CMC-19

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This conference marks the publication of the book "Nordic Crisis Management: Well-Performing Governance during COVID-19", edited by Ásthildur Elva Bernharðsdóttir, Professor at Bifröst University, and Baldur Þórhallsson, Professor at the University of Iceland. The volume provides the first systematic comparative analysis of how the five Nordic states, together with Greenland and the Faroe Islands, managed the COVID-19 pandemic. The conference will also address broader lessons for governance, resilience, and crisis management and discuss whether the Nordic model of crisis management is sufficiently prepared for the next major transboundary crisis in an increasingly uncertain and polarized international environment.

The conference brings together scholars from across the Nordic region who have participated in the research project Crisis Management and the COVID-19 Pandemic: Leadership, Expertise and Best Practices. The project has examined how administrative scale, polity and structural arrangements, and culture shaped crisis management in the Nordic countries during COVID-19.

This project established a network of leading scholars in the field of crisis management to analyze, evaluate and compare the strategic responses of Iceland, Greenland, Norway, Sweden, the Faroe Islands, Finland and Denmark to the COVID19 crisis, sharing experiences and best practices with the aim of strengthening resilience and coordination between the Nordic countries for future intra-national crisis management.

The consortium applied a renowned comparative case study framework on crisis management that has been developed to analyse decision-making and policy-making dynamics in extraordinary situations. The different population size of the Nordic countries presents an opportunity to evaluate to what extent the size of a state’s public administration and governance can potentially influence the way in which it responds to a crisis situation. Research shows that there are fundamental differences between the functioning of governance in small and large states - differences that have not been adequately addressed in the crisis management literature. The different strategies that the culturally similar Nordic countries have opted for provides an excellent laboratory to study both the effectiveness of their approaches to crisis management and regional cooperation.