event.

SARS quickly became a global crisis and GOARN was

designed to coordinate information and response on a

global level. Fourth, in addition to a clearinghouse role,

this independent hub has to be able to operate directly

in the field itself. A key to the GOARN success was its

ability to deploy field teams to affected areas. These

field teams could then relay breaking information back

to WHO headquarters.

The fact that the WHO is a high-status organization in

international health is likely to have played a role in the

success of this instance of distributed sense making.

Additionally, the success of the GOARN may stem from

its organizational merits, but also from the fact that sense

making, in this case, created pooled interdependence

where each city responding to its local outbreak did not

necessarily need information from other cities in order to

manage its response. Those cities that did compare notes

with their counterparts, however, do appear to have fared

better in managing the outbreak and clinical cases than

those that pursued sense making in isolation.

4.2. Surge capacity: rapid, sustainable andproperly scaled deployment

Disaster aid to foreign disaster areas produce the most

complex operations imaginable, as these operations

involve a wide variety of actors that must collaborate,

often in hostile or in inhospitable territory, to collect,

transport and distribute scarce resources (McClintock,

2009). The capacities required to facilitate a rapid

response at the right scale have been thoroughly

studied by students of disaster supply chains (Boin,

Kelle, & Whybark, 2010). A prescriptive list typically

includes the following components:

1. Professional first responders. Surge capacity requires

that first responders can be mobilized quickly and

deployed across geographical boundaries. First respon-

ders tend to be well versed in the art of improvisation.

Yet, it is not clear whether first responders are ready

to work in areas and crises that their training and

experience may not have prepared them for.

2. Supply chain management. Rapid deployment of peo-

ple and resources requires sophisticated manage-

ment of supply chains. The research in this area has

been growing rapidly in recent years (Van Wassen-

hove, 2006; Kovacs & Spens, 2007). The research has

identified a plethora of constraints operating on

response operations across scales; it has also deliv-

ered very promising software capacities to enhance

supply chain management for crisis management.

3. Fast track procedures. Many standard operating pro-

cedures in organizations are designed to work on a

time scale of months or years, whereas the time

scale of crises should be measured in hours, days and

weeks. In addition, the deployment of assets is often

a political issue for agencies governed by budgetary,

jurisdictional and accountability concerns. The mo-

bilization and deployment of resources requires the

ability to rapidly adapt or work around administra-

tive procedures and systems designed for more

leisurely review and decision-making. For instance,

it would mean that accreditation standards for

certain professionals (such as doctors) would be

temporarily waived to facilitate a rapid response.

Research time and again shows and explains that this

type of flexibility does not come natural to public

organizations, which typically work best with time-

proven routines (Wilson, 1989).

4. An integrated command center. A complex crisis

response requires a pre-designated and pre-

organized location from which to centrally manage

the mobilization and deployment of resources

(Mignone & Davidson, 2003; Militello et al., 2007).

Such a centre must be connected with centres at

other administrative levels and with centres in other

sectors. In recent years, we have seen the profes-

sionalization of command centres in the United

States and Europe. In fact, in terms of command

infrastructures, we may say that the situation has

never been better. But it remains unclear how inter-

connected these centres are in practice.

What all these components require to function in

response to transboundary threats (rather than the

more localized threats that gave rise to their design) is

organizational adaptability. The ability to rapidly recon-

figure organizations and activities is somewhat of a Holy

Grail in organizational research. The management

literature suggests that organizations can develop

routines that will enable them to respond rapidly to

changing technological and market conditions (Teece,

Pisano, & Shuen, 1997; Eisenhardt & Martin, 2000). This

literature suggests that adaptive capacity depends on

‘combinative capabilities’ – the ability to recombine

existing knowledge and skills to develop new responses

to emerging situations (Kogut & Zander, 1992; Wang &

Ahmed, 2007). The lesson from this literature is that

crisis response systems need specialized routines dedi-

cated to helping them respond dynamically.6

The US Coast Guard’s response during Hurricane

Katrina provides a good example of a public organiza-

tion that rapidly adapted to the scale of the disaster. A

General Accountability Office review of the response

found that a combination of geographically distributed

organizational structure and standardization allowed

the US Coast Guard to respond quickly and flexibly

202 Chris Ansell, Arjen Boin and Ann Keller

Journal of Contingencies and Crisis Management

Volume 18 Number 4 December 2010 & 2010 Blackwell Publishing Ltd.

to the crisis. The distributed organizational structure

allowed the Coast Guard to deploy mobilized assets

and first responders to where they were most needed.

At the same time, standardization across the organiza-

tion allowed teams assembled from different units to

work effectively together (GAO, 2006). Other exam-

ples of organizations that harbour such routines include

the US Marine Corps and the Federal Bureau of

Prisons.7

4.3. Networked coordination

A successful response to a crisis or a disaster is marked

by rapid support, participation and cooperation from

mission-critical stakeholders (the public, private orga-

nizations, interest groups, international partners, etc.).

