The proposed paper employs a historical institutionalist perspective and extensive archival re-search to study the volatile institutional reform process of the German Federal Office for Civil Protection (BBK) between 1990 and 2007. In doing so, it emphasizes the crucial impact of path dependency and external events on a substantial part of public safety architecture. In particular, the proposed paper discusses three factors that seem to have critical influence on the fact that this agency was terminated and re-established over the course of less than five years. These fac-tors are (1) vertical tensions between the federal administration and the states, (2) intra- and in-ter-agency conflict within the federal administration, and (3) critical external events. The argu-ment is eventually geared towards inferring an institutional state of stable fragility.

Civil protection constitutes an integral part of the modern state’s fundamental feature to provide public safety. In Germany, the public duties in civil protection are distributed among the federal and the state level. In this architecture, the Federal Office for Civil Protection is ought to act as the central information and knowledge hub, providing coordination and communication ser-vices. Over time, however, the agency has accumulated a multitude of further functions, by and large adhering to the scope of its legal framework. The proposed paper suggests that this in-ventive process is part of a self-preservation drive, in which the attempts to increase the organi-zation’s value and to demarcate the BBK from the Federal Agency for Technical Relief (THW) take center stage. Meanwhile, the THW, which performs primarily operational tasks, can be considered a rival organization that aims at improving its position at the cost of its competitor. Thus, this inter-agency conflict at the federal level seems to be one of the three main factors that strongly influence the institution’s development.

The root of the BBK’s self-preservation drive, however, seems to be a path-dependent one. Due to the distribution of tasks under the Basic Law, the federal administration has to fulfill its civil defense duties. It flows from this that even though there might be more effective and efficient solutions to provide civil defense in Germany, the federal administration has to have sufficient structures and resources to do so, providing the BBK with path dependent basic stability. In reality, the federal administration distributes plenty of resources (money, equipment, education, and other services) to the states in order to assign a substantial amount of the civil defense tasks to them, which they perform by means of their constitutionally codified disaster management activities. In this cooperative approach to civil protection, the states have vested interests of their own to keep receiving these valuable resources, hence why these interests appear to also have a major impact on the BBK’s institutional development.

Finally, critical external events–most notably the end of the Cold War, the 9/11 terrorist attacks, and the European flood disaster of 2002–seem to constitute the decisive factor for the radical reform process of the Federal Office for Civil Protection. With the help of archival sources, the proposed paper gathers empirical data from key federal and state stakeholders to explore the BBK’s institutional state between stability and fragility through a historical institutionalist lens.

Governance relates to the processes and structures in place to enable governing boards to oversee and strategically lead organizations. Despite the existence of governance models within public and third sector services, reviews of different forms of governance are under researched. Within the UK, recent studies have requested further research on emergency service governance (Murphy et. al, 2019; Ashworth, 2019; Farrell, 2017). Building on Lakoma (2023), which focused on accountability within the English fire and rescue service, we examine the efficacy of a range of governance models in place across the UK. After decades of working to one model, a range of approaches now exist - Scotland has an appointed board, Wales has retained the traditional Combined Fire and Rescue Authority, N. Ireland has adopted a hybrid approach and there is patchwork of models in England, including Combined and County Council FRAs, Police Fire and Crime Commissioners (PFCC) and elected Mayors. The immaturity of these arrangements when considered alongside new inspection regimes has been identified by Murphy et. al. (2019).

We analyse qualitative data drawn from interviews, observations and documentation in relation to the internationally recognised CIPFA Principles of Good Governance. These are: behaving with integrity; ensuring openness and stakeholder engagement; defining outcomes; determining interventions; developing governing and leadership capacity; managing risks and performance; and implementing transparency in reporting and audit. These will each be examined in order to determine the efficacy of the governance models: the Elected Mayor, the PFCC, the Combined FRA, County FRA, the Appointed Board and the hybrid model. In doing so, we identify that whilst certain models perform best on particular elements, no single model performs well against the full range of criteria. For example, the Appointed Board and PFCC models score highly on strategic decision making, whereas County and Combined FRAs perform best on stakeholder engagement. The key contribution of this paper is that it captures the unique impact of different governance arrangements within a single service across the UK.

