1
Crisis management capacity in central government: The perceptions of civil servants in Norway
Tom Christensen and Per Lægreid
Introduction.
Dealing with crisis is a main responsibility of governments and public sector executives but at the same time major crises test the limits of what bureaucratic public administration is designed to do (Boin, Ekengren and Rhinard, 2013). Thus crisis management is a core government responsibility that is difficult to fulfill (Boin et al., 2016), but governance capacity is a necessary precondition. Governance capacity deals primarily with aspects of formal structural and procedural features of the administrative apparatus, and Lodge and Wegrich (2014) see this capacity as consisting of coordination, regulation, analytical and delivery elements.
Societal security and crisis management represent a “wicked problem” where coordination between actors and organizations with different tasks and perceptions is crucial (Head, 2008). These problems transcend organizational borders, policy areas and administrative levels (Ansell et al., 2010; Boin, 2008). They are typically complex, involving multi-level and multi-sectoral actors, partly hybrid, combining inconsistent principles, and represent uncertain knowledge and ambiguous goals and priorities. Crises are often unpredictable, demand rapid response, and often spur considerable criticism and debate (Boin et al., 2016). Public organizations face important constraints in their effort to handle these complexities, being at the nexus of both democracy and governance, facing demands for capacity as well as accountability, legitimacy and representativeness.
In this chapter the focus is on governance capacity as seen from the civil servants at central level in ministries and central agencies. This means that the strategic level is more up front than the operational level. Civil servants are definitely in a central position related to governance capacity, since much of the overall organizing of crisis management is based on this level. How actors in organizations such as ministries and central agencies experience their own capacity and competence to prevent and manage crises is important for understanding how they handle them.
Today the world is perceived as increasingly insecure and dangerous. for a number of reasons. This has led to a tightening-up of government. Crises make it easier to argue for reassertion of the centre and increased coordination (Christensen, Lægreid and Rykkja 2016).
2 The new threat of terrorism has underlined the importance of governments’ avoiding contradictory outcomes and ensuring that information is shared between agencies and between administrative levels in multi-governance systems.
We emphasize such questions by focusing on high trust context on the case of Norway.
A main issue is to examine to what degree contemporary crises such as the terrorist attacks July 22. 2011 has had on the perceptions of the civil servants in central government regarding the authorities’ capacity to prevent and handle crises. On that day two serious and devastating terrorist attacks occurred striking the very core of the country’s democratic institutions. First, a large car bomb at the central government complex in Oslo destroyed several ministerial building, including the Ministry of Justice and the Prime Minister’s Office. Two hours later the same terrorist shot a large number of young people from the Labour party’s youth organization attending a summer camp on the island of Utøya. In total 77 people died and many sustained severe injuries. The terrorist was a ‘lonely wolf,’ an ethnic Norwegian with political right wing sympathy.
Our main research goal is to describe and explain civil servants’ perceptions of how able government bodies are to prevent and handle crises and accidents and how it varies after the crises compared to before. The terrorist attacks put internal security and crisis management high on the political agenda, organizational changes were made, new regulatory arrangements were introduced and more resources were allocated to the field (Jensen, Lægreid and Rykkja 2017; Lango, Lægreid and Rykkja, 2014; Chapter x this book). We will compare their perceptions on this topic in 2006 with their perceptions in 2016 (see Christensen, Fimreite and Lægreid, 2011).
Crises are often transboundary and include three key elements: threats, urgency and uncertainty (Boin et al. 2016). These elements are not necessary objective features but also involved subjective elements and perceptions. This means that the specific positions, roles, values, expertise and experiences of the civil servants will lead to different perceptions regarding how crises are prevented and handled. We will concentrate on the prevention and handling of the crisis and include both intentional and non-intentional crises.
The empirical data base is two surveys. Both in 2006 and 2016 a questionnaire was sent to civil servants in all Norwegian ministries and central agencies. The government executives were asked how well prepared their organization was to prevent and handle various crises, accidents and catastrophes.
