October 2024

Following the KoViK team's research visit to Sweden in February this year, we had the privilege of hosting our Swedish colleagues Pär Olausson and Olof Oscarsson (Mittuniversitetet Östersund) and Christine Grosse (Luleå tekniska universitet) for a return visit from 21/10/2024 to 24/10/2024. Erna Danielsson (Mittuniversitetet Östersund) joined us online.

Tuesday was dedicated to working on a joint publication. We would like to compare the two countries Sweden and Germany in the area of municipal crisis management during the COVID-19 pandemic. How did the stakeholders in the two countries perceive the situation? What role did the municipal level play and what concepts and strategies did they pursue?

On Wednesday, we discussed possible future collaborations in research on risk and crisis management as well as civil protection and civil-military cooperation. We then met with thematically related researchers from the University of Wuppertal to discuss joint ideas - special thanks to Prof. Dr.-Ing. habil. Eberhard Schmidt, Prof. Dr med. Hans Martin Hasselhorn and Prof. Dr Stefan Diestel. The official work programme concluded with a visit to the "Smart Grid" laboratory of Prof. Markus Zdrallek, where we talked about a large-scale, long-lasting power outage and the possibilities of isolated supply to individual critical infrastructures. Many thanks to Maximilian Mütherig, Giuseppe Puleo and Marco Tafuro for their interesting contributions and the discussion.

With a whole series of "to-do's" and even more impressions on all sides, we ended the Wednesday with a visit to Cologne Cathedral and a "Kölsch" in the Schreckenskammer brewery.

We would like to thank our guests for the exchange!

July 2024

We are pleased to announce the publication of the article "In Search of a Modus Operandi for Evaluation: Developing a Mixed-Methods Approach for Crisis Team Exercises" by our colleagues Dr. Patricia M. Schütte and Dr. Sylvia Bach in the European Journal for Security Research. This article also incorporated findings from the KoViK project.
The article contributes to a comprehensive and stringent analysis and evaluation of crisis management exercises. This is achieved using a mixed-methods approach that combines the following methods:

- Observations using a specially developed app
- Online surveys of participants before and after the exercises
- Interviews for in-depth analysis

The innovative combination of these methods provides exciting insights for crisis management practice.

Click here for the full article (open access): https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s41125-024-00100-1

May 2024

Civil protection is linked to volunteering and civil society in many ways. Our colleagues were able to publish the latest research findings from this area in the current issue of the journal "VOLUNTARIS - Zeitschrift für Freiwilligendienste und zivilgesellschaftliches Engagement", which focuses on the topic of "Engagement in disasters".
In the article from the KoViK project, Dr. Patricia Schütte, Yannic Schulte, Malte Schönefeld and Prof. Dr. Frank Fiedrich look at the question of what challenges exist in the cooperation between parts of the public administration and helping civil society. In doing so, they refer to empirical results from the BMBF and DFG projects "Security Co-operation and Migration (SiKoMi)" and "Local governments in crisis mode (KoViK)". What is the relationship between the state and volunteers and what concepts and ideas for cooperation between volunteers and state actors are needed for the future? The article is available to download free of charge: https://www.nomos-elibrary.de/10.5771/2196-3886-2024-1-11/oeffentliche-verwaltungen-und-zivilgesellschaft-herausforderungen-der-zusammenarbeit-in-krisensituationen-jahrgang-12-2024-heft-1?page=1

May 2024

This year's ISCRAM 2025 took place in the city of Münster under the motto "Embracing the Crisis Management Lifecycle". The title focuses on a holistic and integrated process approach to crisis management, which was reflected in the presentations and posters on display.

Our Department of Civil Protection, Disaster Relief and Property Security (BuK) was able to present six papers, which are available open access via the ISCRAM Library(https://ojs.iscram.org/index.php/Proceedings/issue/view/1). The KoViK project presented the article "Crisis Response and Management of Public Administrations: Forgotten Tales" (available free of charge at https://ojs.iscram.org/index.php/Proceedings/article/view/54). In his presentation, Yannic Schulte emphasised the important but little-noticed role of local administrations as crisis managers and spoke about the importance of following up and safeguarding the (learning) experiences made by administrations.

