ABSTRACT
The emergence and presence of collaborative crisis management networks, in terms of close collaboration between public and private actors implies a major managerial challenge for public authorities. One of the key tasks for the responsible public authorities is to initiate and maintain various organizational architectures as well as technical systems to facilitate functional collaboration in loosely and temporarily composed networks. The nature of crises requires collaborating partners to communicate effectively with each other in order to make informed decisions under conditions of uncertainty and to engage and call upon the assistance of additional actors in the security network to mitigate, prepare for, respond, and recover from crises. This chapter contains a study of the implementation of the national communication system RAKEL in Sweden and focuses on the aspects of planning and facilitating collaborative crisis management through system architecture and meta-governance of collaborative crisis management. The analysis places emphasize on three core challenges of technical systems: hardware issues, software issues and economic aspects. The chapter argues that if we wish to overcome collective-action problems in crisis management systems, managers need to be attentive to the nature of networks and the potential deadlocks of competing styles of governance.
