Putting out Fires: A Multiple Streams Analysis
Abstract as pdf
Corresponding Author:
Kerstin Eriksson
RISE Research Institutes of Sweden Sweden
kerstin.eriksson@ri.se
Author(s):
Evangelia Petridou1 , Gertrud Alirani2 and Roine Johansson3
1Risk And Crisis Research Centre, Mid Sweden University, Evangelia.Petridou@Miun.Se, SWE
2Risk And Crisis Research Centre, Mid Sweden University, Gertrud.Alirani@Miun.Se, SWE
3Risk And Crisis Research Centre, Mid Sweden University , Roine.Johansson@Miun.Se, SWE
Sweden has not traditionally been known for a high occurrence of large forest fires, but events in the past few years have manifested the opposite. The 2014 forest fire in Västmanland was by far the largest in modern times and four years later, in 2018, a number of fires destroyed twice the area the 2014 forest fire had burned. Crisis management in Sweden rests with municipalities, which face the challenge of adapting their crisis management and preparedness architecture in order to be combat the risk of large forest fires. However, policy change is not an automatic result of a crisis. Furthermore, mechanisms of policy change at the local level in the field of crisis management is poorly understood. In this paper, we employ the Multiple Streams Framework (MSF) to analyze the organizational and policy changes in the Swedish municipality of Sala, which was hit by the forest fires both in 2014 and 2018. Through semi-structured interviews and a survey collecting network data, we map the network of actors that contributed to the changes after 2014. We employ MSF to show that the fires constituted a focusing event that exposed serious inadequacies in the crisis management municipal structures and policies. Concomitantly we shed light on the framing of the event by relevant actors as well as contextualize it in the Swedish national crisis management context.
Disaster recovery in the long-term