The main research questions posed in the paper are accordingly the following:
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What is characterizing the perceptions of central civil servants regarding how well prepared government authorities are to prevent and handle crises?
Have these perceptions changed over time from 2006 to 2016?
How and to what extent can we explain variety in these perceptions, based on structural and cultural factors?
We start by presenting our theoretical perspectives for explaining civil servants’ perceptions of the ability of government to prevent and handle crises, focusing structural and cultural features.
Then we will give a brief outline of the Norwegian context both generally and in this specific policy area. In the third part, our empirical data are presented, describing the main results concerning how the government's ability to prevent and handle various risks and crises is perceived by the government officials. Then we analyze variations in the perception of crisis management, interpreting our main empirical results and discussing some implications.
The theoretical approach
In our empirical analysis of the variation in civil servants’ perceptions of the ability to prevent and handle crises we will apply two sets of organizational or institutional features, reflecting different perspectives taken from organization theory (Christensen et al., 2007).
An instrumental-structural perspective
According to an instrumental-structural perspective, the formal structure of public organizations will channel and influence the models of thought and the actual decision-making behaviour of civil servants (Egeberg, 2012; Simon, 1957). It’s presupposed that actors are scoring high on rational calculation and political-administrative control (Dahl and Lindblom 1953; March and Olsen 1983). We expect that certain civil servants in certain positions, related to hierarchical level and tasks, will have an attention structure, capacities and knowledge that give them more insight into crisis management in their own organization and their own capacity to cope with tasks and solve problems, and will therefore assess situations differently from civil servants with other positions and tasks (cf. Simon, 1957). These deciding factors include their jurisdiction, their knowledge of the field in question, their contact with other actors inside this field and their overview of the public sector more generally, factors that we broadly can define as formal structure.
Where actors structurally are located are related to the two central dimension of a formal structure, i.e. vertical and horizontal specialization, with connected coordination dimensions
4 (Egeberg, 2011; Gulick, 1937). In the fields of safety and security, tasks and responsibility tend to be spread among several sectors and levels and involve a large number of actors. Crisis management is therefore related to a lot of governmental complexities, challenges and dilemmas along both vertical and horizontal dimensions (Wise and Nader, 2002). The experience of many recent accidents and crises has shown that inadequate and complex organization and failure to coordinate, both at lower operative levels and higher administrative levels, or between them, is a recurring problem (Kettl et al., 2004;Wise, 2002).
Coordination is further complicated by the fact that modern public organizations and policies are organized according to the principle of purpose, which makes them vertical in nature and characterized by strong functional sectors – pillars or silos – and weak coordinating mechanisms (Kettl, 2003: Pollitt, 2003). In the case of crisis management the traditional problems of organizational coordination seem to be multiplied and the stakes related with success or failure huge (Kettl, 2004:66).
We focus on the importance of four structural variables for understanding the variation in perceptions of crisis-management ability and capability among civil servants: administrative level, policy area, position and perceived coordination capability. Regarding administrative level we distinguishes between ministries and central agencies. The expectation is that ministries perceived better crisis management capacity than the central agencies which are closer to the operational level. The relevance of policy area is measured by making a distinction between ministries and agencies more directly involved in crisis management in different sectors and other units. We would expect civil servants in agencies and ministries with a specific crisis-management responsibility to perceive their authorities' ability to prevent and handle crises as greater than such actors not belonging to such policy areas.
Furthermore, the basis of our expectations is that diversity in hierarchical structural position, seeing crisis management from different levels, and performing tasks that involve different knowledge bases, networks and activities will create variety in the assessment of crisis management (cf. Christensen et al., 2007). Our general assumption is that civil servants in leadership positions will generally give a more positive evaluation of their own organization's ability to handle and prevent crises than people without leadership responsibilities. Leaders are primarily meant to attend to or to be responsible for handling and preventing crises, and they will therefore see them from a top hierarchical-coordinative perspective.
