The Handbook of Public Sector Communication

15Public Sector Communication: Risk and Crisis Communication

Finn Frandsen and Winni Johansen

Introduction

Managing and communicating risk and crisis have become a challenging task for many public sector organizations. “Governance has increasingly become a matter of crisis management” (Boin, 't Hart, Stern, & Sundelius, 2017, p. 3). Disasters such as the Indian Ocean tsunami (2004), pandemics such as the H1N1 (or “swine”) flu pandemic (2009), terrorist attacks such as the truck attacks in Nice, Berlin, Stockholm, Barcelona, and London (2016–2017), but also political and administrative scandals leading to negative media coverage and public outrage, have emphasized the need for new and extended risk and crisis management (Drennan, McConnell, & Stark, 2015). As a consequence, public organizations increasingly transform into risk organizations (Power, 2007, 2016), which are embedded in a risk civilization or a risk society (Beck, 1992; Lagadec, 1982). Communication plays a key role in this transformation process.

There are important differences between how risks and crises are managed and dealt with communicatively in the public sector and in the private sector, respectively. The best way to understand these differences is to apply a comparative approach. Such an approach is all the more relevant, as there has recently been a movement in public organizations toward adopting the approaches to risk and crisis management applied by private companies (Frandsen & Johansen, 2009,