Risk and Crisis Management in the Public Sector, 3rd Edition. By Lynn T.Drennan, AdinaDudau, AllanMcConnell, and AlastairStark, London: Routledge, 2024. 292 pp. $54.95 (paperback). ISBN: 978‐1‐03‐243472‐8

Just as the first edition of Risk and Crisis Management in the Public Sector was shaped in the wake of 9/11, the COVID-19 pandemic became the defining catalyst for the third edition. At this critical juncture, the book asks how public institutions can anticipate risks, manage cascading threats, and rebound under pervasive uncertainty. Whether a crisis is anticipated or unfolds without warning—whether it arises from natural hazards or human causes, or results from accidents or deliberate attacks—mass-casualty events now increasingly occur and are managed within a highly interconnected global environment (Perrow 1999). In this respect, the volume functions as both a synthesis of two decades of crisis governance scholarship and an invitation to reconsider how public institutions can absorb disruption. It will be a valuable-resource for both students and practitioners in emergency management and homeland security (EMHS) and public health (PH). The book covers a broad intellectual terrain. It is highly useful for both instructors teaching EMHS and graduate students who want to grasp the extensive cases and theories of risk and crisis management, because it offers a broad conceptual bridge that brings together a wide range of public administration (PA) perspectives—including organizational theory, policy analysis, and administrative ethics. Furthermore, its comparative perspective—drawing on cases from Europe, Asia, and North America—expands the analytical reach of the discussion without devolving into descriptive eclecticism. The cases demonstrate that although administrative traditions vary across countries, the underlying governance challenges remain strikingly similar in terms of fragmented authority, political blame avoidance, and the difficulty of institutional learning after a crisis. The book moves from basic concepts of risk and crisis to practical aspects of organizational response and preparedness. The early chapters (1–3) establish this intellectual base by defining risk as probability, threat, and opportunity; outlining the evolution of public-sector risk management; and clarifying the institutional drivers and barriers that shape organizational engagement with risk. These chapters remind readers that anticipating crises requires organizational awareness and early detection capacity, not merely technical forecasting. Drawing on Charles Perrow's (1999) theory of “normal accidents,” the authors emphasize that crises are often endogenous to complex systems rather than sudden anomalies. Together, the chapters trace how the authors understand contemporary crisis governance as having developed from fragmented, reactive practices toward more systematic and evidence-informed approaches. Building on this groundwork, the middle and later chapters (4–8) turn to the practical enactment of crisis management across communication, operational response under an acute phase, post-crisis accountability, and global coordination. Chapters 7 and 8 extend these discussions into the global arenas, analyzing reform, organizational learning, and the challenges of transboundary threats in an interconnected world. These chapters explore practical domains where risk and crisis management intersect with core public sector functions, such as emergency services, public health, environmental policy, and infrastructure governance. The book concludes by linking its theoretical and conceptual discussions to three applied case studies—COVID-19 pandemic lesson-learning, cybersecurity and data breaches, and the escalating wildfire crisis in Greece, the United States, and Australia—showing how digital complexity, climate change, and institutional fragmentation influence contemporary risk governance. Earlier editions stood out for clearly distinguishing “risk” from “crisis,” in contrast to much of the existing literature where the two terms are often used interchangeably: risk management as anticipatory assessment and mitigation of uncertainty, and crisis management as rapid collective response once uncertainty turns disruptive. In the third edition, the authors shift from this sharp divide to a continuum, arguing that mega-crises, such as the global financial crisis and COVID-19, have made it so that “the divisions between risk and crisis management knowledge are a problem for any public sector organization that needs to address contemporary threats” (Drennan et al. 2024, 239). This evolution reads like a Hegelian dialectic: from an initially vague boundary between risk and crisis (thesis), to their disciplined conceptual separation (antithesis), and finally to a third-edition “synthesis” that sublates the earlier opposition into an interdependent form of knowledge requiring practical integration—more a culmination of the book's trajectory than a minor adjustment, even if it is unclear whether this arc was originally intended. At its core, the book acknowledges the inherent paradox facing contemporary public managers: the need to act decisively under conditions of deep uncertainty while simultaneously upholding procedural legitimacy and political accountability. This tension—between swift decision-making and democratic oversight—forms the analytical backbone of the volume. The authors argue that risk and crisis management is embedded within institutional cultures, policy legacies, and intergovernmental structures, which enable and constrain administrative performance. This perspective situates the book within a growing tradition of governance scholarship that views crises as “stress tests” for public institutions and systems of governance (Boin and 't Hart 2010), revealing not only administrative competence but also underlying value systems and political dynamics. Risk and crisis management is a core public-institution capacity: anticipating disruption, coping with consequences, and persevering under stress (Nam-Speers et al. 2023). The volume shows that governing under uncertainty is PA's ultimate test, and that resilience is not just institutional but a moral commitment to serve the public good under pressure. The volume integrates theoretical framing with empirical insight, charting the shift from reactive emergency response to anticipatory governance and inter-organizational coordination, in terms of how governments