Coordination capacity is a core challenge in crisis management (Boin and Bynander, 2014). Perceived coordination capability measures whether civil servants generally see their own organizational unit as scoring high on general coordination capacity or not. Here we will
5 focus on vertical coordination within own policy area because of the liability principle, indicating that each and every ministry and agency is responsible for internal security and crisis management within their own portfolio. We would expect employees who perceive having such capability also to score higher on perceived ability of the authorities to prevent and handle crises.
A cultural-institutional perspective
The second perspective in the analysis is the cultural-institutional one (Selznick, 1957).
Through a process of institutionalization, organizations are gradually adapting to internal and external pressure and developing unique informal institutional cultural identities (Krasner, 1988; March, 1994). Path-dependency means that the informal norms and values in the formative years of a public organizations will heavily influence the path further taken. Actors will think and act primarily according to a cultural logic of appropriateness, of which the logic of consequence is one sub-category (March and Olsen, 1989).
Common identities and a high level of mutual trust are central characteristics and they make it possible to coordinate many activities in ways that make them potentially mutually consistent. A high level of mutual trust tends to enhance appropriate behaviour and vice versa.
In civil service systems with strong vertical sector relations, such as Norway, civil servants know what they are supposed to do and how to act, based on knowledge of cultural traditions, and this creates and maintains trust relations within the different sectors, but it may also constrain or modify trust and coordination among sectors (Fimreite et al., 2007). One would expect there to be a tension between a more traditional sector culture concerning crisis management and a new and more holistic and collaborative one.
We would expect administrative culture and context to make a difference for perceived crisis management capacity. Three variables are used to measure this. Actors in ministries and central agencies with a high level of mutual trust will generally be expected to make a more positive evaluation of these organizations' ability to handle and prevent crises. The same will be the case for actors with a high level of identification with their own organization or with the central government in general. Another general expectation is that civil servants working in a policy area with a high level of conflict may be less likely to perceive crisis management capacity positively.
6 The Norwegian Context
Norway has a consensus-oriented policy style (Olsen, Roness and Sætren, 1982). The regime’s performance and the level of trust in public institutions are generally higher than in most other countries (Norris, 1999; Christensen and Lægreid, 2005), as is the general level of trust in society (Rothstein and Stolle 2003). The public sector in Norway is large and there is a relatively high level of mutual trust among public-sector organizations.
Historically, Norway has avoided major disasters or catastrophes, with the exception of the terrorist act in 2011, and we will expect this to affect the way civil servants assess their own capability. The most important developments in Norwegian internal security policy since the Cold War have been a gradual strengthening of the Minister of Justice’s overall coordination responsibilities and the establishment of new central agencies and more ad hoc organizational arrangements (Lango et al., 2011). Overall Norway was reluctant reformer in the field of societal security and crisis management up to the terrorist attack in 2011 (Christensen, Lægreid and Rykkja, 2015).
A core concept within the Norwegian government is individual ministerial responsibility. This implies strong sectoral ministries, resulting in weak horizontal coordination between policy areas. This is also the case within the area of internal security and crisis management, where the Ministry of Justice’s responsibility for coordination is confronted by strong sectoral interests (Fimreite et al., 2014). Three crucial principles guide the Norwegian authorities’ approach to crisis management. A liability principle implies that every ministry and authority is responsible for crisis management within its own sector. A principle of proximity emphasizes that a crisis should be managed at the lowest operational level possible.
A principle of conformity emphasizes that organizational forms in a crisis should be as similar to ‘normal organizational’ forms as possible. A fourth principle of cooperation, implemented after the terrorist attack, emphasizes the necessity of collaboration between public sector organizations without challenging the principle of liability.
