Jeroen Wolbers

Leiden University | LEI · Institute for Security and Global Affairs

The common operational picture is used to overcome coordination and information management problems during emergency response. Increasingly, this approach is incorporated in more advanced information systems. This is rooted in an ‘information warehouse’ perspective, which implies information can be collected, sorted and exchanged in an accessible a...

Coordination theories are characterized primarily by a focus on integration, in which coordination is aimed at achieving a coherent and unified set of actions. However, in the extreme settings in which fast-response organizations operate, achieving integration is often challenging. In this study we employ a fragmentation perspective to show that de...

Fast-response organizations excel in mounting swift and coordinated responses to unexpected events. There are a multitude of conflicting explanations why these organizations excel. These range from acknowledging the strengths of centralized command and control structures, towards stressing the importance of decentralized, improvised action. Though...

The field of crisis and disaster studies has proliferated over the past two decades. Attention is bound to grow further as the world negotiates the prolonged challenges of the Covid-19 pandemic. In this review, we provide an overview of the main foci, methods, and research designs employed in the crisis and disaster research fields in the period of...

On Monday morning March 18, 2019 a terrorist opened fire inside a tram in the middle of the city of Utrecht. A key challenge in the Utrecht attack was making sense of the situation and organizing a coherent response in a distributed command and control structure. This is a recurrent challenge in crisis management. As command structures expand, sens...

Information exchange is regarded as a vital component of crisis management, yet organizations continue to struggle with the timely distribution of information across organizational and professional boundaries in a crisis. In this chapter, we reflect on the doctrine of “netcentric operations” in the Netherlands, which has been implemented to enhance...

Iconic events have traditionally instigated progression in the fields of crisis and disaster science. In the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic, the pressing question is how this global health emergency impacted the research agendas of our field. We reviewed contributions in ten important crisis and disaster journals in the two and a half years followin...

At the time when this issue of Risk, Hazards and Crisis in Public Policy gets published (March 2022), we can look back at over 2 years of COVID‐19 pandemic. The crisis had both many phases and faces, in ever so many countries around the globe. In RHCPP, we have seen discussions on its creeping nature (Boin et al., 2020), its dispropor- tionate impa...

The requirements for effective and responsive crisis management have developed significantly in the face of proliferating transboundary crises and rising societal demands during the information revolution. As crises disturb more and more societal strata and rapidly span across different types of networks, traditional crisis structures need to becom...

Research on organizational crisis emanates from multiple disciplines (public administration, international relations, political science, organization science, communication studies), yet basically argues that three main categories of crises exist: • Crises in organizations: often tangible, immediate threats or incidents that completely upset an org...

A major challenge for disaster scholars and policymakers is to understand the power dimension in response networks, particularly relating to collaboration and coordination. We propose a conceptual framework to study interests and negotiations in and between various civic and professional, response networks drawing on the concepts of “programming” a...

In dit opiniestuk bediscussieer ik een reeks inzichten die voortkomen uit eigen wetenschappelijke studies naar commandovoering tijdens politieachtervolgingen en terreurgevolgbestrijding, waaronder de tramaanslag in Utrecht. Deze studies heb ik uit- 2 gevoerdinhetkadervanNWOgefinancierdongebondenonderzoek. Deonderzochte operaties hebben allemaal een...

In deze bijdrage staat een analyse van het crisismanagement tijdens de tramaanslag in Utrecht op 18 maart 2019 centraal. Direct na de schietpartij komt een grote multidisciplinaire hulp- verleningsoperatie op gang en start de politie met de Manhunt op de gevluchte dader(s). Om deze operaties te onderzoeken zijn 24 respondenten geïnterviewd die deel...

A key challenge in crisis management is maintaining an adequate information position to support coherent decision-making between a range of actors. Such distributed decision-making is often supported by a common operational picture that not only conveys factual information but also attempts to codify a dynamic and vibrant crisis management process....

In times of crises or disaster, the response capacity of public authorities is put under extreme pressure. In contrast, citizens are resilient in times of crises and are increasingly organizing themselves. The new possibilities offered by social media and online platforms have the potential for citizen self-organization. In practice, we see that go...

In the past years devastating terrorist attacks struck major European cities of Olso, Paris, Brussels, Nice, Berlin, London, Stockholm, and Manchester. It pushed the response capacity of Europe's emergency management agencies to its limits. Despite of organizational and technological systems being in place, the emergency response fell short on seve...

Europe's emergency services are increasingly confronted with sudden-onset crises, as headlines continue to remind us of terrorist attacks, extreme fires, and flash floods. Responding to sudden-onset crises typically generates fragmentation, as the crisis is characterized by an instant and rapidly escalating threat to the core functions of a society...

In this chapter we describe four key challenges of crisis management: cognition, communication, coordination, and control. The crash of Turkish Airlines at Schiphol functions as the case to introduce the challenges. We end by discussing an agenda for future research, which addresses ad-hoc teaming, command tactics, and information management.

