It seems that emergencies are now becoming the new normal for our tightly interconnected society. The world has faced numerous crises of different range and magnitude starting from the Global Financial Crisis to the Covid-19 pandemic and natural disasters, particularly those linked to the unprecedented pace of the climate change. The severity of distractions and the need for critical reflection on how different crises can be managed to reduce threats to human lives and institutional ecosystems, resulted in the increased attention from the public administration scholarship to issues of emergency governance in the context of contemporary developments within public administration and policy (Hannah et al., 2022).

To study governance during disasters, it is crucial to distinguish between their specifics. Natural disasters or those related to the public healthcare are rather episodic as they have a definitive timeframe of either short-term character, e.g., earthquakes, tsunamis or hurricanes, or medium-term character, e.g., the Covid-19 pandemic that lasted for more than a year but was taken under control after the suffice of vaccines. The other type of disasters are those caused by a human, such as terroristic acts, cyber-attacks, or wars, which are much less explored in public administration research if compared to those of natural character. While recent examples of crises linked to the Covid-19 or cyber security proved their transboundary potential, most of these catastrophic events regardless to their characteristics are still considered as those happening on a certain geographical spot due to their link to a specific territory, thus creating an illusion of a localized problem that does not significantly affect international public order or global political agenda. Nevertheless, this assumption per se is much contested. As “a new stage in the development of the world economic and political system has commenced, a new kind of world order, which is characterised both by unprecedented unity and unprecedented fragmentation” (Gamble et al., 1996, p. 5) that currently frames the way governance unfolds when facing disasters.

Governance, as an inter-sector and inter-governmental collaboration for delivering services to the citizens, serves as an instrument to address complex and multi-faceted challenges caused by the disasters hitting our societies (Kapucu, 2012, p. 41). As various approaches to exploring this phenomenon exists (e.g., Kapucu and Garayev, 2016; George et al., 2015), in this paper we propose applying the multi-level governance (MLG) as a theoretical lens. MLG is defined as “the simultaneous activation of governmental and non-governmental actors at various jurisdictional levels’ and perspectives derived from MLG may be applied to a wide set of issues spanning from political mobilization (politics), to policy-making (policy), to state restructuring (polity)” (Ongaro, 2020, p. n/a), which fits well when studying emergency governance.

This paper aims to explore how different external and internal actors interacted to respond and manage a human-made disaster. We focus on two collaborative settings: (1) collective international institutions (namely, the IMF, WB and the EU), which provided significant financial support to Ukraine, and (2) internal actors in Ukraine on macro-, meso- and micro-levels, and study how they responded to one of the most acute problems – support of civil population in Ukraine. Thus, the dataset for this study provides a unique overview of multi-level decision-making, practical mechanisms applied and dynamic multi-directional interaction between international institutions, Ukrainian central government, local governments, universities, and NGOs.

Mr Christian ROQUES, Deputy Director-General, European Commission - Directorate-General for Human Resources and Security, Chairman CPQS /Mr Costas POPOTAS, Head of Unit, Establishment of entitlements and Payroll, Court of Justice of the EU, CPQS member

From the first appearance of the Covid-19 virus in Europe at the end of January 2020 onwards, up to its rapid expansion a few weeks later, the European institutions were trying to assess the risks on the basis of their previous experiences and the business continuity plans elaborated and constantly updated since the previous virus alerts. If it is true that the reactions to the new virus were modelled on the previous SARS and MERS alerts, since the impact of the latter was not felt beyond Asia and the Arabic peninsula, things changed as the situation aggravated. As several European states started confining people, the EU institutions launched themselves into updating their crisis plans to ensure business continuity with the implementation of novel responses and protective measures in several domains that were not necessarily taken into account in previous assessments of risks. And despite all, the preparedness established via the previous continuity plans, untested maybe under real circumstances, proved well dimensioned to the final extent of the pandemics and its persistence.