The terrorist attacks in 2011 exposed serious shortfalls in the government’s emergency preparedness and ability to handle such a crisis. The Inquiry Commission attributed this to a lack of risk awareness, an inability to learn from previous experiences, and lacking implementation capacity, especially related to crisis planning (NOU 2012:14). The crisis exposed a fragmented policy area, accountability pulverization, structural fragmentation, and weak coordination. The Commission stated that the lesson learned after the attacks were more related to deficient leadership, culture and attitudes than to a lack of resources or a need for
7 new legislation and organizational changes, which seems as a somewhat paradoxical conclusion, since so much in the report was about organizational problems (Christensen, Lægreid and Rykkja 2015).
In spite of that, the largest reform in this area after 2011 has been the Police Reform in 2015, focusing on structural reorganizations by merging 27 police districts into 12 (Christensen, Lægreid and Rykkja, 2017). Overall, the main organization principles for societal security and crisis management have not been changed but many changes within the existing ministerial system have added up to rather significant changes when we see internal and external structural changes, changes in leadership as well as changes in regulations and procedures together. This has been possible because the issues of internal security and crisis management has received much more political attention (see chapter x).
Based on these changes after 2011, attention towards internal security and crisis management increased and such issues came higher on the political agenda. More resources were allocated to the field, formal changes and new regulations occurred, and it was also more focus on leadership. Our expectation is, therefore, that the civil servants perceived crisis management capacity is higher in 2016 than in 2011.
Data and methodology
The empirical data in this chapter are based on two surveys of civil servants conducted in 2006 and 2016. All civil servants with at least one year tenure, from executive officers to top civil servants in Norwegian ministries, and every third civil servant in the central agencies were included. In 2006 a total of 1874 employees in the ministries and 1452 in central agencies answered the survey. In 2016 the numbers were 2322 and 1963. The response rate in 2006 was 67 percent in the ministries and 59 percent in the agencies. In 2016 it was 60% in the ministries and 59 % in the agencies, which is overall a very high response rate.
In both surveys the civil servants were asked to answer the following questions: “How well prepared are the public authorities in your field of work to prevent and handle crises, accidents and disasters? (For example avalanches, storms, plane crashes, railway and shipping accidents, epidemics and terrorist attacks). We asked the respondents to rank their answers from 1 (very well prepared) to 5 (very badly prepared). Also ‘do not know’ was a response category. This is the dependent variable in this paper.
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The dependent variables – prevention and handling of crises
In our case, crises cover a broad spectre from intentional man made crises such as terrorist attack, to unintended natural crises such as avalanches, storms, and also epidemics and crises related to transportation incidents. They differ in their degree of uniqueness and predictability, their degree of uncertainty regarding how to handle them and how transboundary they are (Gundel, 2005; Christensen, Lægreid and Rykkja, 2016). Regarding the degree of surprise, uncertainty and difficulty to predict the hardest cases are the ‘unknown unknown’ or black swans which are very hard to prepare for or prevent. Regarding the so-called ‘known unknown’
cases, it is more easy to understand what can be done to counter an urgent threat. These are normally periodically natural crisis which are relatively well understood. Crises normally happen irregularly and a crucial feature is that crises is a matter of perceptions and thus include a subjective element (Boin, 2008). There is normally a strong element of urgency and critical decisions have to be taken under uncertainty (Rosenthal, Charles and ‘t Hart,1989).
Table 1 shows that civil servants generally report that they feel that they are well prepared to prevent and handle crises, accidents and disasters within their own field of work.
Two thirds of the civil servants in the ministries and central agencies who expressed an opinion on this issue said they were either well or very well prepared. This might reflect the overall picture of a well performing administrative apparatus in Norway (Greve, Lægreid and Rykkja 2016). One third of our respondents, however, answered ‘don’t know’ or ‘not relevant’. This relatively high score indicates that many civil servants work with tasks or in agencies that are not closely related to crises, internal security or accidents.i
Table 1. How well prepared ministries and agencies are to prevent and handle crises in their own field of work, as seen by civil servants. Percentage.
