Upscaling Collaborative Crisis Management: A Comparison of Wildfire Responder Networks in Canada and Sweden

• Main Authors: Nohrstedt, Daniel, Baird, Julia, Bodin, Orjan, Plummer, Ryan, Summers, Robert
• Format: Book Part
• Language: English
• Published: Routledge 2020
• Subjects: FoR 0502 (Environmental Science and Management); FoR 1604 (Human Geography); Canada; Fort McMurray
• Online Access: https://doi.org/10.4324/9780429244308

One recurrent challenge during major crises and emergencies is how to effectively scale up the response. This involves efforts to expand the number of organizations involved to ensure access to resources, coordination of information and decisions, and joint actions to minimize costs and risks and to restore order. At the same time, upscaling requires difficult decisions about the timing and proper design of crisis responder organizations. In addition, it is generally challenging to orchestrate collaboration among diverse actors from different organizations with different cultures, missions, and experiences. This chapter demonstrates the dynamics of upscaling during two major wildfires in Canada (Fort McMurray, 2016) and Sweden (Västmanland, 2014). We detail the course of events leading up to the activation of joint crisis response organizations and shed light on the formal process of upscaling, how upscaling played out in practice, and how actors perceived performance. The comparison between the two cases demonstrates that although crisis management in Canada and Sweden is organized in different ways, similar challenges emerged in relation to upscaling. We find that differences in perceptions of the situation and divergent beliefs about the sufficiency of local capacities lead to different understandings of the necessity and timing of upscaling.