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Recalibrating pandemic risk leadership: Thirteen crisis ready strategies for COVID-19

Wardman, Jamie K.

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Authors

Jamie K. Wardman



Abstract

Good leadership is widely regarded as a crucial component of risk and crisis management and remains an enduring theme of more than 40 years of inquiry into emergencies, disasters, and controversies. Today, the question of good leadership has come under the spotlight again as a key factor shaping how successfully nations have dealt with the COVID-19 global health crisis. Amidst plummeting levels of public trust, the worst recession of the G7, and the highest death toll in Europe, the UK’s pandemic leadership response has faced especially stern accusations of incompetence and culpability for what has been described as the most catastrophic science policy failure for a generation. Addressing these issues, this paper argues for the adoption of a more pluralised UK leadership approach for handling COVID-19. Particularly, it is contended that as COVID-19 is a multifaceted problem that presents many varied and distributed challenges, UK leadership should employ a differentiated range of strategic mechanisms and processes to help improve substantive understandings and decision-making, support collective resilience, and build adaptive capacities as the crisis continues. The paper accordingly identifies and elaborates thirteen strategies, drawing on lessons and insights from the risk and crisis management field, that are proposed to serve as a useful heuristic to help guide UK pandemic leadership in this endeavour. To illustrate the value and application of each strategy, examples are provided of noteworthy leadership responses to COVID-19 observed internationally thus far, as well as leadership problems that have hampered the UK’s pandemic response. In conclusion, it is suggested that in as far as the conduct expected of leaders during a pandemic, or any other crisis, should maintain and be reflective of democratic values and standards of legitimacy, these strategies may also provide broadly applicable normative criteria against which leadership performance in handling COVID-19 may be judged as crisis ready.

Citation

Wardman, J. K. (2020). Recalibrating pandemic risk leadership: Thirteen crisis ready strategies for COVID-19. Journal of Risk Research, 23(7-8), 1092-1120. https://doi.org/10.1080/13669877.2020.1842989

Journal Article Type Article
Acceptance Date Mar 4, 2020
Online Publication Date Nov 10, 2020
Publication Date 2020
Deposit Date May 12, 2022
Publicly Available Date Mar 28, 2024
Journal Journal of Risk Research
Print ISSN 1366-9877
Electronic ISSN 1466-4461
Publisher Routledge
Peer Reviewed Peer Reviewed
Volume 23
Issue 7-8
Pages 1092-1120
DOI https://doi.org/10.1080/13669877.2020.1842989
Keywords General Engineering; Strategy and Management; General Social Sciences; Safety, Risk, Reliability and Quality
Public URL https://nottingham-repository.worktribe.com/output/5039991
Publisher URL https://www.tandfonline.com/doi/full/10.1080/13669877.2020.1842989
Additional Information This is an Accepted Manuscript version of the following article, accepted for publication in Journal of Risk Research. Jamie K. Wardman (2020) Recalibrating pandemic risk leadership: Thirteen crisis ready strategies for COVID-19, Journal of Risk Research, 23:7-8, 1092-1120, DOI: 10.1080/13669877.2020.1842989. It is deposited under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/4.0/), which permits non-commercial re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

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