Paresh Wankhade, Edge Hill University

Giles McClelland, Edge Hill University

Increasingly, disasters, emergencies and crises have become defining challenges for contemporary public management scholarship. Global security threats, floods, wildfires, terrorist attacks and pandemics require a swift response from the authorities and emergency services. This involves continuous translation, boundary spanning and brokerage across professional, organizational, and jurisdictional boundaries. Such conditions place intense pressure on public organizations to anticipate risks, co-ordinate across fragmented systems, communicate with the public, maintain legitimacy and learn from failure.

This theme issue invites contributions that examine the changing relationship between disaster management, emergency services, inclusion and public governance. There is particular interest in the movement from a narrow model of emergency response towards a broader concern with inclusive resilient governance. Existing scholarship further suggests that effective crisis management involves good leadership, sense-making, organizational support, effective co-ordination, clear communication, accountability, legitimacy and learning.

Public management scholarship has highlighted the importance of governance capacity, institutional design and legitimacy in crisis systems, signalling the role and value of collaborative and network governance during turbulent times. This highlights the difficulties of co-ordinating multiple actors under conditions of urgency, uncertainty, threat and risk. Resilience scholarship further reminds us that disaster preparedness and recovery depend not only on formal state capacity, but also on social capital, community capabilities, information flows, local knowledge and uneven patterns of vulnerability.

Existing scholarship also emphasises the actions employees take to promote and protect their own personal resilience. Job crafting has been found to be positively associated with favourable outcomes for job holders, teams and organizations. Due to its bottom-up nature, job crafting has been identified as potentially beneficial for dynamic and turbulent work environments in which managers require employees to demonstrate initiative and adaptive capabilities. Exploring any mutually beneficial job crafting behaviours to improve workforce resilience, staff engagement and wellbeing will offer interesting insights into contemporary emergency service management.

Exposure to disasters including preparedness, evacuation, response, and reconstruction processes are not socially neutral events and are also shaped by gender and identity relations, social norms, institutional cultures and unequal distributions of power and resources in how the risk is produced, experienced and managed.

This theme welcomes conceptual, theoretical, empirical and comparative papers addressing disaster management, emergency services, job crafting, diversity and resilience from a public management theory and practice perspective. There is particular encouragement for submissions that connect emergency and disaster studies with debates in public administration, public policy, governance, organizational theory, collaborative governance, gender studies, public service management and institutional resilience. There is particular interest in studies that explore how emergency service managers and employees craft and reshape their roles to promote and protect their personal resilience.

Potential topics

• How are emergency services adapting to more complex, frequent and interconnected crises?
• What forms of governance capacity are needed to manage compound and cascading risks?
• How do public organizations co-ordinate across organizational, sectoral and jurisdictional boundaries during disasters?
• What are the strengths and limitations of command-and-control, networked and collaborative models of emergency management?
• How do emergency services balance centralized command with local discretion, improvisation and community knowledge?
• How do frontline responders reshape tasks, relationships and meanings during disaster preparedness, response and recovery?
• What forms of job crafting support workforce resilience, engagement, wellbeing and service continuity?
• What role do leaders and managers play in influencing the job crafting behaviours of teams and individuals?
• How do public organizations maintain trust, legitimacy and accountability during and after crises?
• What role do identities such as women and gender-diverse actors play in community resilience, mutual aid and local crisis leadership?
• How do inequalities shape exposure to disaster risk, access to emergency services and recovery outcomes?
• What role do communities, civil society organizations, volunteers and private actors play in building resilience?
• How do governments and emergency services learn or fail to learn from inquiries, reviews and past disasters?
• How are digital technologies, data analytics, AI, early warning systems and crisis communication platforms transforming emergency management?

Timeline

• May 1, 2027: Deadline for research articles
• August 1, 2027: Deadline for debate and new development articles