Transcrisis: Future Research Recommendations
Creators: name: Boin, Arjen
name: Lodge, Martin
Publisher: name: Zenodo
Year: 2018
Subjects: crisisfication
transboundary crisis management
crisis management
European Union
political leadership
public administation
backsliding
regulatory state
Brexit
constitutional crises
refugee crisis
Cyber-security

description: <strong>TransCrisis: a research agenda for developing understanding of transboundary crisis management in Europe</strong>

The TransCrisis project focused on transboundary crisis management capacities in the EU and its member states, focusing on how EU-level institutions, European political leaders and national governments develop and utilise these capacities in a diversity of domains. At the EU level, TransCrisis diagnosed a growing presence of decision-making processes and institutional crisis management procedures at a time of growing political debate about the legitimacy of the European Union.

<strong>Building on TransCrisis</strong>

The TransCrisis consortium is unique in that it brought together scholars from the fields of political science, public administration and international relations with diverse interests in crisis management, regulation and comparative politics. This allowed TransCrisis to focus on different aspects of transboundary crisis management in the EU and to draw synergies across them.

In particular, TransCrisis focused on transboundary crises in three areas that had previously not been engaged with in an integrated fashion:

- The traditional domains of civil protection, public health and security;

- The domains broadly defined by the Single Market, namely issues arising in particular from growing market integration and interdependence;

- The importance of constitutional politics in particular member states.

TransCrisis highlights the importance of taking a holistic view of transboundary crisis management that incorporates both immediate ‘fire-fighting’ and long-term crisis management approaches that seek to build resilience.

Above all, the value of TransCrisis research has been to integrate research traditionally associated with civil protection and ‘societal security’ domains with domains that are also characterised by transboundary crises, namely constitutional politics and integrated European markets. The tight connectedness between these three areas of transboundary crises has been a prominent feature emerging from TransCrisis research. The political aftermath of the financial and the refugee crises have affected all aspects of EU capacity to address transboundary crises, whether it is in dealing with the formal (and growing) transnational decision-making structures, member state motivation and capacity to meaningfully address potential transboundary crises, or in allowing political parties and national governments to campaign on the basis of explicit opposition to central EU norms.

Any further EU research into transboundary crises should therefore avoid the tendency to solely concentrate on single areas or technological fixes in the domain of ‘security’ but maintain the focus on interdependence across policy issues and domains. It might appear attractive to channel financial resources into promises of quick technical fixes to deal with questions of security, but such fixes and applications will prove worthless without advancing our understanding of the critical political and social underpinnings that shape transboundary crisis management in the context of the EU and its member states.

This particular document develops proposals for future research.