GOVERNING CRISES: ESTABLISHING STABILITY IN FLUIDITY

The global macro-environment is one in which crises are increasingly complex and transcend traditional borders and sectors. The conventional response to crises has been to manage them as extreme shocks to be overcome. In this crisis-management response, crises are seen as isolated events to be resolved. Yet this view of crises is insufficient for handling the intricate contemporary crises we experience today, because it does not fully capture how dynamic and intricately connected crises often are. This view also limits—perhaps even hinders—our understanding of crises, preventing us from predicting them, exhaustively coping with them, and learning from them. More-comprehensive and maybe more-accurate is an understanding of crises as unfolding emergent processes rather than as isolated events, and as processes that a broad set of stakeholders and organizations can coordinate, better manage, and adapt to. The concept of crisis governance provides this morecomprehensive understanding, and is the foundation of the Chair of Crisis Governance (CCG) at the University of Antwerp’s Faculty of Business and Economics, established in 2023. The CCG is a research center created to explore and develop new approaches for dealing with crises by combining this dynamic, evolving, process understanding of crises with the concept of governance, a concept traditionally associated with stability and predictability. Combining these two (arguably) contradictory concepts into one research program will allow the CCG to provide actionable knowledge, theory, and evidence along with new perspectives and solutions for effectively dealing with crises. By reassessing extant frameworks and developing new ones for governance, management, and decision-making, the CCG will help organizations prepare for, respond to, and learn from crises so that organizations can be more resilient, viable, and effective in the crises that, unfortunately, we must expect and be ready for.