10 Crisis and risk management
The crisis and risk management indicator is defined as: the effectiveness with which the government engages the whole of society to better assess, prevent, respond to and recover from the effects of extreme events. The OECD Strategic Crisis Management report highlights crisis management as central to government’s role and a “fundamental element of good governance” (Baubion, 2013). Studies have shown that credibility and trust in governments to deal with crises is vital both to reassure and encourage support from the private sector and general public, as outlined by Christensen et al. (2011).
The crisis and risk management indicator is made up of 13 metrics. This is an increase of four from the 2017 Pilot, however it has been restructured to allow for the inclusion of a new data source, with eight metrics continuing from the 2017 Pilot and five new metrics. The data for the indicator comes from:
- The United Nation’s Hyogo Framework for Action monitoring reports [2015].
- The OECD’s Survey on the Governance of Critical Risk [2016].
Both the Hyogo Framework monitoring reports and the OECD survey are largely composed of binary yes/no questions. The InCiSE model has undertaken its own analysis and aggregation of these measures to produce metrics for the crisis and risk management indicator. These are listed in detail in Section A.6.
| Metric | Source | Type | Public sector proxy | Data transformation | Weighting within indicator | Definition of the source metric (e.g. question wording) | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| In theme (A) | Theme (B) | Total (C=A*B) | ||||||
| Strategic approach to risk | ||||||||
| Strategic approach [new] | OECD | Government assessment | No | Composite | 20.0% | 30.0% | 6.0% | Strategic level approaches to risk management |
| Lead risk institution [new] | OECD | Government assessment | No | Composite | 20.0% | 30.0% | 6.0% | Functions carried out by the lead institution |
| Risk planning extent | UN | Government assessment | No | Composite | 20.0% | 30.0% | 6.0% | Types of risk planning undertaken |
| Multi-hazard assessment | UN | Government assessment | No | Composite | 20.0% | 30.0% | 6.0% | Approach to multi-hazard assessment |
| Risk onitoring | UN | Government assessment | No | Composite | 20.0% | 30.0% | 6.0% | Extent of risk monitoring |
| Risk preparations and management | ||||||||
| Risk management capability [new] | OECD | Government assessment | No | Composite | 25.0% | 30.0% | 7.5% | Approach to ensuring capability in crisis and risk management |
| Preparedness | UN | Government assessment | No | Composite | 25.0% | 30.0% | 7.5% | Approach and policies for preparedness |
| Disaster spend appraisal | UN | Government assessment | No | Composite | 25.0% | 30.0% | 7.5% | Approach to economic appraisal of disaster spending |
| International cooperation | UN | Government assessment | No | Composite | 25.0% | 30.0% | 7.5% | Processes and activities in place for international cooperation |
| Risk communications | ||||||||
| Crisis and risk communications [new] | OECD | Government assessment | No | Composite | 50.0% | 20.0% | 10.0% | Approaches to communicating information about risks before and during events |
| Early warning systems | UN | Government assessment | No | Composite | 50.0% | 20.0% | 10.0% | The existence and use of early warning systems |
| Post-disaster assessment | ||||||||
| Risk research and evaluation [new] | OECD | Government assessment | No | Composite | 50.0% | 20.0% | 10.0% | Use of research and evaluation in risk management policy and planning |
| Post-disaster asessment | UN | Government assessment | No | Composite | 50.0% | 20.0% | 10.0% | Approach to assessing post-disaster losses and needs |
| Tables 3.8.A & 3.8.B in the original 2019 publication | ||||||||
10.1 Imputation of missing data
One of the 38 countries selected for the 2019 edition of InCiSE has completely missing data for all crisis and risk management metrics. This is an improvement on the 2017 Pilot of InCiSE where eight countries had completely missing data. The 2017 Pilot used median imputation to handle missing data for the crisis and risk management indicator (i.e. replacement of missing values with the median value of the included countries). As a result of the decision to move to fully predictive imputation for the 2019 edition, external predictors needed to be found. There are no easily identifiable external predictors (e.g. tertiary education for capabilities or the UN’s E-Government survey for digital services), instead the correlations between the crisis and risk management metrics and other metrics in the InCiSE model have been analysed to identify potential predictors. This analysis has selected three metrics: the task discretion metric from the capabilities indicator; the use of data in HR administration from the HR management indicator; and, the Open Data Index from the openness indicator.
10.2 Changes from the 2017 Pilot
The 2017 Pilot used data solely from the national monitoring and progress reports of the UN Hyogo Framework for Action. The Hyogo Framework for Action ended in 2015 and has been replaced by the Sendai Framework, however monitoring and reporting of this framework has only just begun. Furthermore, these frameworks focus on natural disaster risk rather than the full range of risks and civil contingencies issues that countries have to manage at a central government level. Since the publication of the pilot a further dataset has become available, the OECD’s Survey of the Governance of Critical Risks. This dataset provides data on this wider array of risks that governments, especially OECD members, tend to manage.