Theme 1: Understanding Transboundary Crisis Management

This theme provides the analytical framework to guide the project’s research into transboundary crisis management in the European Union (EU). The framework explains when transboundary crisis management can be considered effective in terms of the problem at hand; it also considers the more intricate effects on the legitimacy of EU institutions and political leadership. It maps the cultural, political, socio-economic and legal barriers to effective and legitimate transboundary crisis management, as identified in the literature on EU governance and multilevel systems. It distils from the literature ‘success factors’ – those that enable and facilitate transboundary crisis management to formulate an analytical framework to study Transboundary Crisis Management in the EU. The tools created in this study have been validated by a board of crisis management, public administration and political experts. The outcome of this project is therefore a validated assessment method to research the effectiveness and legitimacy of transboundary crisis management.