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Designing societal safety: A study of the Swedish crisis management system

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Author

Summary, in English

Design is an activity aimed at solving an unsolved problem or improving an existing solution. In the area of societal safety, there are many activities that could be classified as design activities. For example when different actors are implementing measures to mitigate certain risk scenarios or when they are considering actions that could improve their capability to respond to various crises. We provide a descriptive study of how design problems are dealt with in the Swedish crisis management system. Our focus is on the risk and vulnerability analyses that are conducted annually by most Swedish authorities, and on efforts to improve various actors’ command and control capability. Within these two areas, both highly relevant for societal safety, we analyse how the actors address design problem using a framework inspired by design science. We present the results from a content analysis of all risk and vulnerability analyses (RVA:s) performed by the county administrative boards (regional level) in 2010 (there are 21 such boards in Sweden) and from 14 semi-structured interviews with representatives for various local and regional authorities in Sweden conducted in 2011. We conclude that when measures to reduce risk or improve crisis management capability are suggested in the RVA:s the context in which the measures are supposed to be useful in are not always described (including description of scenarios). Moreover, the effect of implementing the suggested measures are not explicitly described in any of the RVA:s. The results from the interview study indicates that leaving out or not describing important information explicitly when conducting design activities is not a phenomenon isolated to RVA:s but is also present when, for example, suggesting measures to improve command and control capability.

Department/s

Publishing year

2012

Language

English

Publication/Series

Proceedings of PSAM 11 / ESREL 2012, 25 - 29 June 2012, Helsinki, Finland

Document type

Conference paper

Publisher

IAPSAM & ESRA

Topic

  • Social Sciences Interdisciplinary

Keywords

  • Design
  • risk and vulnerability analysis
  • command and control
  • capability

Conference name

PSAM 11 & ESREL 2012

Conference date

2012-06-25

Conference place

Helsinki, Finland

Status

Published

ISBN/ISSN/Other

  • ISBN: 978-1-62276-436-5