COMPARING COORDINATION STRUCTURES FOR CRISIS MANAGEMENT IN SIX COUNTRIES

The article analyses organizational structures and coordination mechanisms for crisis management in six European countries, focusing on the prevalence of hierarchical and network arrangements, administrative culture and perceptions of coordination quality. The main research question concerns how important collaboration and cooperation are within the policy area. We apply a structural–instrumental and a cultural perspective, and examine data on formal organizational structures as well as survey data from administrative executives. The mapping reveals hybrid coordination arrangements with different national ‘flavours’. The survey data shows that the executives accorded significant weight to coordination, but the use of different coordination mechanisms was only loosely linked to their assessments of coordination quality. Our findings support a view of public administration as a largely composite system combining contradictory organizational principles that have evolved through institutional layering. National context and the specific challenges from different types of crises therefore influence crisis management capacity profoundly.