2006 2016
Very well prepared Well prepared
Neither well nor badly prepared Badly prepared
Very badly prepared N=100%
16 52 24 7 2 1816
19 53 21 5 1 1961 The responses of the civil servants who said ‘don’t know/not relevant’ were excluded (about 33%).
9 One interesting finding is that the civil servants perceptions are rather stable over time. We would have expected that the external chock that the terrorist attack in 2011 represented would create more attention, organizational changes and resources to the field of internal security and crisis management and that thus in turn would lead the civil servants to perceive that they were better prepared to prevent and handle crises now than before the terrorist attack. One reason for this might be that even if the attention, organizational changes and resources have increased in this area, so has feeling of insecurity and the expectations of possible crises increased as well. So, there might be a coevolution between crisis management capacity and risk awareness and risk acceptance level (Christensen, Lægreid and Rykkja, 2016).Increased crisis management capacity might enhance risk awareness and risk acceptance, which in turn might affect the perceived crisis management capacity. A gap between crisis management capacity and risk acceptance can then be reduced by either increasing the capacity, reducing the risk acceptance level or a by a combination.
A supplementary but somewhat different explanation can be type of crises. If the civil servants first of all refer to the terrorist attacks, they might see this crisis as a unique type of crises with a low probability to occur again. Facing a crisis situation of low probability but high impact, they might think that this type of crises might probably not happen again and thus their perceived crisis management capacity might remain rather stable.
Variations in civil servants' perceptions of the crisis-management capability
We now turn to the question of the relative explanatory power of the various independent variables for civil servants' views of their own ability to prevent and handle crises. Here we conducted a linear OLS regression analysis (Table 2)ii.
Table 2. Summary of regression equations by structural, cultural and demographic features affecting civil servants' perceptions of the government’s ability to prevent and handle crises. Standardized Beta coefficients. Linear regression.
2006 2016
Structural features:
Ministry/central agency
Policy area (internal security/crisis management /other areas) Position
Perceived coordination capability
- .13**
.09**
.09**
.24**
.19**
.08**
.06**
Cultural features:
Mutual trust .14** .05*
10 Identification own department/own agency
Conflict in field of work
.05*
.08**
.12**
.14**
Control variables:
Gender Age Tenure
.04 .03 -
- -.03 - .01
Adjusted R2 .09 .12
**: Significant at .001-level; *: Significant at .01-level
In 2006 the multivariate analyses show that policy area makes a significant difference. Civil servants working in ministries and central agencies with special responsibility for internal security and crisis management are significantly more satisfied with their own crisis management capability than those working in other central bodies. This might illustrate the problem of practicing the principle of sectoral or institution-based responsibility. Theoretically, we would expect that integrated crisis management would result in less awareness of those tasks, and conversely that more separate and specialized organization of functions would result in more awareness and capacity. And indeed, that is exactly what our data indicate. But these results say nothing about how easy it is to coordinate crisis management between agencies that are heavily focused on these tasks. In this analysis there is also a significant effect of position.
Civil servants in leadership positions perceive that the crisis management capacity in their own field is higher than civil servants without management positions. We also see a clear effect of another structural variable: coordination capability. Civil servants scoring high on coordination capability report a higher level of perceived crisis-management capability than those who report problems of coordination.
Cultural variables also have an effect. In particular, a high level of mutual trust between ministries and central agencies tends to enhance perceptions of crisis management capability.
There is an effect of identification with own agency or department, and related to level of conflict in own field of work.
The results from 2016 compared to 2006 show the overall same pattern. Both structural and cultural variables matter while demographic control variables has no effect. Also in 2016 employees in the field of internal security and crisis management have significant higher perception about crisis management capacity than those working elsewhere, especially this is the case if they are in management positions and report that the coordination capacity is good in their own policy area.