Our data also reveal concerns regarding the motivation for governance reform. Rather than being developed in response to governance deficiencies, new governance models have been driven by emergency service fragmentation and concerns about response times (Taylor et. al. 2021). We conclude that the selection of governance models inevitably necessitates a trade-off between aspects of good governance and propose that evidence regarding the efficacy of various models is utilised to underpin decisions on future governance arrangements.

References

Ashworth, R., 2019. 17 Commissioners, Mayors and Blue Lights in Wankhade, P., L. McCann and P. Murphy (eds). Critical Perspectives on the Management and Organization of Emergency Services, p.251.

Farrell, C. 2005. Governance in the UK public sector: The involvement of the governing board. Public Administration 83(1), pp. 89-110. (10.1111/j.0033-3298.2005.00439.x)

Farrell, C. 2017, ‘Governance Matters’, In: Murphy, P. and Greenhalgh, K. eds. Fire and Rescue Services: Leadership and Management Perspectives. Cham, Switzerland: Springer, pp. 179-189., (10.1007/978-3-319-62155-5_12).

Lakoma, K. 2023. A Comparative Study of Governance Changes on the Perceptions of Accountability in Fire and Rescue Services in England, Public Administration, Vol.102, 1, pp.3-20.

Murphy, P., Wankhade, P. and Lakoma, K., 2019. The strategic and operational landscape of emergency services in the UK. International Journal of Emergency Services. ISSN 2047-0894

Taylor, L., K. Greenhalgh and P. Murphy , 2021. ‘Accountability for performance in English and Scottish fire and rescue services from 2010 to 2016’. Public Money & Management, 41 (1), pp. 36-45. ISSN 0954-0962.

This paper addresses the emergence and organizational behavior of a series of so-called “joint centers” in Germany’s federal system of government, which have been established over the course of the past two decades to improve communication, intelligence sharing, and coordination of operations among law enforcement agencies and intelligence services from both state and federal levels of government. Similar to international trends towards fusion centers, this approach has been accompanied by high expectations to strengthen the organizational capacity of the national security community to respond to threats from serious crime and (home-grown and international) terrorism in particular. At the same time, this development has raised concerns about the infringement of civil liberties, the lack of political control and accountability, as well as the propensity of administrative inefficiencies that are associated with this organizational form.

Against this background, this paper is geared to examine the potential assets and liabilities of the “fusion center model” through the perspective of organization theory, particularly based on sociological variants of neo-institutionalist approaches. The paper is meant to be descriptive in that it presents the institutional setting of Germany’s domestic security agencies as well as its recent reform. The paper also aims to be analytical and explanatory inasmuch as it accounts for the trajectory towards fusion centers – and the political and administrative dynamics behind it.

Empirically, the analysis of this case is set in the context of Germany’s national system of law enforcement agencies and intelligence services – a system known for its significant degree of decentralization and fragmentation of organizational jurisdictions. Vertically, the domestic set of security agencies is divided by lines of demarcation between state and federal levels of government. Horizontally, the divide runs through police authorities and intelligence services, which are kept separate by a legal firewall, effectively limiting the chance of organizational mergers between police and intelligence agencies. In response to this fragmentation, fusion centers are meant to by-pass or at least mitigate the boundaries between levels of governments and different sets of organizations by establishing “platforms for intelligence sharing and cooperation” while safeguarding the legal independence of participating agencies.

Theoretically, this paper is informed by the sociological strand of the neo-institutionalist literature when analyzing the organizational features of the fusion center approach in Germany’s federal system. Consequently, the degree of institutionalization depends as much on cognitive and cultural components (i.e. shared knowledge, norms, values, role understandings) as on regulatory elements (i.e. formal rules and processes, organizational structures). It follows from this that fusion centers face a dilemma situation: In order to enhance the (informal) flow of information between different sets of organizations and professionals, they need to rely on loosely coupled, informal, even personalized relations between participating agencies. However, in order to improve inter-agency coordination, streamline procedures, and produce reliable results (which may also allow for administrative oversight and political accountability), they need to rely on formalized, if not bureaucratic structures and processes. As a result, fusion centers may succeed in one respect, but will necessarily fail in the other.