Lina Svedin - Böcker

This book examines how efforts to exert accountability in crises affect public trust in governing institutions. Using Sweden as the case study, this book provides a framework to analyse accountability in crises and looks at how this affects trust in government.Crises test the fabric of governing institutions. Threatening core societal values, they force elected officials and public servants to make consequential decisions under pressure and uncertainty. Public trust in governing institutions is intrinsically linked to the ability to hold decision-makers accountable for the crucial decisions they make. The book presents empirical evidence from examination of the general bases for accountability in public administration, and at the accountability mechanisms of specific administrative systems, before focusing on longer term policy changes. The author finds that within the complex web of bureaucratic and political moves democratic processes have been undermined across time contributing to misplaced and declining trust in governing institutions.Accountability in Crises and Public Trust in Governing Institutions will be of interest to students, scholars and practitioners of public policy, political leadership and governance.

Virtually all of the socio-technical systems that maintain public order, quality of life, and commerce depend on a reliable electric supply, and critical infrastructure failures such as "blackouts" have profound implications for citizens and for those who govern in their name. Social scientists have noted the impact of such failures on society, and undertake the study of crisis management to improve our knowledge of why critical systems fail and how such systems can be made more reliable. Auckland Unplugged is a major contribution to this field. Using the 1998 blackout of the central business district of Auckland, New Zealand, as a case study, the authors reveal a number of important insights into the central challenges of crisis governance in post-industrial, democratic societies. These challenges include:· Finding an appropriate division of responsibility and labor between public- and private-sector actors.· Crafting and coordinating a crisis response that addresses perceived threats to community values and avoids the twin perils of underreaction (e.g., passivity or paralysis) and overreaction (e.g., "crying wolf" or political grandstanding).· Coping with competence/authority discrepancies under stress: Those who have expert knowledge of the technical issues rarely have the authority to make policy; those who have the authority generally lack the technical expertise to comprehend the subtleties and uncertainties of the issues at stake.· Maintaining credibility and legitimacy when facing acute, ill-structured problmes in politicized, publicized, and highly uncertain environments.Such challenges are by no means specific to Auckland or to the problem of coping with urban "blackouts." Auckland Unplugged clearly describes and carefully explores general and recurring problems faced by crisis managers around the world.

Virtually all of the socio-technical systems that maintain public order, quality of life, and commerce depend on a reliable electric supply, and critical infrastructure failures such as "blackouts" have profound implications for citizens and for those who govern in their name. Social scientists have noted the impact of such failures on society, and undertake the study of crisis management to improve our knowledge of why critical systems fail and how such systems can be made more reliable. Auckland Unplugged is a major contribution to this field. Using the 1998 blackout of the central business district of Auckland, New Zealand, as a case study, the authors reveal a number of important insights into the central challenges of crisis governance in post-industrial, democratic societies. These challenges include:· Finding an appropriate division of responsibility and labor between public- and private-sector actors.· Crafting and coordinating a crisis response that addresses perceived threats to community values and avoids the twin perils of underreaction (e.g., passivity or paralysis) and overreaction (e.g., "crying wolf" or political grandstanding).· Coping with competence/authority discrepancies under stress: Those who have expert knowledge of the technical issues rarely have the authority to make policy; those who have the authority generally lack the technical expertise to comprehend the subtleties and uncertainties of the issues at stake.· Maintaining credibility and legitimacy when facing acute, ill-structured problmes in politicized, publicized, and highly uncertain environments.Such challenges are by no means specific to Auckland or to the problem of coping with urban "blackouts." Auckland Unplugged clearly describes and carefully explores general and recurring problems faced by crisis managers around the world.

This book examines how efforts to exert accountability in crises affect public trust in governing institutions. Using Sweden as the case study, this book provides a framework to analyse accountability in crises and looks at how this affects trust in government.Crises test the fabric of governing institutions. Threatening core societal values, they force elected officials and public servants to make consequential decisions under pressure and uncertainty. Public trust in governing institutions is intrinsically linked to the ability to hold decision-makers accountable for the crucial decisions they make. The book presents empirical evidence from examination of the general bases for accountability in public administration, and at the accountability mechanisms of specific administrative systems, before focusing on longer term policy changes. The author finds that within the complex web of bureaucratic and political moves democratic processes have been undermined across time contributing to misplaced and declining trust in governing institutions.Accountability in Crises and Public Trust in Governing Institutions will be of interest to students, scholars and practitioners of public policy, political leadership and governance.

