Nordic Crisis Management

This masterpiece, decades in the making, is delivered just in time. There is much to learn here about how trust and accountability go hand in hand and how the systems put in place are shaped by values, culture, and the people in them.

-Lina Svedin, Professor of Strategy and Security Studies, Air University, Maxwell AFB, Alabama

This book should be on each ‘preparedness’-shelf since we can learn from Nordic experiences. Their COVID-19-lessons-learned allow to anticipate how to ensure a trust-driven resilient response to the next system-quake.

- Geert Bouckaert, KU Leuven Public Governance Institute

The book shows how a natural experiment - the spread of COVID across the globe - works out in a most similar systems design, revealing key variables that played a role in achieving different outcomes.

- Sandra van Thiel, Professor of Public Management, Erasmus University Rotterdam

This book is an important step towards a better understanding of both crises and how to management them.

- Anders Wivel, Professor of International Relations, University of Copenhagen

There is no better time to test the practice of governance than under crisis conditions. Read on, and prepare for the next crisis!

-Godfrey Baldacchino, Professor of Sociology, University of Malta, and Executive Editor, Small States & Territories journal

This book provides the first comparative analysis of how state size and administrative scale influenced responses to the COVID-19 pandemic across the five Nordic states and two territories. It produces valuable insight into how state size, polity and structural arrangements, and culture influenced the management of the crisis in Denmark, the Faroe Islands, Finland, Greenland, Iceland, Norway, and Sweden. In an era of recurring global crises, the book offers critical lessons for policymakers, crisis leaders, and public administration scholars.

Ásthildur Elva Bernhardsdottir is Professor of Crisis Management at Bifröst University, Iceland.

Baldur Thorhallsson is Professor of Political Science at University of Iceland, Iceland.