Understanding and Addressing the Disruptive Impacts of Contemporary Climate Crises

Contemporary climate crises, such as wildfires, droughts, floods, and tropical storms, are increasing in frequency, intensity, scale, and duration. Organization and management scholars have been calling for more systematic study of the impacts of this increasing complexity on extant crisis governance arrangements and capacities for collaboration in response. We here bring together insights from organization and management studies and public administration research to investigate the disruptive impacts of the 2019-2020 ‘Black Summer’ bushfires – a prototypical contemporary climate crisis. We conceptualize the complexity of such crises in terms of manifestation on, and across multiple, scalar dimensions (i.e., jurisdictional, functional [organizational, sectoral], spatial, cultural, and temporal dimensions) and mobilize transboundary crisis theory to explain how this disrupts the functioning of standing collaborative governance arrangements through five distinct mechanisms: stretching, blurring, fracturing, ossifying, and improvising. In turn, we synthesize a conceptual model of how these mechanisms interact to undermine collaborative capacity as crisis complexity increases. Our work bridges and extends ongoing debates in organization and management studies as well as public administration, offering a foundation for adaptation of crisis governance and response in a climate-changed future.