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A general malaise exists today about the prospects for timely and effective climate action. This calls for increased attention to factors that enable climate policy change. Among these enabling factors are hydrological, climatological, and meteorological disasters, including floods, extreme temperatures, drought, wildfires, and storms. What impacts these disasters have on climate policy-making is contested; some view them as potential focusing events leading to unique opportunities for policy learning and reform, while others anticipate no or limited effects. Recent research, however, has yielded few advances to document and explain these diverging outcomes. This article revisits research on how climate disasters shape climate policy-making to identify knowledge gaps and future research directions. The article highlights past research foci as a basis for pinpointing unresolved puzzles, questions, and phenomena. Future research directions are identified, including the general association between disaster events and climate policy-making, policy design and quality, and the potential for ripple effects from different disaster types and across policy issue areas. These research directions aim to widen the perspective regarding how post-disaster politics may shape climate policy-making and the factors that matter in this process. Redirecting the focus from documenting types and patterns of policy change to identifying policy designs that lead to positive outcomes is a particularly promising avenue for advancing this research and contributing to climate policy-making.

In the last two decades, the European Union (EU) has forged an international role as a ‘force for good’ and a champion for democracy, human rights, multilateralism, free trade, climate change action, and sustainable development. However, as the international context has grown more competitive and turbulent, it has become more challenging for the EU to uphold this global role. Subsequently, the EU has pursued more proactive policies to confront urgent challenges to the rules-based international system and global governance norms. This paper explores what the EU’s evolving geopolitical foreign policy role actually entails and how it is compatible with the Union’s understanding of itself as a global leader as expressed as a Normative Power, Market Power, and Security Power. Utilising the Indo-Pacific Strategy of 2021 and subsequent communications as illustrative examples, it examines how the EU is upscaling its plans and partnerships into a broader, sustainable connectivity strategy that fits into the context of a reoriented EU foreign policy and its leadership goals. In conclusion, it finds that the credibility of the three powers that the EU proclaims to play will be dependent on the coherence of the role set and the extent to which the EU can achieve these roles.

Action toward strengthened disaster risk reduction (DRR) ideally builds from evidence-based policymaking to inform decisions and priorities. This is a guiding principle for the Sendai Framework for Disaster Risk Reduction (SFDRR), which outlines priorities for action to reduce disaster risk. However, some of these practical guidelines conceal oversimplified or unsubstantiated claims and assumptions, what we refer to as “truisms”, which, if not properly addressed, may jeopardize the long-term goal to reduce disaster risks. Thus far, much DRR research has focused on ways to bridge the gap between science and practice while devoting less attention to the premises that shape the understanding of DRR issues. In this article, written in the spirit of a perspective piece on the state of the DRR field, we utilize the SFDRR as an illustrative case to identify and interrogate ten selected truisms, from across the social and natural sciences, that have been prevalent in shaping DRR research and practice. The ten truisms concern forecasting, loss, conflict, migration, the local level, collaboration, social capital, prevention, policy change, and risk awareness. We discuss central claims associated with each truism, relate those claims to insights in recent DRR scholarship, and end with suggestions for developing the field through advances in conceptualization, measurement, and causal inference.

Whether disasters influence adaptation actions in cities is contested. Yet, the extant knowledge base primarily consists of single or small-N case studies, so there is no global overview of the evidence on disaster impacts and adaptation. Here, we use regression analysis to explore the effects of disaster frequency and severity on four adaptation action types in 549 cities. In countries with greater adaptive capacity, economic losses increase city-level actions targeting recently experienced disaster event types, as well as actions to strengthen general disaster preparedness. An increase in disaster frequency reduces actions targeting hazard types other than those that recently occurred, while human losses have few effects. Comparisons between cities across levels of adaptive capacity indicate a wealth effect. More affluent countries incur greater economic damages from disasters, but also have higher governance capacity, creating both incentives and opportunities for adaptation measures. While disaster frequency and severity had a limited impact on adaptation actions overall, results are sensitive to which disaster impacts, adaptation action types, and adaptive capacities are considered. Here the authors explore the effects of disasters on adaptation actions in 549 cities, finding that the effects of disaster frequency and severity are modest and depend on action type, population size, and adaptive capacity.