The days at ISCRAM were not only used to maintain existing contacts, but also to make new ones. The many impressions and research ideas provided fresh motivation for linking research and practice. Many thanks to the ISCRAM community for the open and cordial exchange and to the Institut Der Feuerwehr NRW and the University of Münster for the outstanding organisation! We would like to mention Dr Monika Rode, Dr Adam Widera, Prof Dr Bernd Hellingrath and Berthold Penkert (Director of the IdF NRW) by name.

February 2024

Last week, the "Management and Organisation in Emergency Response" research group from the Department for Public Safety and Emergency Management (BuK) visited the "Risk and Crisis Management Centre" at Mid Sweden University in Östersunds kommun. Our delegation consisted of research group leader Dr. Patricia M. Schütte and staff members Yannic Schulte and Malte Schönefeld.

The purpose of the trip was a joint exchange on research issues in civil protection, in particular with regard to COVID-19 crisis management by local governments in Sweden and Germany, as researched in the KoViK project. The visit was extremely productive and several ideas were collected on topics related to municipal crisis management and possible differences and similarities in this area. Agreements were also reached on joint articles and research projects. Our department is very pleased about the intensification of its international partnerships in the academic field.

Although the temperatures in central Sweden were consistently in the double-digit minus range, our colleagues received a very warm welcome and are looking forward to seeing Gertrud Alirani, Olof Oscarsson, Erna Danielsson, Christine Grosse and Pär Olausson again soon.

October 2023

The Disaster Preparedness and Crisis Communication Forum, organised by "Congress and Press" in Potsdam, offered exciting insights into various approaches to municipal crisis communication and disaster preparedness. In addition to practice-oriented "lessons identified" from the floods in the Ahr valley in 2021, concrete municipal strategies were presented in order to position themselves in a crisis-proof and resilient manner. In addition, technical communication options were presented in the event that "nothing works". Our colleague Dr Patricia M. Schütte presented interim results from the DFG research project KoViK.

You can find the contribution from Congress and Press here: https://lnkd.in/e9HHZRNf

June 2023

Our research project "Local governments in crisis mode (KoViK)" was represented with a contribution at the ISCRAM 2023 conference in Omaha (USA). Under the title "Critical infrastructure and crisis-affected actor? Investigating the double role of municipal administrations", the project presented a workshop report on its current work. Malte Schönefeld was on site on behalf of the team of authors, which also includes Dr. Patricia M. Schütte, Yannic Schulte and Prof. Dr. Frank Fiedrich. The article sheds light on the difficult dual role of local authorities, which had to maintain their role as critical infrastructure (Kritis) in crisis situations such as the COVID-19 pandemic despite being severely affected themselves.

ISCRAM (Information Systems for Crisis Response and Management) is a global professional community of people working on information systems for crisis response and management, including the social, technical and practical aspects of information and communication systems used in all phases of the management of emergencies, disasters and crises.

The workshop report has been published in this year's "ISCRAM Proceedings" and is freely available online: Schönefeld, M.; Schütte, P. M.; Schulte, Y.; Fiedrich, F. (2023): Critical infrastructure and crisis-affected actor? Investigating the double role of municipal administrations. In: J. Radianti, I. Dokas, N. Lalone and D. Khazanchi (eds.): 20th ISCRAM Conference Proceedings. University of Nebraska at Omaha, pp. 88-95.

Available online at https://idl.iscram.org/files/radianti/2023/2601_Radianti_etal2023.pdf

May 2023

The Ministry of the Interior of the State of North Rhine-Westphalia and our BuK department at the University of Wuppertal met on 9 May 2023 to discuss current topics and developments in civil protection.

After a general introduction to the entire teaching and research activities of the department by Prof. Dr. Frank Fiedrich, Dr. Sylvia Bach presented her research group "Resilience of Critical Infrastructures" and discussed a specific KRITIS project on the topic of blackouts.

