Academic Insight Seminar: From compliance to capability
Why does preparedness remain difficult even when organizations know what needs to be done? This Academic Insight Seminar explores how municipalities can turn plans and resources into civil defense capabilities that work under pressure. Please note that breakfast will be served from 7:30 AM.
The Center for Security and Resilience (CfSR) invites you to an Academic Insight Seminar with Olivia Gardell and Olof Larsson, Research Analysts at CfSR, on the theme “From compliance to capability: How municipalities build civil defense that works under pressure.”
Municipalities increasingly understand many of the capabilities required to maintain essential services during severe disruption, crisis, and war. These include continuity planning, backup power, food supply, emergency support points, and crisis organization. Yet knowledge does not automatically translate into capability.
Initial findings from CfSR identify recurring challenges related to mandates, resources, priorities, decision-making authority, and dependencies on actors beyond the municipality itself.
From preparedness on paper to capability in practice
The seminar will explore the gap between preparedness on paper and capability in practice through perspectives from management and control, organizational capability, and pragmatic bureaucracy.
How do organizations turn plans and resources into coordinated action? How can decisions be made when responsibilities and conditions remain uncertain? And how can control be combined with the professional discretion needed to act under pressure?
The discussion will also consider whether preparedness should be understood less as a separate specialist function and more as an organizational capability embedded in ordinary management, budgeting, procurement, staffing, investment, and leadership - and what this means for how preparedness should ultimately be governed and measured.
Speakers
Olivia Gardell
Research Analyst, Center for Security and Resilience, Stockholm School of Economics
Olof Larsson
Research Analyst, Center for Security and Resilience, Stockholm School of Economics
Moderator
Staffan Holmberg
Executive Director, Center for Security and Resilience, Stockholm School of Economics