Designing response networks in turbulent times: necessary and sufficient conditions

Despite agreement among crisis and emergency management scholars on the need to establish networks to address crises, there is no consensus on which network structures foster high-performance responses. Here, we fill empirical gaps in the literature through a Qualitative Comparative Analysis of the COVID-19 vaccination networks activated by the 20 Italian Regions, demonstrating that there is no Holy-Grail structure that can ensure a high-performance response to a crisis; the preferred network structure would depend on: (a) the specific organizational and contextual characteristics of the crisis (and their interplay); and (b) the performance measure of interest (e.g. efficacy or speediness).