EM exercising as a public private partnership: a good idea or impossible dream?

One of the fundamental challenges in the management of significant emergencies or crises is to achieve greater levels of cooperation between the public sector and private sector. As the 2018 AFAC Conference abstract call acknowledges, the benefits range from being able to deliver more for less to leveraging off specialist expertise, reputations and strong community and stakeholder relationships. However it is also true to say that there is downside risk associated with initiating and building this cooperation. In particular, organisations may expose themselves to political and reputational risk as they reveal their own vulnerabilities and truly test their ability to manage events near the ‘edge of chaos’.

One of the more common recent initiatives has been for response agencies and organisations from the private sector to ‘play’ together in major exercises. Under such circumstances, the tensions between the processes, procedures, information technology, values and organisational structures are often revealed.

We draw on a case study and the associated experience of running and evaluating these types of exercises to look at lessons for their planning, implementation and review. Recently Owen et al., (2018) identified that fixing the weak links in the lessons learning cycle requires that response agencies have a deeper understanding of how to learn. We consider this issue in the context of exercise management involving response agencies and organisations from the private sector to identify the shared and individual learnings.