Strategic situational awareness for crisis management

We need to urgently reconsider how we make sense of the overlapping, interconnected, and cascading socio-ecological polycrisis of our current era. Research on situational awareness (SA) for strategic, long-term, crisis management is limited and lacks an explicit consideration of how to cope under socio-ecological crises. We analyze how city politicians and expert officials attune to the conditions of socio-ecological polycrisis. We concentrate specifically on the formation of situational awareness and the challenges imposed on it in crisis management and governance. We base our case study on a set of policymaking exercises, called Strategic Situation Rooms (SSR), which we organized for three Finnish city organizations. We develop the concept of Strategic Situational Awareness (SSA) as an avenue to expand the capacities of crisis management in polycrisis. SSA in our proposition is a reflexive and pragmatist outlook that considers the ways in which the scope of the available and suitable means of crisis management and governance is shaped by organizational and institutional constraints and capacities. Our formulation draws on (1) a synthesized literature on reflexivity and pragmatism in research on strategic resilience and crisis management, (2) our exploratory approach to trying out the practice of managing polycritical circumstances in governance, i.e. the SSR exercises, and (3) the results gained from the exercises. Our results exhibit not only prospective pitfalls but also effective prompts for how to incorporate and institutionalize the contingencies of actions often conceived “impossible and unnnecessary” into strategic crisis management and governance.