What Drives Successful Administrative Performance during Crises? Lessons from Refugee Migration and the Covid-19 Pandemic.

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EVIDENCE FOR PRACTICE

While practitioners often prefer centralized and hierarchical solutions in times of crisis, this study highlights the potential of reflexive and adaptive use of multiactor networks to cope with the extraordinary.Administrations that are prepared and that display a high quality in their network cooperation with other administrations and with civil society, on average, performed significantly better in their respective crises.Knowledge management and resource sharing-both among administrative units and with civil society-increase organizational ability to perform well in crisis situations.Administrations do best when lessons learned in crises are accessibly stored and when previously successful crisis networks can be quickly revitalized, thus allowing for intercrisis learning-documentation of best practices during crises-via smart or traditional forms of data storing and organizational memory keeping-further boost the performance of administrations during succeeding crises.In the early stages of a crisis, decision makers need to invest in organizational self-awareness of how challenges are mastered and how insights about optimal coping are best passed on.