This chapter examines the introduction and implementation of the pilot project Twitcident in an emergency response room setting. Twitcident is a web-based system for filtering, searching and analyzing data on real-world incidents or crises. Social media data is seen as important for emergency response operations: it can be used as an ‘early warning...

Citizens have often been found to converge on disaster sites. Such personal convergence is increasingly supported by online informational convergence. The adoption of online platforms represents an opportunity for response organizations to manage these two different manifestations of citizen convergence. We analyse one such platform, “Ready2Help”,...

In the aftermath of the devastating earthquakes in Nepal, a large scale humanitarian response was launched. We studied the response operation four weeks after the last quake, using participant observations and interviews. Our findings indicate that the response operation was characterized by two faces: control and collaboration. These are rooted in...

The aim of this paper is to critically explore whether crowdsourced Big Data enables an inclusive humanitarian response at times of crisis. We argue that all data, including Big Data, are socially constructed artefacts that reflect the contexts and processes of their creation. To support our argument, we qualitatively analysed the process of ‘Big D...

Network Centric Operations is a promising command doctrine in both military operations and during civil disaster management. As both sectors started intensifying their joint operational capacity through civil-military collaboration, it becomes increasingly relevant to address the different command doctrines underlying Network Centric Operations in...

Over the last decade, the disaster response landscape is increasingly complemented by voluntary citizen initiatives on digital platforms. These developments have opened up opportunities for response agencies and NGOs to organize local community involvement. In this paper we focus on the question how citizen involvement can be proactively organized...

Fostering community resilience in the aftermath of a disaster constitutes a significant challenge and requires an adequate understanding of the community’s specific capabilities and vulnerabilities. We carried out a field study in Nepal as a multi-disciplinary research team that explored how the humanitarian response enabled community resilience af...

Disasters and crisis create complex conditions that require intra-organizational and inter-organizational coordination throughout the duration of response operations. Emergency response plans and Incident Command Systems that are implemented at times of crisis are well defined on the intra-organizational level, following organization's own hierarch...

How do emergency responders coordinate the response operation across the boundaries of their organizations in fast-paced environments? Coordination is a key aspect of emergency management that addresses how crisis managers from police, ambulance services and fire department align their mutual interdependencies in an environment that is prone to esc...

This chapter examines the introduction and implementation of the pilot project Twitcident in an emergency response room setting. Twitcident is a web-based system for filtering, searching and analyzing data on real-world incidents or crises. Social media data is seen as important for emergency response operations: it can be used as an ‘early warning...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to contribute an analysis of how crisis communication can make a difference in terms of the impact of an emergency on society. Design/methodology/approach – The attitude of the response organisations with respect to communities is reflected in the planning model they adopt. Two ideal-typical planning models a...

In organization and management theory coordination is primarily characterized by integration. A tautology is concealed in this approach: coordination is simultaneously the diagnosis of the problem and the way forward to resolve it. Yet, already for several decades empirical studies in crisis management showed that fragmentation is a prevailing phen...

For more than four decades, ICS as a framework for managing multi-organizational disaster response opera- tions has been emulated, criticized, adapted and implemented in different forms, not only in the United States, but in many countries around the world. Yet, over these four decades, fundamental changes in information tech- nology have altered t...

Timely and adequate communication is essential for the response to emergency situations. The current vision on emergency response embraces the networked organization as an answer to the dilemmas of communication and information flows in crisis situations. With stabilization of the network paradigm, the focus question turns into how networks are per...

In our modern society, the impact of large-scale safety and security incidents can be large and diverse. Yet, this societal impact is makeable and controllable to a limited extent. At best, the effect of concrete response actions is that the direct damage is somewhat reduced and that the recovery is accelerated. Proper crisis communication can make...

In crisis management involvement of a large number of organizations is required. Not only the first responders need to take action, but also organizations and entities like civil authorities, public utility and crisis teams are responsible for critical infrastructures as well as the community. A key element for effective collaboration is situation...

Our main concern in this article is whether nation-wide information technology (IT) infrastructures or systems in emergency response and disaster management are the solution to the communication problems the safety sector suffers from. It has been argued that implementing nation-wide IT systems will help to create shared cognition and situational a...

This paper is about the introduction of netcentric work in the public safety sector in the Netherlands. The idea behind netcentric work is that a common operational picture will help the professionals to overcome problems with sharing information during crisis. In this WIP paper we will pay attention to netcentric work principles and the dilemma of...

The implementation of GMS (Integrated Emergency room System) in the Netherlands has had a tumultuous record. A direct consequence of the governmental decision to hand over the empty basic system to the emergency rooms is that a large deviation in local systems emerged. A case study in one of these emergency rooms explains the consequences of this a...