Crisis management has become a defining feature of contemporary governance. In times of crisis, communities and members of organizations expect their leaders to minimize the impact, while critics and bureaucratic competitors make use of social media to blame incumbent rulers and their policies. In this extreme environment, policymakers must somehow establish a sense of normality, and foster collective learning from the crisis experience. In the new edition of this uniquely comprehensive analysis, the authors examine how strategic leaders deal with the challenges they face, the political risks and opportunities they encounter, the pitfalls they must avoid, and the paths towards reform they may pursue. The book is grounded in decades of collaborative, cross-national and multidisciplinary case study research and has been updated to include new insights and examples from the last decade. This is an original and important contribution from experts in public policy and international security.

How can political leaders best control the effects of transnational links on their societies, maintaining the prosperity brought by such ties while minimizing their unstabilizing effects? The answer, according to some observers, rests in collective management through joint policymaking processes. This work explores the strategy used in Scandinavian countries for collectively coping with transnationalism. Although focus ing on a unique case, it is highly relevant to broader international efforts at policy coordination and joint problem solving. The author first analyzes the extent of Nordic transnational ties and identifies the principles involved in collective management. He then outlines the means, scope, and frequency of regional contacts among political leaders and bureaucrats and analyzes the norms and dynamics of joint policymaking to determine what roles the various principals play in the collective management effort. Policy results are reviewed in order to evaluate the relative success of Nordic methods, and comparisons are made between issue areas and degrees of salience to reveal the types of issues most effectively treated by the Nordic strategy.

This cross-national treatment of the foreign policies of Northern Europe-Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway, Sweden-is organized by substantive policy areas rather than by country, thus allowing most-similar-case analyses of several dimensions of the countries' international relations. The authors make comparisons among the countries in each area of investigation and present details of security, international development, and neighborhood and foreign policy processes. They also describe and explain international and domestic forces that shape the region's external policies. The combination of sound, empirically based data and attention to broader international and theoretical interests allows relevant comparisons with other advanced industrial states.

Crisis management has become a defining feature of contemporary governance. In times of crisis, communities and members of organizations expect their leaders to minimize the impact, while critics and bureaucratic competitors make use of social media to blame incumbent rulers and their policies. In this extreme environment, policymakers must somehow establish a sense of normality, and foster collective learning from the crisis experience. In the new edition of this uniquely comprehensive analysis, the authors examine how strategic leaders deal with the challenges they face, the political risks and opportunities they encounter, the pitfalls they must avoid, and the paths towards reform they may pursue. The book is grounded in decades of collaborative, cross-national and multidisciplinary case study research and has been updated to include new insights and examples from the last decade. This is an original and important contribution from experts in public policy and international security.

A special feature of Europe's Nordic region is that only one of its states has joined both the European Union and NATO. Nordic countries also share a certain distrust of approaches to security that rely too much on force or that may disrupt the logic and liberties of civil society. Impacting on this environment, the EU's decision in 1999 to develop its own military capacities for crisis management - taken together with other ongoing shifts in Western security agendas and US-Europe relations - has created complex challenges for Nordic policy establishments. This multi-author volume combines the techniques of reporting and analysis, debate and reduction, to illuminate the consequences for the five Nordic countries, Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway, and Sweden. The views expressed in it by Nordic and non-Nordic, younger and more established analysts reflect the political and intellectual ferment triggered in the Nordic region by these developments: in the process shedding light on defence and security challenges that matter deeply for Europe as a whole.