City Government Innovation for Extreme Crises, Risks and Emergency Governance

The world of emergency governance in cities is fundamentally changing and requires government innovation at multiple scales. Existing risks require updating in terms of their impact and probabilities. Examples include recent extreme weather events leading to devasting flooding or fires. New areas of uncertainty emerge where impact and probabilities are difficult to estimate (e.g. recent discussions of ‘climate whiplash’ facing cities).  In addition, we are dealing with an unprecedented period of “ignorance” in which emerging issues inevitably expose tightly coupled social systems to potential complex emergencies. For example, the climate crisis’ impact on different social systems is recognised, but there is little understanding of interdependencies and their effects.

 This changing emergency landscape calls for transformative change. It also requires a particular focus on public sector innovation at the level of city governance. Literatures on governing complex emergencies in cities remain nascent with little comparative work, lacking acknowledgement of urban governance traditions and constitutional contexts, and a missing focus on the politics of emergency responses having to balance local interest, agency and global impacts. At the same time, the wide spectrum of publications on risk and crisis management are increasingly converging. Whereas in the past, a clear distinction existed between worlds of risk and crisis (a world of dealing with relative certainty vs a world of dealing with uncertainty), the contemporary world has seen a merging of crisis and risk management tools. Yet, as risks are increasingly transboundary, these require transformative forms of innovation for city governance at a time where the climate crisis is posing ever more existential threats to the resources of city governance.

 This research focuses on the changing emergency landscape facing city governance, acting as a potential source for innovation at the level of the city in particular, but multi-level emergency governance more generally. Research is needed in the ways in which city governments prepare and could prepare for future emergencies that threaten to overwhelm existing arrangements. Such challenges range from ‘known’ issues that are associated with changes in likely impact and probabilities to non-linear emerging issues associated with high degrees of uncertainty.