THE ROUTLEDGE HANDBOOK ON CRISIS POLYCRISIS AND PUBLIC ADMINISTRATION (HB 2025)

This volume considers how local, national, and global crises with differing durations, sizes, and impacts challenge the public sector to respond.

Within the public administration and policy disciplines, there has been limited recognition about the nature of, linkages among, and the response options for crises and polycrises, when more than one crisis, emergency, disaster, or catastrophe (whether human-caused or natural) simultaneously impacts citizens in one geographical location. This handbook gathers experts from different fields to explore how each crisis challenges human capacity, information technology, and communication capabilities, and how public leaders must respond. These expert contributions are grouped within five thematic sections:

• Structures in Crisis: A North-South Dialogue, to engage national and global perspectives on how political, social, and economic structures respond during crises
• Agents in Crisis: A Cross-Actor Dialogue, on how agents respond to crises
• Human Capital and Information Technology in Crisis, exploring how these resources interact during crises
• Public Sector Communication in Crisis, examining issues of government and governance in effective crisis communication
• Practitioners in Crisis, a reminder to the discipline that important context and realities are missed if practitioner realities are overlooked.

Chapters in the book engage 23 countries and one overseas dependency along with 14 crisis events. Eighteen chapters are focused on one crisis event while ten chapters directly or indirectly engage polycrises.

As crises and polycrises become a constancy of our time, this volume will be of great interest to students, researchers, and practitioners of public administration and public policy.

Kim Moloney is an Associate Professor at the College of Public Policy at Hamad Bin Khalifa University, Qatar. Her latest books are her sole-authored Who Matters at the World Bank (2022) and separately, her co-editing (with Diane Stone) of The Oxford Handbook of Global Policy and Transnational Administration (2019).

Gloria J. Billingsley is a Professor of Public Policy and Administration at Jackson State University, USA, with over 20 years of teaching experience and building community partnerships. Her research includes issues on voting rights; race, gender, and class; minority participation in health research, and issues of spirituality and health.

Bok Gyo Jeong is an Associate Professor of Public Affairs at Kean University, USA. His research interests include comparative civil society, global/transnational policy issues, nonprofit higher education, social entrepreneurship/economy, UN-NGO partnership, and collaboration between government and nonprofits.

Pablo Sanabria-Pulido is a Professor at Universidad EAFIT, Colombia. He studies and teaches the design, formulation, and implementation of public policies and the managerial challenges that public service organizations and public officials face, aiming to disentangle how to make public organizations work better, particularly at the national and local levels. His research has been recognized and published in key international public administration and policy outlets.

Tonya E. Thornton is the Director of Critical Infrastructure Protection with the Global Connective Center. Her expertise focuses on emergency management and grid security to provide resiliency solutions. She is a member of the American Society for Public Administration and is Treasurer for its Section on Emergency and Crisis Management.

Eric Zeemering is an Associate Professor and MPA Director at the University of Georgia, USA.