The daily process of public service provision and administration is filled with value judgments and value trade-offs, and the safeguarding of just and fair processes is key to the public’s trust in governing institutions. In crises, public decision-makers face complex ethical judgments under great uncertainty, timepressure, and heightened public scrutiny. A lack of attention to the ethical dimensions of crises has lead decision-makers to long-shadow crises that never reach closure. Furthermore, crises triggered by unethical conduct by public officials steadily feed people’s cynicism about politicians and bureaucracy. The fact that decision-makers often are judged on how they dealt with ethical issues in crises further underlines the importance of this topic.Little scholarly attention had been paid to how ethics play into and are dealt with in situations when they matters most – in crises. In order to improve government performance we need to analyze the ethical dilemmas and normative challenges that face practitioners in crises. This book meets this challenge by presenting a public policy framework for analyzing the ethical dilemmas in crises and introduces ten empirical chapters written by prominent public administration and crisis management scholars. The cases reviewed include Abu Ghraib, the 9/11 Commission, the 2008 Financial Crisis and the Memorial Hospital Tragedy during Hurricane Katrina. Building off the empirical focus on inherent ethical challenges in crises and actor ethics in evaluation and judgment, the concluding chapter outlines important lessons about criteria for crisis decision-making and strategies, the poisoned apple of bureaucratic discretion, and the nature of post-crisis evaluations.The book is geared toward students, scholars, and practitioners concerned with public management, public sector ethics, public policy, crisis management, and the implication of these factors on business and corporate crisis management.

The daily process of public service provision and administration is filled with value judgments and value trade-offs, and the safeguarding of just and fair processes is key to the public’s trust in governing institutions. In crises, public decision-makers face complex ethical judgments under great uncertainty, timepressure, and heightened public scrutiny. A lack of attention to the ethical dimensions of crises has lead decision-makers to long-shadow crises that never reach closure. Furthermore, crises triggered by unethical conduct by public officials steadily feed people’s cynicism about politicians and bureaucracy. The fact that decision-makers often are judged on how they dealt with ethical issues in crises further underlines the importance of this topic.Little scholarly attention had been paid to how ethics play into and are dealt with in situations when they matters most – in crises. In order to improve government performance we need to analyze the ethical dilemmas and normative challenges that face practitioners in crises. This book meets this challenge by presenting a public policy framework for analyzing the ethical dilemmas in crises and introduces ten empirical chapters written by prominent public administration and crisis management scholars. The cases reviewed include Abu Ghraib, the 9/11 Commission, the 2008 Financial Crisis and the Memorial Hospital Tragedy during Hurricane Katrina. Building off the empirical focus on inherent ethical challenges in crises and actor ethics in evaluation and judgment, the concluding chapter outlines important lessons about criteria for crisis decision-making and strategies, the poisoned apple of bureaucratic discretion, and the nature of post-crisis evaluations.The book is geared toward students, scholars, and practitioners concerned with public management, public sector ethics, public policy, crisis management, and the implication of these factors on business and corporate crisis management.

The underlying rationale for this book is to present research that a) highlights the explosively political and deeply divisive issues involved in managing risk and b) address the empirical deficit and theoretical challenges related to managing societal risk ethically. Extant risk management research borrows heavily from engineering, systems theory and business management, and is primarily focused on probabilities, modeling, and abstractions of the value of mitigative action. This research engenders a false sense of objectivity and it de-politicizes fundamental political and democratic questions about the allocation of society’s scarce resources and about the balance of responsibilities between governing institutions and individuals with regard to risk. The quantitative and hard-science focus on risk also keeps a discussion of the consequences of the distribution of risk, resources and responsibilities for real people out of the lime light. The contributors to this book are experts in a wide range of academic fields and in this book they take on the challenge of examining their core research with a specific ethics perspective. They explore the ethics of risk management using theory, cases and data from a range of policy areas, countries and philosophical traditions.This book should be of interest to scholars and practitioners working in fields that deal either implicitly or explicitly with risk. This would include, but is not limited to, scholars and students of public management, public sector ethics, public policy, risk regulation, and risk management. The book deals directly with core problems of management in the public sector, value-conflicts, multiple principals and stakeholders, as well as information analysis and the application of sound and valid decision-making processes. The book can be adopted as a core text for graduate courses in public management, public policy, public administration ethics, and comparative politics. It would also work well as an applied theory text in comparative politics; ethics centered courses in political science, as well as more narrowly focused courses on risk, crisis and disaster management.For the practitioner audience, this book pin-points the ethical stakes, the analytical and managerial challenges, and the necessary tools to meet the many risks that societies face. This book, Ethics and Risk Management, provides a unique take on the realities of cost-benefit analysis, efforts to control and regulate risk and risky behavior, as well as the decidedly bounded rationality with which we, as decision-makers and citizens, perceive and take risks. The work of identifying, understanding, prioritizing and designing effective tools to mitigate and manage risk is an inherently analytical and strategic process best suited to take place before and between crises. Successful risk analysis and management reduces the general occurrence of crises, while the ethical analysis and management of risk serves to reduce the likelihood of subsequent socio-political turmoil should a crisis occur. Thus, the investment that any practitioner makes in risk management has the potential to yield both social and political benefits if the analysis and work is done with an eye toward ethics and stakeholder analysis.