11 The main difference between 2006 and 2016 is the importance of working at ministerial level in contrast to working in a central agency. In 2006 this did not make a significant variation, but in 2016 the administrative level was in fact the most important single factor to understand the variation in crisis management perceptions. In 2016 civil servants in ministries had higher perceptions regarding the crisis management capacity than their colleagues in central agencies. While 76% of civil servants in ministries meant that they were well or very well prepared to prevent and handle crises in their own field of work, 67% of the civil servants in central agencies had the same perceptions. One way of understanding this is that crisis management was not high on the political agenda in 2006 and received a low level of attention which might produce rather similar perceptions in ministries and central agencies. In 2016 the situation was different. More serious crises had occurred and second these crises had changed the agenda setting and attention focus significantly. For civil servants in ministries closer to their political executives this might have changed their perceptions towards higher crises management capacity also due to the fact that many of the changes involved the ministries and the interface between political and administrative executives. In the central agencies the civil servants might be closer to the actual crisis management and they might to a greater degree perceive the weaknesses of the crisis management system.
Regarding cultural features, employees having high identification with own organization, low level of conflict and feeling high level of mutual trust relations between agencies and ministries, have higher perception of crisis management capacity in their own field of work. In contrast to 2006 low level of conflict has a higher importance for perceived crisis management capacity and high level of mutual trust a lower importance.
Discussion
Our first main result is that the civil servants have rather stable perceptions on the crisis management capacity over time, even though there is a major terrorist attack in 2011 hitting directly at the core of the central civil service. One interpretation of this is that what Easton (1965) labels ‘diffuse support’ or general system trust is very strong in Norway. Or put differently, when more specific support, related to specific institutions or actors is challenged, as in this case, the effects are minor, probably meaning that the ‘slack’ in the system is high (Cyert and March,1963). A similar experience was that the trust in the police went down right after the terrorist attack, but got back up again rather quickly (Christensen, Lægreid and Rykkja, 2016).
12 Going back to our hypotheses, we find a clear pattern. Variations in perception of crisis management capacity can to a great extent be explained by structural and cultural variables.
Demographic control variables do no matter. This is in line with broader trends in survey results related to the attitudes, perceptions and contact pattern in the Norwegian central civil service, i.e. we find generic features regardless of policy area (Christensen et al., 2007),
Among the civil servants, structural variables related to specialization and coordination have strong explanatory power. Administrative leaders in specialized agencies with particular responsibility for crisis management and who report overall good coordination capacity believe they are most capable when it comes to crisis management. In contrast, civil servants working in regular agencies and ministries espousing the principle of general responsibility for crisis management in their own area and who experience coordination problems, give the lowest assessment of crisis-management capability. This shows that the attention and capacity structure, related to formal structure is important, combining horizontal and vertical aspects of specialization and coordination (Egeberg, 2012; Gulick, 1937, Simon 1957). Having crisis management as one's main institutional focus is an advantage when it comes to both attention and resources, but it also increases knowledge about the preventive potential and handling ability. Actors with a lot of other tasks to attend to, and where internal security and crisis- management tasks are only one type of task among many others, meaning differentiated attention and capacity, will perceive more problems. Generally speaking the existence of coordination problems indicates a fragmented structural context, which is problematic for this policy area. We also expected administrative leaders to be more prepared to prevent and handle crises than those lower down in the hierarchy. This is confirmed. This may indicate that this is a rather specialized policy area.
In addition, the administrative culture must be taken into consideration. Mutual trust between ministries and subordinate agencies tends to enhance crisis-management capability and make coordination easier. This is what Bardach (1998) labels "smart practice," where the crucial point is not so much structural reorganization and new coordinative structures, but softer cultural measures where different public organizations find pragmatic ways to collaborate based on a common cultural understanding. Civil servants identifying strongly with their own agency and who perceived less conflict score relatively higher on their perceptions of crisis-management capability. This is at the core of Selznick’s (1957) cultural theory on institutionalization, supplemented by Krasner’s (1988) concepts of vertical depth – strong identity – and horizontal width – strong cultural horizontal integration, which is more difficult
13 with conflicts. Level of conflict, identification and mutual trust show the expected results both in 2006 and in 2016.