navigate uncertainty, accountability, and resilience together. Particularly noteworthy is its discussion of resilience as a managerial capacity that involves both flexibility and organizational memory. A salient strength of this book lies in its careful attention to such organizational learning. The authors treat learning not as a spontaneous byproduct of experience but as a managed process requiring intentional structures and incentives. By distinguishing between single-loop learning (adjustment within existing frameworks) and double-loop learning (reexamination of underlying assumptions), the book illustrates how public institutions evolve—or stagnate—in the aftermath of crises. This conceptual distinction, rooted in Argyris and Schön's (1978) framework, provides analytical traction for understanding why lessons identified so often fail to become lessons learned. Drawing on the authors' claim—“This comparative dimension of decision-making is not something that is widely understood or researched in the crisis management community. Yet, the pandemic shows that when crises are truly global, comparisons can be found and used to make and justify any decision” (Drennan et al. 2024, 245)—I consider this the most innovative part of the book. Before COVID-19, I had been trained with the classic caution that we should not compare apples and oranges—that is, cross-case comparison is often methodologically suspect because contexts differ. But living through the pandemic gave us something like a “one-condition” world in which every country faced the same named crisis at roughly the same historical moment, and we could observe national responses side by side. Not every country responded equally well (and not all responded badly either), and precisely because of that shared baseline, it became meaningful—even unavoidable—to ask whether one country managed certain choices better than another. Simultaneously, the pandemic revealed the politics of comparison that the authors highlight: some countries explicitly followed others' moves, and others adopted a policy only to later pivot away from that direction. In that sense, the authors' focus on a comparative dimension of crisis decision-making is not only persuasive but analytically powerful. Case-comparison approaches have not always been especially popular in parts of social science, yet the pandemic experience pushes us to take their methodological legitimacy more seriously and to develop sharper questions about relative, cross-case advantage under global crises. The pandemic did not only teach PA scholars, and particularly PH researchers, substantive lessons about crisis management and risk governance; it also opened a doorway to new methodological consciousness, showing that global crises can create rare conditions where careful comparison is not a mistake to avoid but a tool we need to refine. Nevertheless, the book's breadth occasionally comes at the expense of analytical depth in specific chapters. In places, it stops short of offering a sufficiently granular account of how technical expertise, bureaucratic fragmentation, and public communication interact to shape the credibility and timeliness of governmental responses. For instance, while the section on environmental risk management provides a detailed mapping of policy instruments and interagency coordination, it leaves limited room for a critical discussion of political economy and the role of private-sector actors. The discussion of transboundary crises likewise would have benefited from deeper engagement with literature on global governance and networked risk (Ansell et al. 2010). Also, themes such as sensemaking, decision-making, legitimacy, centralization versus decentralization, and symbolic narratives are neither clearly articulated nor convincingly demonstrated in the cases, although the authors claim that these themes are the cornerstones of crisis management and defined the pandemic. These omissions, however, do not significantly detract from the text's overall contribution; rather, they point to fertile ground for future research extending the framework into cross-sectoral and even international domains. Meanwhile, a few passages rest on shaky factual ground. The authors state South Korea as almost the sole COVID-19 success story and explain that success primarily through non-pharmaceutical interventions (NPIs) (Drennan et al. 2024, 147). From a Korean vantage point, this account appears somewhat superficial. NPIs functioned largely as supportive, secondary measures; the more decisive driver was the state's multi-loop learning from the prior outbreak experience (e.g., MERS-CoV, SARS-CoV), which enabled early pharmaceutical/biomedical interventions and expert-led testing-and-tracing protocols to be in place even before the virus was detected domestically (Lee et al. 2020). The government's health authorities rapidly applied a genetic-sequence–based process of elimination—ruling out four known coronaviruses one by one—to infer that the remaining pathogen in travelers returning from China was novel. This early diagnostic capacity, coupled with targeted border-linked tracing and isolation of likely carriers within specific travelers rather than the general population, allowed Korea to cut transmission chains quickly and effectively. This misreading of the Korean case may reflect the authors' heavy reliance on secondary sources, especially news media, in lieu of fieldwork-based case research—an understandable choice in a fast-moving global crisis, yet still a surprising foundation for claims of this scale. It is unexpected to see scholars of such experience and stature in PA leaning so heavily on inherently thin journalistic accounts for claims of this magnitude. Still, stepping back from these critiques, the book's overall contribution is unmistakable. Taken together, while future research will need to address emerging challenges such as digital risk, misinformation, and global supply chain vulnerabilities, the book has already established itself as a seminal reference point. By situating risk and crisis management within the broader discourse on public value (Moore 1995), the book reframes administrative capacity not merely as a matter of efficiency, but as an issue of equity, transparency, power, meaning-making, and civic accountability. In this vein, the authors emphasize that effective crisis governance cannot be separated from broader questions of democratic legitimacy and social trust.