Search

Founded in 1798, Rijkswaterstaat, the Dutch government’s agency for infrastructural works, brought flood security, navigable waterways and highways to the Netherlands. It is an iconic institution within Dutch society, best known for its ‘battle against the water’. The Zuiderzee Works (1920–1968) and the Delta Works (1954–1997) brought worldwide acclaim. This chapter tells the story of a humble semi-military organization that developed into a formidable institution of civil engineers with a strong technocratic mission mystique. It also recounts the institutional crisis the agency experienced in the 1970s–1990s when it was too slow to adapt to major sociocultural and political changes. To ride the waves of change, it eventually developed several proactive adaptation strategies and reinvented its mission mystique in managerial terms. Adaptation to climate change now presents another key challenge, for which Rijkswaterstaat will have to develop a new ‘social license to operate’.

WADA is a hybrid public–private agency that leads the global fight against doping. This chapter explores why and how this agency developed into an institution that receives support from sports organizations and governments worldwide. Despite initial scepticism about its ability to overcome the ineffectiveness of anti-doping policies prior to its foundation in 1999, WADA quickly grew into a broadly trusted and well-respected organization. It successfully developed a globally harmonized anti-doping system that reinforced the credibility of international sports competitions and the legitimacy of elite sport policies. From its inception, it had a distinct identity as a neutral, impartial and objective standard setter and referee agent in a morally challenging organizational field. Nonetheless, being relatively young, WADA remains a vulnerable institution. It must continuously take an independent position with regard to partial interests of sporting and public authorities that are responsible for WADA’s funding and governance. This requires institutional leadership that the organization cannot always offer, as recent doping affairs show.

The European Organization for Nuclear Research (CERN) is the world’s most formidable centre for particle physics. Its mission is radically ambitious: uncovering what the universe is made of and how it works. It advances that mission by providing particle accelerator facilities that enable world-class research in fundamental physics, bringing together scientists from all over the world to push the frontiers of science and technology. It has become widely recognized as one of the most successful cross-national collaborative research organizations of all times. Smart institutional design, good governance, resourceful leadership and resilient collaboration have underpinned the strong sense of interdependence, entrenched norms of mutual respect, trust, empathy and consensual decision-making that have allowed it to thrive.

Several Canadian and international scholars offer commentaries on the implications of the COVID‐19 pandemic for governments and public service institutions, and fruitful directions for public administration research and practice. This first suite of commentaries focuses on the executive branch, variously considering: the challenge for governments to balance demands for accountability and learning while rethinking policy mixes as social solidarity and expert knowledge increasingly get challenged; how the policy‐advisory systems of Australia, Canada, New Zealand, and United Kingdom were structured and performed in response to the COVID‐19 crisis; whether there are better ways to suspend the accountability repertoires of Parliamentary systems than the multiparty agreement struck by the minority Liberal government with several opposition parties; comparing the Canadian government’s response to the COVID‐19 pandemic and the Global Financial Crisis and how each has brought the challenge of inequality to the fore; and whether the COVID‐19 pandemic has accelerated or disrupted digital government initiatives, reinforced traditional public administration values or more open government.

It’s an institution—a phrase we have all come across or may have used. We intuitively understand what it means. There is something special, perhaps mythical, about them. We value these institutions. We may even find it hard to imagine a life without some of these institutions. In this chapter, we offer a definition of institutions and introduce our theoretical framework (based on the work of Philip Selznick). We introduce the case studies in this book and identify patterns of institution building.

Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF), or Doctors without Borders, was started by a few doctors and journalists in the 1970s. Today, MSF is a humanitarian actor to be reckoned with, with its emergency medicine expertise and its unique interpretation of the neutrality and independence principles. The organization has acted unconventionally in numerous humanitarian crises and criticized peer organizations in the sector. This nonconformity has never harmed MSF; the organization is highly respected by the general public. This chapter analyzes how MSF as a principled provocateur could evolve into a public guardian of humanitarian values. We posit that MSF’s controversial acts have become an integral part of its reputation; it is expected to go against the grain. However, in order to be credible, the organization works hard to uphold its ‘volunteer and humanitarian spirit’ and strives to be an effective and professional organization.

In all societies, life as usual is punctuated from time to time by critical episodes marked by a sense of threat and uncertainty that shatters people's understanding of the world around them. We refer to these episodes in terms of crisis. Crises are triggered in a variety of ways; for example, by natural forces (earthquakes, hurricanes, torrential rains, ice storms, epidemics and the like) or by the deliberate acts of ‘others’ (‘enemies’) inside or outside that society (international conflict and war, terrorist attacks, large-scale disturbances). But they may also find their roots in malfunctions of a society's sociotechnical and political administrative systems (infrastructure breakdowns, industrial accidents, economic busts and political scandals). Some crises affect communities as a whole (think of floods or volcanic eruptions), others directly threaten only a few members of the community, but their occurrence is widely publicised and evokes incomprehension, indignation or fear in many others (child pornography rings, police corruption, bombing campaigns). Yet the very occurrence of critical episodes casts doubt on the adequacy of the people, institutions and practices that are supposed to either prevent such destructive impacts from happening or mitigate the impact if they do hit. We define ‘crises’ as episodic breakdowns of familiar symbolic frameworks that legitimate the pre-existing sociopolitical order ('t Hart 1993).

Crises cast shadows on the polities in which they occur. The sense of threat and uncertainty that pervades them shatters people's understanding of the world around them. Scholars have argued that the very occurrence of a crisis or the widespread use of the ‘crisis’ label to denote a particular state of affairs or development implies a ‘dislocation’ of hitherto dominant social, political or administrative discourses (Wagner-Pacifici 1986, 1994; Howarth et al. 2000). This dislocation can delegitimise the power and authority relationships that these discourses underpin, and may pose grave challenges to the position of incumbent officeholders and institutions or to established policies and organisations. At the same time, crisis opens up semantic and political space for actors to redefine issues, propose new policies, foster public reflection, or simply to gain popularity and strike at opponents. Typically, such opportunism rides on the wave of crisis-induced processes of accountability and learning. Edelman was right in pointing out that incumbent elites are not necessarily threatened by crises. Some disturbances or emergencies may fit their purposes quite neatly. They may actively seek to ‘create’ crises in order to gain authority. He observes with characteristic succinctness: ‘Any regime that prides itself on crisis management is sure to find crises to manage’ (Edelman 1977: 47). But the same goes for the other end of the political power spectrum: parliamentary opposition figures, interest group leaders and self-appointed public voices may actively work to ‘discover’ and inflate crises.

This open access book explores a special species of trouble afflicting modern societies: creeping crises. These crises evolve over time, reveal themselves in different ways, and resist comprehensive responses despite periodic public attention. As a result, these crises continue to creep in front of our eyes. This book begins by defining the concept of a creeping crisis, showing how existing literature fails to properly define and explore this phenomenon and outlining the challenges such crises pose to practitioners. Drawing on ongoing research, this book presents a diverse set of case studies on: antimicrobial resistance, climate change-induced migration, energy extraction, big data, Covid-19, migration, foreign fighters, and cyberattacks. Each chapter explores how creeping crises come into existence, why they can develop unimpeded, and the consequences they bring in terms of damage and legitimacy loss. The book provides a proof-of-concept to help launch the systematic study of creeping crises. Our analysis helps academics understand a new species of threat and practitioners recognize and prepare for creeping crises.