Crisis Management and the Covid-19 Pandemic: Leadership, Expertise and Best Practices

The research project Crisis Management and the Covid-19 Pandemic: Leadership, Expertise and Best Practices is coming to an end after three years under the leadership of Baldur Thorhallsson, professor at the University of Iceland, and Ásthildur Elva Bernharðsdóttir, professor at the University of Bifröst. The project brought together an international network of leading scholars in the field of crisis management. The network has, over the past three years, analysed, evaluated and compared the strategic responses of Iceland, Greenland, Norway, Sweden, the Faroe Islands, Finland and Denmark to the COVID-19 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 different strategies adopted by the culturally similar Nordic countries provided an excellent laboratory for studying both the effectiveness of their approaches to crisis management and regional cooperation. In addition, the different population sizes of the Nordic countries presented a unique opportunity to evaluate to what extent the size of a state’s public administration and governance influences its response to a crisis. Findings suggest that smallness, when understood not merely as a constraint but as a distinct administrative condition, can be a potent asset for navigating complex crises; if it is accompanied by the right balance of informality, coordination, and institutional coherence.

So far, four articles have been published in the Small States & Territories Journal, more specifically in A Special Section - The Nordic Countries’ crisis management of the Covid-19 pandemic: The effect of size. These articles, along with more information about the project, can be accessed here.