Crisis Management in the Public Sector

Abstract

The practice and study of public administration has long included questions of efficiency and effectiveness in crisis management. There are some misunderstandings of the problems faced, like the recent global economic crisis from the public management perspective. These misunderstandings in the public sector may cause different perceptions of the crisis, which lead people and organizations to some misunderstandings and ineffective reactions of crisis management, which bring slower and ineffective results. In light of this rapidly changing environment, “new public management” requires quick, flexible, and adaptive decision making systems and structures. The aim of this chapter is to discuss the usage of “systems thinking” in “new public management” to provide a dynamic approach to crisis management. In that respect, a structural analysis of the global and local crisis and systems thinking modeling is discussed in the scope of crisis in the first section. In the second section, the relationship between new public management and systems thinking within crisis management in the public sector is studied. In the conclusion, the necessity of usage of the new tools and decision support systems by public management in crisis management is emphasized in light of the developments brought by New Public Management.