This article examines the Trump Administration's inability to mount a timely and effective response to the COVID-19 outbreak, despite ample warning. Through an empirical exploration guided by three explanatory perspectives—psychological, bureau-organizational, and agenda-political—developed from the strategic surprise, public administration, and crisis management literature, the authors seek to shed light on the mechanisms that contributed to the underestimation of the coronavirus threat by the Trump Administration and the slow and mismanaged federal response. The analysis highlights the extent to which the factors identified by previous studies of policy surprise and failure in other security domains are relevant for health security. The paper concludes by addressing the crucial role of executive leadership as an underlying factor in all three perspectives and discussing why the US president is ultimately responsible for ensuring a healthy policy process to guard against the pathologies implicated in the federal government's sub-optimal response to the COVID-19 crisis.

Natural hazard events provide opportunities for policy change to enhance disaster risk reduction (DRR), yet it remains unclear whether these events actually fulfill this transformative role around the world. Here, we investigate relationships between the frequency (number of events) and severity (fatalities, economic losses, and affected people) of natural hazards and DRR policy change in 85 countries over eight years. Our results show that frequency and severity factors are generally unassociated with improved DRR policy when controlling for income-levels, differences in starting policy values, and hazard event types. This is a robust result that accounts for event frequency and different hazard severity indicators, four baseline periods estimating hazard impacts, and multiple policy indicators. Although we show that natural hazards are unassociated with improved DRR policy globally, the study unveils variability in policy progress between countries experiencing similar levels of hazard frequency and severity.

This chapter analyzes the evolution of the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) from a specialist organization of climate scientists into an institution at the nexus of science and politics. We explain how the IPCC became the primary scientific authority for policymakers, the public, and climate activists on the existence, severity, consequences of, and, increasingly, possible solutions to anthropogenic climate change. We assess its influence on policymakers and governments, while examining the various tensions, critiques, and contradictions that the organization and its leaders have had to grapple with across its 32-year history, during which it successfully developed a distinct identity as a trusted provider of comprehensive scientific assessments. Our analysis also focuses on the institutional reforms that helped restore legitimacy to IPCC after ‘climategate’ and other controversies.

This chapter examines how leaders can reduce the chances of falling victim to a policy fiasco by utilizing the lessons from research and practice to help them avoid common failures of collaborative crisis management. Five failures—of imagination, initiative, coordination and cooperation, credibility, and learning—that need to be avoided are identified and discussed. The examination of each failure is followed by a presentation of the prescriptions leaders and organizations can take to diminish their occurrence and improve their ability to cope with them. The chapter concludes by discussing how to improve collaborative crisis management through the mobilization of critical knowledge and scientific advice to improve planning, training, preparedness, capacity building, and, when needed, the effective management of crises.

In this article, we utilize the Collaborative Governance Databank to empirically explore core theoretical assumptions about collaborative governance in the context of crisis management. By selecting a subset of cases involving episodes or situations characterized by the combination of urgency, threat, and uncertainty, we conduct a plausibility probe to garner insights into a number of central assumptions and dynamics fundamental to understanding collaborative crisis management. Although there is broad agreement among academics and practitioners that collaboration is essential for managing complex risks and events that no single actor can handle alone, in the literature, there are several unresolved claims and uncertainties regarding many critical aspects of collaborative crisis management. Assumptions investigated in the article relate to starting-points and triggers for collaboration, level of collaboration, goal-formulation, adaptation, involvement and role of non-state actors, and the prevalence and impact of political infighting. The results confirm that crises represent rapidly moving and dynamic events that raise the need for adaptation, adjustment, and innovation by diverse sets of participants. We also find examples of successful behaviours where actors managed, despite challenging conditions, to effectively contain conflict, formulate and achieve shared goals, adapt to rapidly changing situations and emergent structures, and innovate in response to unforeseen problems.

Studying collaborative governance has become a booming business. However, the empirical literature still struggles to produce robust generalizations and cumulative knowledge that link contextual, situational and institutional design factors to processes and outcomes. We still have not mustered the broad and deep evidence base that will really help us sort fact from fiction and identify more and less productive approaches to collaboration. The current empirical evidence in the study of collaborative governance consists chiefly of small-N case studies or large-N surveys. The challenge is to move from case-based, mid-range theory building to more largeN-driven systematic theory-testing, while also retaining the rich contextual and process insights that only small-N studies tend to yield. This article, and the articles in the accompanying special issue, introduces an attempt to provide this middle ground– the Collaborative Governance Case Database. The database has been developed to serve as a free common pool resource for researchers to systematically collect and compare high-quality collaborative governance case studies. This article is an introduction to the database, exploring its design, opportunities and limitations. This article is also an invitation; inviting all researchers to freely use the cases in the database for their own research interest and to help strengthening the database by adding new cases they are eager to share with colleagues.