The underlying rationale for this book is to present research that a) highlights the explosively political and deeply divisive issues involved in managing risk and b) address the empirical deficit and theoretical challenges related to managing societal risk ethically. Extant risk management research borrows heavily from engineering, systems theory and business management, and is primarily focused on probabilities, modeling, and abstractions of the value of mitigative action. This research engenders a false sense of objectivity and it de-politicizes fundamental political and democratic questions about the allocation of society’s scarce resources and about the balance of responsibilities between governing institutions and individuals with regard to risk. The quantitative and hard-science focus on risk also keeps a discussion of the consequences of the distribution of risk, resources and responsibilities for real people out of the lime light. The contributors to this book are experts in a wide range of academic fields and in this book they take on the challenge of examining their core research with a specific ethics perspective. They explore the ethics of risk management using theory, cases and data from a range of policy areas, countries and philosophical traditions.This book should be of interest to scholars and practitioners working in fields that deal either implicitly or explicitly with risk. This would include, but is not limited to, scholars and students of public management, public sector ethics, public policy, risk regulation, and risk management. The book deals directly with core problems of management in the public sector, value-conflicts, multiple principals and stakeholders, as well as information analysis and the application of sound and valid decision-making processes. The book can be adopted as a core text for graduate courses in public management, public policy, public administration ethics, and comparative politics. It would also work well as an applied theory text in comparative politics; ethics centered courses in political science, as well as more narrowly focused courses on risk, crisis and disaster management.For the practitioner audience, this book pin-points the ethical stakes, the analytical and managerial challenges, and the necessary tools to meet the many risks that societies face. This book, Ethics and Risk Management, provides a unique take on the realities of cost-benefit analysis, efforts to control and regulate risk and risky behavior, as well as the decidedly bounded rationality with which we, as decision-makers and citizens, perceive and take risks. The work of identifying, understanding, prioritizing and designing effective tools to mitigate and manage risk is an inherently analytical and strategic process best suited to take place before and between crises. Successful risk analysis and management reduces the general occurrence of crises, while the ethical analysis and management of risk serves to reduce the likelihood of subsequent socio-political turmoil should a crisis occur. Thus, the investment that any practitioner makes in risk management has the potential to yield both social and political benefits if the analysis and work is done with an eye toward ethics and stakeholder analysis.

The challenges to health, wellness, and health equity in the United States are massive. No matter what side of the discussion health care leaders are on, insufficient mental health care, adverse childhood experiences, substance use disorders, high infant mortality rate, and declining life expectancy for women are issues that leadership can rally around. The second volume in the Interdisciplinary Community-Engaged Research for Health series explores hands-on approaches that leaders can take in their community. Creating Culture through Health Leadership focuses on the practitioner’s view of community engagement and how health care leaders can build a culture of health through community-grown solutions. Volume editor Lina Svedin invites contributors from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation’s Culture of Health Leaders program to share transformative leadership skills that advance health and equity for all. Svedin’s contributors span the fields of business, technology, architecture, education, urban farming, and the arts, and represent subject matter experts, mentors, and coaches in the private, public, nonprofit, and social sectors. The volume is a collection of innovative, engaging case studies that illuminate how health care administrators and managers can collaborate to lead change within their organization, in their regional system, and throughout the nation.

Community-Academic Partnerships for Early Childhood Health is the first volume in the Interdisciplinary Community-Engaged Research for Health series. In this first volume, series editors Farrah Jacquez and Lina Svedin have invited academics around the country who participated in the first cohort of the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation’s (RWJ) prestigious, innovative Interdisciplinary Research Leaders (IRL) program to share results from their efforts. These three-person teams composed of two researchers and one community partner used applied research to create measurable change in healthcare and health outcomes for young children. Spanning disciplines from public health, psychology, policy, economics, medicine, nutrition and geography, academics teamed up with community partners, including medical practitioners, nonprofit leaders, and policymakers to create action and community benefit through research, intervention, and policy development. From research on the nonmedical needs of women in the Mississippi Delta, WIC programs in Puerto Rico, and children’s advocacy in Cincinnati, Ohio, the contributors describe seven cases depicting valuable stepping stones for academic and community partners to collaborate and create a culture of health in the United States.