Some type of coordinative effort is needed to orches-

trate, synchronize and adjust cooperation between

organizations that may have never worked with each

other before. To accomplish such a degree of coordina-

tion under conditions of uncertainty, urgency and stress

– without clearly defined authority relations – is a

difficult task under the best of circumstances.

Two opposing schools of thought dominate the

literature on coordination. One argues for establishing

in advance of a crisis a system for creating authority

structures across organizations and jurisdictions. An-

other argues that pre-established hierarchies will never

be adequate to the specific features of a given crisis and

that to enable self-organizing during a crisis will be the

most effective approach.

The US disaster response community adheres to the

first school. To cope with the coordination challenge, it has

developed the Incident Command System (ICS), which,

in recent years, has become the de facto and sometimes

de jure standard of emergency coordination in the United

States.8 ICS offers a common operating philosophy and

architecture that can help disparate entities work to-

gether; trained officials find it easy to cooperate in this

standardized approach to emergencies (it has proved

especially effective in the fire-fighting community).

The scholarly community is still divided on the

question of whether ICS can or should be used for all

types of crises and disasters. The coordination of a

varied and evolving network of actors requires trust,

which typically has been established over time and

before crisis events. It is not easy to establish inter-

organization relationships on the fly (Kapucu, 2006) and

it is not clear whether ICS addresses this challenge.

The response to Katrina, for instance, was marred by

coordination failures, as most participants in the re-

sponse network reportedly were unaware of the exact

workings of ICS. Three years later, Louisiana’s response

to Hurricane Gustav was greatly facilitated by ICS. In

the aftermath of the Columbia shuttle disaster, ICS

proved useful in coordinating approximately 450 orga-

nizations (including 120 government agencies), which

collaborated in a 2,000 square miles area to search and

collect shuttle debris (Donahue, 2004). It was also quite

successfully used in the response to the 9/11 attack on

the Pentagon (Varley, 2003) and in California’s response

to a public health crisis (Moynihan, 2008, 2009).

The second school maintains that complex response

operations cannot be managed or even coordinated in a

top-down fashion from some central office (Harrald,

Cohn, & Wallace, 1992; McEntire, 2002; Kettl, 2003; cf.

Chisholm, 1989).9 A key finding in disaster research is

that self-organizing is often very effective in times of

disaster (Kendra & Wachtendorf, 2003; Solnit, 2009).

This finding strongly suggests that political leaders should

monitor and facilitate the process of a self-organizing

response system rather than try to control and command

it. A coordinated response builds on an intricate mix of

limited (but effective) central governance and a high level

of self-organization (or administrative resilience).

One of the most intricate, scaled-up coordination

mechanisms is found in the European Union (EU),

where member states and EU institutions have devel-

oped a combination of formal and informal procedures

to coordinate the actions of member states (Boin &

Rhinard, 2008). For instance, the Civil Protection

Mechanism facilitates a coordinated surge of member

states who want to contribute to a shared disaster

response. The so-called Crisis Coordination Arrange-

ments are explicitly designed with an eye on trans-

boundary crises with a highly politicized dimension. In a

system consisting of 27 member states that guard their

sovereignty (especially during crises), the EU has be-

come a legitimate platform for cooperation and co-

ordination for a wide variety of crises and disasters.

4.4. Formal boundary-spanning structures

In any crisis, it is important that critical decisions are

made at the appropriate level of authority (’t Hart et al.,

1993). It is, of course, not always clear who should

make which decisions as crises are non-routine situa-

tions. Most governing procedures and authority struc-

tures were not designed with emerging crises in mind.

The solution is usually found in the formulation of

formal structures and procedures that apply to these

unforeseen circumstances and have to be formally

triggered according to pre-set procedures (think of

formal disaster declarations).

The extreme dispersion of authority (or the lack of

clear ‘ownership’) that is characteristic of a transbound-

ary crisis requires formal structures that prescribe how

decision-making authority is organized across geogra-

phical, policy and time boundaries. What is needed is a

transboundary authority structure that can be triggered in

Managing Transboundary Crises 203

& 2010 Blackwell Publishing Ltd.

Journal of Contingencies and Crisis Management

Volume 18 Number 4 December 2010

times of crisis and that will help minimize confusion and

bureaucratic infighting. Such a framework is unlikely to

be invented ‘on the fly’. Moreover, the legal dimensions

of such a framework must be carefully thought through

(cf. Egan, 2010).

A good example can be found in the US National

Response Framework (NRF), which spells out how

authority relations can adapt to a transboundary crisis

(in this case, a crisis or a disaster that outstrips the

response capacities of a single state) (FEMA, 2008). The

NRF was first formulated after 9/11 and subsequently

updated after the flawed response to Hurricane Katrina

(2005). The 2008 hurricane season (with Gustav and Ike

lashing the Gulf Coast and Houston) offered a first major

test. Participating organizations at both the state and the

federal level seemed satisfied with the proposed proce-

dures, which worked well (cf. Boin & Egan, 2011).