One main insight is that, despite the debate if it is structural features or cultural features that matter, we have to look at the interplay between structural and cultural variables. It important lesson is that it is the interplay and mutual relationships between structure and culture that need to be taken into account and we have to go beyond the either/or discussion (Christensen and Lægreid 2008).
Conclusion
Typical for the way Norway handles crisis-management concerns is that, even though commissions are assigned to work on the problems, the government uses a lot of resources, and media coverage is intensive, the results of these processes are rather limited (Christensen, Lægreid and Rykkja 2015). Crisis management obviously has come higher on the political agenda in Norway after the terrorist attack. In spite of this, we see remarkable stability regarding the civil servants overall perceptions of their crisis management which is high both before and after the terrorist attack. We have interpreted this as an indication of what Easton (1965) labels high diffuse system support.
Second, we also see robustness when it comes to what explains the variations in their perceptions (Christensen, Fimreite and Lægreid 2011). Both before and after the terrorist attack the main explanatory factors are linked to structural and cultural features. What we see is a combination on the importance of policy area, on the one hand, and trust and identity relations on the other hand. Civil servants with working in ministries and central agencies with a specific responsibility for internal security and crisis management issues, who perceive the coordination within own policy area as good, who have strong identity to own organization and high mutual trust relations between ministries and central agencies, report stronger perceived crisis management capacity than other civil servants.
Thus organization type matters to a great extent. Both in 2006 and 2016 there is a significant variations between organizations with a specific responsibility for crisis management and other organizations in central government. Civil servants within established organizations in which the response occur within a preexisting structure and is part of the regular and core tasks of the organizations have different perceptions about crisis prevention and response than other government organizations (Boin et al., 2016). Third, civil servants in
14 management position and who report low level of conflict seem to assess the crisis management capacity to be better in 2016 than in 2006.
In contrast to the Norwegian debate on internal security and crisis management that either focus on cultural feature or structural features, the challenge is to address the interplay of cultural and structural features (Christensen, Lægreid and Rykkja, 2016). The inquiry commission underlined that culture and attitudes were more important than organizational features, while the police study argued that organization and structure is a main reason for the challenges that the police face. But it is important to understand that culture does not develop in in a vacuum but within structural constraints (Lægreid and Rykkja 2014).
A main lesson is the need to the interaction between cultural features and structural arrangements. There is no one factor explanation on the variation in the civil servants perceptions on their crisis management capacity. Both structural and cultural features are necessary to understand the perceived crisis management capacity in Norwegian central government. Another lesson is that with a political and administrative leadership characterized by high legitimacy and mutual trust relations, it would overall be easier to cope with modern, transboundary crises.
A third lesson is that not only increased crisis management capacity is needed. Also the interaction between crisis management capacity and governance legitimacy and trust need to be taken into account (Christensen, Lægreid and Rykkja, 2016). When crisis occur not only crisis management capacity is put to a test but also the civil servants expectations, attentions, awareness and risk acceptance are altered. The more legitimacy the crisis management authorities enjoy, the better they can perform their tasks (Rothstein, 1998). The match or mismatch between governance capacity and civil servants expectations and risk acceptance is important. Increased governance capacity following a crisis can be accompanied by decreased risk acceptance and result in perceptions of crisis management among civil servants at more or less at the same level. This means that crisis management performance is not only a question of objective reality but also a matter of perceptions and sentiments among civil servants (Lewis 2005).
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i One interesting observation is that in 2006 there was no big gap between how the citizens assess the government’s
crisis management capacity and how the civil servants at central lever assess their own capacity (Christensen, Fimreite and Lægreid 2010). For 2016 we do not have comparative data with the citizens.
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ii Only variables that were significant in bivariate analysis is included. We also include three demographic control variables, gender, age and tenure.
