Crisis Management, Humanitarian Aid and Disaster Management in Dealing with the Migrant and Refugee Crisis 2015/16
Abstract as pdf
Corresponding Author:
Daniel F. Lorenz
Disaster Research Unit (DRU), Freie Universität Berlin Germany
daniel.lorenz@fu-berlin.de
Author(s):
Cordula Dittmer1
1Disaster Research Unit (DRU), Freie Universität Berlin, Cordula.Dittmer@Fu-Berlin.De, DEU
In September 2015, German Chancellor Angela Merkel called the situation for refugees on the Balkan route a humanitarian emergency and referred to a humanitarian imperative in order to justify certain humanitarian responses.
The needs of hundreds of thousands of refugees who had already arrived in Germany could only be met by deploying all available civil protection units (CPU) from domestic aid organizations like the German Red Cross (GRC) or the Federal Agency for Technical Relief (THW). However, politically responsible actors, such as Mayors, District Administrators or State Ministers of the Interior, did not have recourse to the corresponding legal and formal disaster declaration as codified in disaster law. At the same time the Federal Ministry of the Interior used outside of German public discourse internal crisis management instruments to set up a unique form of (strategic) crisis management.
Relying on already existing formal structures and proven procedures new instruments were implemented in all the three domains of crisis management – on the federal level, in the humanitarian sector and disaster management. In the analysis of these three different domains of crisis management it came out that actors of different domains used different forms of meaning making and had only very limited knowledge of diverging interpretations and responses. Thus, the overall whole response appears to be highly fragmented with different crisis management procedures in different domains (Woelbers et. al. 2018). In the paper we discuss these three different, but simultaneously used crisis management domains and analyse their roles in responding to the migrant and refugee crisis and the challenges of the fragmented response.
The paper is based on 33 interviews with experts from CPUs involved in refugee aid (GRC, THW, Workers' Samaritan Federation), Federal Office for Civil Protection and Disaster Relief, fire brigades, Federal Ministry of the Interior, social and welfare organizations, humanitarian actors and the Federal Office for Migration and Refugees. The data was collected both during the high period of refugee arrivals in 2015/16, and as part of a research project in 2019 which looks from scientific as well as from practitioners point of view into learning processes after the migrant and refugee crisis.
References
Wolbers, J., et al.
2018 “Introducing a Fragmentation Perspective on Coordination in Crisis Management”, Organization Studies, 39(11): 1521– 1546.
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