5. Conclusion: towards a transboundaryresearch agenda

This paper shows that the challenges faced by crisis

managers who must respond to transboundary events

are not different in kind from those faced in ‘normal’,

more localized crises and disasters. What sets trans-

boundary crises apart, however, is that they create a need

for extreme adaptation and unprecedented cooperation

under conditions in which these are most difficult to

achieve – when the capacity and authority for response is

distributed across multiple organizations and jurisdictions

and when the crisis itself creates difficult patterns of

interdependence among the actors involved.

We have argued that the response to a transboundary

crisis requires a specific set of organizational and proce-

dural tools. An ideal-typical response network would

have distributed analytical capacity, surge potential, co-

ordinated behaviour and special authority arrangements.

Our review of several cases of transboundary crises

leads us to believe that a transboundary response

network cannot be viewed as the mere sum of indivi-

dual parts; it will require special, transboundary quali-

ties. Moreover, there may be a problematic tension in

the characteristics that such a response network must

display. The response system must operate ‘robustly’

across boundaries and at different scales. However,

transboundary crises also place a premium on the

nimbleness and adaptiveness of institutions. They

must have an expansive repertoire of routines and be

capable of rapid customization of their activity. They

must be capable of rapid reinterpretation of circum-

stances and timely reorganization of activities and

courses of action. In sum, transboundary crises demand

response organizations that can be robust and flexible.

Traditional public bureaucracies are not built to pro-

duce highly dynamic responses. They are designed to deal

with routine problems that emerge in known ways

(Wilson, 1989). In order to better understand how

transboundary response networks might be developed

so that they can produce both robust and adaptable

responses, we argue that a more concerted study of

transboundary crises is required. This article helps iden-

tify a set of factors that should be part of such a study.

These characteristics should be checked against the cases

of both effective crisis management and abject failures.

Research on institutional design suggests a caution-

ary approach. Comprehensive design efforts rarely

work out as envisioned (cf. Goodin, 1996). We there-

fore propose an approach of institutional tinkering,

informed by research and evaluation. Research that

compares the experiences of networks responding to

the same or similar transboundary crises could link the

presence or absence of the four core capacities with

evidence of robust flexibility. As long as we do not

know what exactly makes a transboundary response

system, we should not risk the erosion of existing and

well-functioning response systems.

Acknowledgements

An earlier version of this paper was presented at the

2009 Annual Meeting of the American Political Science

Association, Toronto, Canada, 3–6 September 2009.

We thank Todd R. LaPorte, Don Moynihan and our

fellow panelists for their valuable comments on this

earlier version. In addition, we are grateful for the

unsparing comments of Paul ’t Hart and Paul Schulman.

Finally, we thank the anonymous reviewers of this

journal for their perceptive comments and suggestions.

Notes

1. Consequently, in the remainder of this paper, a transbound-

ary crisis is shorthand for a crisis that scores high on at least

two of three transboundary dimensions outlined above.

2. We are less worried about the traditional criterion of

efficiency. While an important benchmark for public

performance under normal circumstances, it usually

becomes less important during and even after a crisis.

3. For example, during the H1N1 outbreak of Spring 2009,

the severity of the influenza strain was difficult to

determine due to the limited information that public

health officials had about the actual number of cases.

This occurs because medical providers are likely to see

only the more severe cases and are unable to count mild

cases that never visit hospitals or clinics. Outbreaks of

novel infectious agents, like Toxic Shock Syndrome or

HIV/AIDS, posed substantial uncertainties as health offi-

cials struggled to identify the cause(s) and risk factors

associated with contracting a new disease.

204 Chris Ansell, Arjen Boin and Ann Keller

Journal of Contingencies and Crisis Management

Volume 18 Number 4 December 2010 & 2010 Blackwell Publishing Ltd.

4. In the United States, the ‘public health system’ is a loosely

affiliated network of approximately 3,000 federal, state

and local health, often working closely with private sector

voluntary and professional health associations (Trust for

America’s Health, 2005). The IOM defines a public health

system as a complicated web of different entities that

include the governmental public health infrastructure,

community organizations, health care delivery systems,

employers and businesses, media and academia.

5. See the special issue in the International Journal of Produc-

tion Economics (Boin, Kelle, & Whybark, 2010).

6. Emergency credentialing systems provide a good example

of a recombinative routine. To utilize trained health care

personnel from other states during a disaster, it is

necessary to provide them with a temporary status.

Having emergency credentialing systems in place consid-

erably facilitates a scaled response. The response to

Hurricane Katrina shows that not all public organizations

possess this type of capacity.

7. The US Federal Bureau of Prisons (BOP) can rapidly

mobilize in response to prison riots, moving personnel

from one prison to the other. Because BOP personnel share

a set of core values and working routines, they can function

effectively in different federal prisons (DiIulio, 1994).

8. The Department of Homeland Security has adopted

these principles in its national doctrine for emergency

management (using the name National Incident Manage-

ment System). For a detailed description, consult the

recently published Department of Homeland Security

(2008).

9. But see the spectacularly successful wind down of air traffic

in North America in the hours following the 9/11 attacks.

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