Dr. Ramian Fathi then spoke about the importance of social media in emergency response and highlighted the developments of the Virtual Operations Support Team (VOST) of the Federal Agency for Technical Relief.

Finally, Dr. Patricia M. Schütte introduced her research group "Management and Organisation in Emergency Response" and then presented the research project funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG) on "Local governments in Crisis Mode".

March 2023

Dr. Patricia M. Schütte's research group Management and Organisation in Emergency Response is contributing to the project "Local Governments in Crisis Mode (KoViK)" funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG). In the article and in the project, Yannic Schulte, Malte Schönefeld and Dr. Patricia M. Schütte deal with the management of the COVID-19 pandemic and parallel critical events at local level. The starting point is the central role of public administrations, especially at municipal level, which have been more or less in constant use as crisis managers in recent years. In addition to presenting the project, the article primarily discusses the challenging dual role of (municipal) administrations as crisis actors on the one hand and as part of the critical infrastructure affected by the crisis on the other.

You can access the current issue of the magazine here: https://www.transforming-cities.de/ausgabe-1-2023-krisen-managen/

January 2023

We are delighted to be taking part in the specialist congress "Research for Civil Protection" of the Federal Office of Civil Protection and Disaster Assistance (BBK) from 12.01-14.01.23 at the World Conference Center Bonn from today with our various research topics. On both days of the conference, we will actively participate in the congress with numerous sessions and presentations of our own.

On Friday, 13.01.23, our research assistants Yannic Schulte, Malte Schönefeld and Dr. Patricia M. Schütte will give a presentation on "KoViK - municipal (crisis) management in the dual role" in their session.

On the third day of the conference, Dr. Patricia M. Schütte will organise session 38 "Events as 'burning glasses' of civil security research", in which Sinan Demirel will give a presentation on the Federal Ministry of Education and Research research project "CroMa - Crowd Management in Transport Infrastructures". Malte Schönefeld, Dr Patricia M. Schütte and Yannic Schulte will also be speaking on "Interorganisational aspects of event security". We are looking forward to a successful symposium and the exchange with many colleagues from science and practice!

Further information and the programme can be found here: https://www.fkfb.info/

The research projects KoViK, NORMALISE and SiKoMi were presented and discussed in two papers at the conference "Northern European Emergency and Disaster Studies" (NEEDS) in Copenhagen.

Dr. Patricia Schütte, Malte Schönefeld and Yannic Schulte traveled to the University of Copenhagen from 01 to 03 November 2022 to exchange with scientists from all over the world about challenges for civil protection during COVID-19 and also regarding climate change. In the panel on "Crisis Governance: advancing our knowledge to deal with future contingencies", Malte Schönefeld focused on organizational logics of local governments. Dr. Patricia Schütte and Yannic Schulte presented theoretical approaches to crisis management of local administrations, including during pandemics, based on findings from the SiKoMi research project. With both contributions, it was possible to find links to other presentations and studies by Scandinavian scientists and to establish new contacts.

October 2022

The article "Challenges of crisis management for public administrations" in the book Resilience and Pandemic by Andreas Karsten and Stefan Voßschmidt analyses the initial findings of the KoViK project. The refugee situation in 2015/16 and the COVID-19 pandemic pose new challenges for administrations and, more specifically, local authorities - they were key players in the crisis and first had to find and shape their own role in this context. The actors themselves questioned the usefulness of bureaucratic structures and processes in a crisis and looked for flexible solutions for crisis management. The extent to which the administrations succeeded in doing this is discussed in this article.

https://elibrary.kohlhammer.de/book/10.17433/978-3-17-039932-7

October 2022

Yannic Schulte and Malte Schönefeld will be travelling to Innsbruck in October this year to take part in the "Disaster Research Days" of the Disaster Competence Network Austria. They will present their conference contribution "Local governments in the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic - theses, approaches and impressions from the KoViK research project" in the form of a lecture. The role of administrations in Germany's complex crisis management system will be analysed and the research approaches pursued in the project will be discussed with the scientific community.