Summary
Most crisis response arrangements are designed for events that are contained, predictable, and relatively short-lived. Our research, published in the Journal of Management Studies, shows that contemporary climate crises differ in fundamental ways. As these crises unfold across multiple scalar dimensions (i.e., jurisdictional, functional [organizational, sectoral], spatial, cultural, and temporal), they disrupt these arrangements in unforeseen ways and undermine capacities for collaboration during crisis preparation, response, relief, and recovery.
Through thematic analysis of 61 in-depth interviews with responders during Australia’s 2019-2020 “Black Summer” bushfires, our study identifies five mechanisms by which increased crisis complexity undermines collaboration: stretching, blurring, fracturing, ossifying, and improvising. These mechanisms interact and reinforce one another, progressively altering how collaboration unfolds.
How Collaboration Is Undermined During Contemporary Climate Crises
The “Black Summer” bushfires, a prototypical example of the contemporary climate crisis, placed Australia’s highly developed crisis response system under extraordinary strain. In our study of the bushfire season, we draw on interviews with emergency responders, government officials, community representatives, and other expert observers to understand the governance and collaborative challenges it created. Through inductive analysis of these interviews, we show that the scale, intensity, and duration of the fires created what we term inter-scalar complexity, or pressure to collaborate across jurisdictions, functions (organizations and sectors), cultural variation, space, and time. In addition, we detail how this complexity undermined collaborative capacity as the crisis unfolded through five interrelated mechanisms.
Stretching: As incidents spread and occur simultaneously, resources are drawn across multiple demands and locations. During the Black Summer, fires burning across several states disrupted established patterns of resource sharing. As one responder put it, there were simply “fires everywhere”, making it “really, very challenging to get resources where you needed them.”
Blurring: As incidents interact and overlap, responsibilities and authority become less clearly defined. During the fires, fire fronts merged, incident boundaries became unclear, and phases such as response and recovery increasingly overlapped. For some incident controllers, this created responsibilities that exceeded any realistic span of control: “People were telling me I was responsible for Mallacoota … I’ve got absolutely no influence on what’s going on there.”
Fracturing: As stretching and blurring intensify, shared understandings of the situation become more difficult to sustain. During the fires, communication systems were overwhelmed by the volume and complexity of information. In the words of one firefighter, systems that supported planning and coordination “basically crumbled” and “the whole planning cell was crippled because of it.”
Ossifying: As these disruptions accumulate across governance boundaries, actors seek stability by turning inward. Organizations focused on immediate priorities, relied on core competencies, and imposed familiar systems. While this created local clarity, it also reinforced boundaries between actors and made collaboration across them more difficult. One respondent described key decisions increasingly being made “behind closed doors, literally,” excluding others from the collaborative process.
Improvising: In response, increasingly isolated actors attempt to adapt in real time. However, this improvisation becomes isolated, duplicative, or misaligned from the broader response. Rather than strengthening coordination, organizations frequently responded by “re-creating new structures, and new processes” that added further complexity to an already strained system.
How These Dynamics Interact
A central insight of our study is that these mechanisms are interconnected and cumulative. To explain their relationships, we develop a conceptual model of how collaborative capacity erodes as contemporary climate crises evolve.
Stretching, blurring, and fracturing are driven by the inter-scalar complexity of the crisis itself. The pressures created by these mechanisms expose gaps, where no arrangements exist to facilitate collaboration, while others create breakdowns, where existing arrangements are no longer fit for purpose.
As these gaps and breakdowns accumulate, actors respond by seeking to restore control and coordination. This gives rise to ossifying, where organizations retreat into familiar routines, priorities, and ways of working, reinforcing boundaries. It also necessitates improvising, as actors try to create workarounds and new initiatives to compensate for emerging failures. Yet these adaptations often become disconnected from one another, creating additional complexity rather than resolving it.
Taken together, these mechanisms gradually transform governance boundaries into persistent fault lines. Rather than a single moment when collaboration breaks down, our model points to a progressive shift towards more fragmented and uneven collaboration as contemporary climate crises unfold.
What Policy Makers and Practitioners Should Do Differently
These findings suggest a shift in how we approach crisis governance in the context of increasingly complex climate-induced crises:
- Design for inter-scalar complexity: Anticipate pressures across multiple scales simultaneously and strengthen coordination across jurisdictions, organizations, and crisis phases, where gaps and breakdowns are most likely. For example, our findings suggest investing in integrated cross-border information systems and more robust national resource-sharing arrangements, so that jurisdictions can coordinate effectively when multiple large-scale incidents occur simultaneously.
- Balance control and integration: Local clarity is essential, but inward-looking responses can undermine system-wide coordination. Rather than allowing actors to retreat into organizational silos during crises, governance arrangements should promote regular cross-agency coordination and ensure that diverse forms of expertise remain integrated into decision-making as complexity escalates.
- Coordinate improvisation: Improvisation is inevitable, but it must be aligned and integrated among actors to remain functional. Instead of relying on isolated or duplicative initiatives, future approaches should develop flexible “meta-routines” that help actors collectively identify emerging gaps and coordinate adaptive responses while remaining connected to the broader response effort.
Ultimately, adaptation requires not just better structures, but greater awareness of how disruptions and responses interact in real time.
The Bottom Line
Contemporary climate crises are not simply more intense versions of past events. They unfold across multiple scales and disrupt the governance arrangements designed to support collaboration during crisis response, relief, and recovery. Our findings show that this occurs through a cumulative process of stretching, blurring, fracturing, ossifying, and improvising, which progressively undermine collaborative capacity as crises increase in complexity. For policymakers, emergency services, and impacted communities, understanding how these mechanisms interact provides a clearer view of how and why coordination can become so difficult, and where vulnerabilities are likely to emerge. The challenge is no longer only how to respond to crises, but also how to maintain collaborative capacity as crises evolve in scalar complexity.
