Eve Coles

The failure to learn lessons from crises is a common observation. The UK Government has been criticized for its response to the COVID-19 crisis. Many critics have highlighted the Government’s apparent failure to learn the lessons from Exercise Cygnus, which made recommendations to improve the UK’s response to a pandemic. This article compares and c...

The failure to learn lessons from crises is a common observation. The UK Government has been criticized for its response to the COVID-19 crisis. Many critics have highlighted the Government’s apparent failure to learn the lessons from Exercise Cygnus, which made recommendations to improve the UK’s response to a pandemic. This article compares and c...

This paper briefly explores the concept of resilience, the relationship between resilience and civil emergencies, organisational learning from crisis and emergencies as an essential element of resilience and the notion of a resilience profession. It then presents a framework of resilience practice for the United Kingdom (UK) the intention of which...

Purpose – The purpose of this technical viewpoint is to provide a commentary of how we went about using logistics prototyping as a method to engage citizens, science fiction (SF) writers and small- to medium- sized enterprises (SME’s). Six urban logistic prototypes built on the themes of future cities, community resilience and urban supply chain ma...

This Occasional Paper highlights the gap between theory and practice in UK emergency management. The need for collaboration makes major incident management challenging, since responder organisations must coordinate as a collective whole. In other words, demonstrate effective interoperability. To improve UK interoperability ‘in practice’, the Joint...

The fictional prototype uses imaginative narratives based explicitly on science fact as a design tool in the development of technology. Through traditional research and development we begin to define and understand what a technology is. This is the typical work that is going on in industrial labs and universities all over the world. Usually this wo...

“Ministers have admitted that the chaos over the fuel crisis, flooding, foot-and-mouth and then the panic over September 11 have shown the United Kingdom's ability to respond to national emergencies is haphazard.”

Researchers in the United Kingdom have long recognised that the emergency management system was in need of restructuring. (Parker and Handmer, 1992; Rockett 1993; Coles 1999; Norman and Coles 2002). The fuel crisis and the floods of 2001 and the foot and mouth crisis of 2002 exposed serious weakness in the United Kingdom's capability to deal with w...

“Risk is like beauty — it exists in the eye of the beholder.” (Pitzer, 1999) This book has sought to bring together a number of perspectives on the management of risk. Its ultimate aim has always been to raise the significance of risk within key areas of political and organisational activities and with a key focus on the management and control of t...

Recent events like the BSE and GM food crises, and the Concorde crash in July 2000, have illustrated that large private and public sector organisations are vulnerable and can suffer from major disruption to their business. Awareness of the need to develop expertise in risk management has grown and as a result new programs of research and teaching i...

Of course it's safe, trust me! Conceptualising issues of risk management within the "Risk Society" -- A case study in risk management: the UK pumped storage business -- Challenging the orthodoxy in risk management: the need for a paradigm shift? -- Incentives for loss prevention instead of disaster management by the state in the case of catastrophi...

The Comprehensive Spending Review (CSR) will have far-reaching effects on government departments and on local government. Terms such as ‘best value’, ‘bench-marking’ and ‘national performance standards’ are now being used to describe the way in which local authority accountability and efficiency are to be tackled and improved. The local authorities...