Throughout this unprecedented crisis, the EU institutions remained alert to the slightest change and overcoming the wish to come back to normal have proved resilient and adaptive. Nevertheless, because of the extraterritorial character of the EU administration, measures concerning its personnel had to be established, in close collaboration with Member States certainly, albeit in full autonomy. The coordination of administrative practices was orchestrated by the “Comité de Préparation pour les questions statutaires” - Preparatory Committee on Staff regulation issues (CPQS). The Committee was entrusted by The Heads of Administrations of the EU Institutions with the task of the Interinstitutional exchange of information and the coordination of solutions for administrative issues newly shown up in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic. Amongst those, the restrictions imposed to access and use of facilities of the institutions decided by the Institutions in order to preserve their staff’s health, in conformity with the national measures applied in the country where the participants are based. In view of that other organisations of European interest were associated to the workings i.e. European Schools, ECB, EIB, European Patent Office.

CPQS convened 90 videoconferencing sessions and set up a shared workspace to make important documentation on the matter available to participants.

During the first period (March/April 2020) of the pandemic, a sustained effort to maintain normal performance was invested in the hope to resume normal working conditions as it was expected to see the crisis over sooner than later. Novel issues had to be tackled like the procedures to obtain permits for staff called to be present at the premises, extending network structures to cope with telework, establishing virtual onboarding, support for staff facing personal of family difficulties. The institutions managed to equip all their staff with teleworking solutions within six weeks from the beginning of the confinement and put in place paperless workflows. Market prospections and desperate negotiations in order to obtain security material (masks and disinfectants) occupied a lot of administrative time and resources.

Nevertheless, the perseverance of the pandemic forced, at a later stage, a review of policies for longer term remote configurations, inclusion of the members of staff to national vaccination campaigns and the planning of the “new normal”.

Gradually, the appearance of new variances called for new approaches for the return of staff to the offices (number of days of recommended/obligatory presence in the office per week, categories of staff exempted from the obligatory presence (vulnerable persons, situations in which critical staff are exempted from this obligation), safety measures to be applied upon such return – e.g. use masks, considerations regarding those situations where staff members openly declare not being vaccinated and vaccinated colleagues do not want to share with them the same office etc.).

The effectiveness of the coordination and the resilience proven by the Institutions were the object of the European Court of Auditors report* published on the 1st of September 2022 . It concerned four of the institutions, the European Parliament, the Council, the European Commission and the Court of Justice of the EU.

The findings conclude that the EU institutions demonstrated considerable resilience in the face of the COVID-19 pandemic, responded rapidly and flexibly, and benefited from previous investments they had made in digitalisation. They adapted their rules of procedure when needed, showed flexibility in adjusting the ways of working to be able to carry out their core activities, and continued fulfilling the roles assigned to them under the Treaties. All of this was achieved while protecting their staff members’ health and well-being, the auditors highlight.

It is now expected from the institutions to assess the suitability of new working arrangements and decide on a new model but also to capitalise on the experiences in order to prepare their reaction for the case of future pandemics.

*Special report 18/2022, “EU institutions and COVID-19 – Responded rapidly, challenges still ahead to make the best of the crisis-led innovation and flexibility”, is available on the ECA website (eca.europa.eu).

Administrative integration represents processes of institutionalizing common administrative capacities across states and across levels of governance. National public administration is thus conceptualized as situated at the intersection of different levels of authority. We have seen a growing scholarly interest to elucidate how national bureaucrats weigh, incorporate, and implement steering signals arriving from various levels of governance, and moreover, how conflicting steering signals are balanced against one another. We know, however, little about which steering signals bureaucrats pay attention to particularly is situations characterized by tension and crisis. Tension and crisis arguably amplify ambiguity to the allocation of attention for bureaucrats. This study thus asks how bureaucrats mobilize and direct their attention in multilevel systems characterized by ambiguity. Drawing on novel large-N survey data (N=200+) from the Norwegian welfare agency this study asks three subsequent research questions:

1. How do national bureaucrats allocate their attention towards adjacent steering signals?

2. What can explain attention allocation towards certain steering signals over others?

3. To what extent is the allocation of attention moderated by perceived room for discretion and experiences of recent organizational crises?

Attention is measured by surveying the weight assigned to various steering signals. We theorize that attention allocation is conditioned by the following independent variables: formal rules, task profile, political contestation, information and contact patterns, organizational duplication and organizational position. Finally, we test the robustness of the analytical model by applying two moderator variables: ambiguity, measured by degrees of perceived discretion, and experience with recent organizational crises, measured by a dichotomous variable that separates bureaucrats that were employed in the welfare agency during the 2019 “welfare-scandal” and those bureaucrats that were not.