In virtually every assessment of responses to large-scale crises and disasters, coordination is identified as a critical failure factor. After the crisis, official committees and political opponents often characterize the early phases of the response as a 'failure to coordinate.' Not surprisingly, improved coordination quickly emerges as the prescribed solution. Coordination, then, is apparently both the problem and the solution. But the proposed solutions rarely solve the problem: coordination continues to mar most crises and disasters. In the absence of a shared body of knowledge on coordination, it is hard to formulate a normative framework that allows for systematic assessment of coordination in times of crisis. As coordination is widely perceived as an important function of crisis and disaster management, this absence undermines a fair and balanced assessment of crisis management performance. This paper seeks to address that void. We aim to develop a framework that explains both the failure and success of crisis coordination. We do this by exploring the relevant literature, reformulating what coordination is and distilling from research the factors that cause failure and success.

Effective interorganizational collaboration is a pivotal ingredient of any community or nation's capacity to prepare for and bounce back from disruptive crisis events. The booming research field of collaborative public management (CPM) has been yielding important insights into such collaboration that as yet await transfer to the study of crisis management (CM). Also, we argue that the general CPM literature has not sufficiently addressed the distinctive collaboration challenges involved in coping with crises. This article bridges this twofold gap. Based on a systematic review of prior research in collaborative CM, this study identifies dominant areas of theoretical emphasis, methodological practices, and patterns of empirical enquiry. The article highlights areas where CPM research has potential to further inform the understanding of collaborative CM, including performance, success factors, managerial skills, and learning. The article then identifies five properties associated with CM-uncertainty, leadership, magnitude, costs, and urgency-which deserve further analysis to advance the understanding of the application of CPM principles and strategies. We conclude with outlining a research agenda and offering a set of testable propositions aimed at investigating the likelihood of effective collaboration in different types of crises and as expected in different CM paradigms.

This article offers a conceptual framework that broadens and enhances our understanding of the role of 'history' in contemporary governance and the attempts by policy-makers to 'manage' critical issues. Building upon the literature on historical analogies in policy-making, we distinguish three dimensions that clarify how the past may emerge in and affect the current deliberations, choices and rhetoric of policy-makers. We apply this in a comparative examination of two cases of crisis management where historical analogies played an important part: the Swedish response to (alleged) submarine intrusions in 1982, and the European Union sanctions against Austria in 1999. We induce from the case comparison new concepts and hypotheses for understanding the role of historical analogies in public policy-making and crisis management.

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