High performance during catastrophic terrorist events require the ability to assess and adapt capacity rapidly, restore or enhance disrupted or inadequate communications, utilize flexible decision making swiftly, and expand coordination and trust between multiple emergency and crisis response agencies. These requirements are superimposed on conventional administrative systems that rely on relatively rigid plans, decision protocols, and formal relationships that assume smooth sailing and uninterrupted communications and coordination.

Network Governance in Response to Acts of Terrorism focuses on the inter-organizational performance and coordinated response to recent terrorist incidents across different national, legal, and cultural contexts in New York, Bali, Istanbul, Madrid, London, and Mumbai. Effortlessly combining each case study with content analyses of news reports from local and national newspapers, situation reports from government emergency/crisis management agencies, and, interviews with public managers, community leaders, and nonprofit executives involved in response operations, Naim Kapucu presents an overview of how different countries tackle emergencies by employing various collaborative decision-making processes, thus, offering a global perspective with different approaches. These features make this book an important read for both scholars and practitioners eager to reconcile existing decision-making theories with practice.

About the Author

Naim Kapucu, Ph.D., is a Professor at the School of Public Administration at the University of Central Florida (UCF). He is also the founding director of the Center for Public and Nonprofit Management (CPNM) at UCF (2008-2011). He has developed Emergency Management and Homeland Security graduate certificate and undergraduate minor programs at UCF. He has also served as the Director for the Public Service and Leadership Program at the School of Public Administration from 2007 till 2009. He has published widely in areas of public policy and administration, crisis leadership, nonprofit management and disaster management. His work has been published in Public Administration Review, Administration & Society, Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory, the American Review of Public Administration, and Disasters. His main research interests are emergency and crisis management, network leadership and governance, decision-making in complex environments, and collaborative public management. He is the author of Collaborative Response to Acts of Terrorism: A Comparative Network Analysis in Dynamic Environments and Managing Emergencies and Crises (with Alp Ozerdem).

Reviews

"A much-needed, timely, descriptively rich, theory-driven, and evaluative disaster management exploration of government response to infamous terror attacks, the book is introduced and ended with illuminating comparative and theory chapters that compliment the case studies. This highly informative book is, in my view, one of the first widely international country-study comparative works on terrorism disaster management. The study will find a prominent place in terrorism and homeland security studies within and beyond the six nations examined."

-Richard Sylves, The George Washington University Institute for Crisis, Disaster, and Risk Management

"Too often the failure of responses to natural and unnatural disasters can be traced to an inability or unwillingness of agencies to share information and to integrate resources. Failure happens despite the common wisdom that collaboration is critical when authority is shared, responsibility is divided among large networks of actors, and resources are dispersed. Common goals and cultural interoperability, as well as technological interoperability, are essential prerequisites for collaboration. Professor Kapucu provides context to the theory, comparing recent responses to terrorism in six nations, and identifies ways that the obstacles to collaborative action can be removed and counter-terrorist programs can be improved. The analysis is a major contribution to the theory and the practice of intergovernmental and multi-organizational collaboration in dealing with terrorism and other hazards."

-William L. Waugh, Jr., Georgia State University

"Kapucu provides public administrators in crisis situations-profoundly different from everyday bureaucratic agency routines, of course-with a veritable manual on how to build administrative capacity rapidly in the face of extraordinary danger, coordinate across multiple emergency responders, restore disrupted communications technologies, and employ fl exible, collaborative decision making throughout. Along with the author's previous works, this book stands as an important line of research, on which future scholars will build in order to better comprehend this complex, understudied topic of our times." - Yusuf Ustun, Ministry of the Interior, Turkey

Book Information
ISBN 9781138849037
Author Naim Kapucu
Format Paperback
Page Count 282
Imprint Routledge
Publisher Taylor & Francis Ltd
Weight(grams) 408g